RMIT School of Fashion & Textiles.
Image: RMIT University.

What Is: Fashion ‘Rewilding’?

Fashion “rewilding” describes actions that support new cultures in how we better use, make and recreate clothing that can expand beyond the boundaries of the dominant Western fashion system.

Within this current system, the most prominent way we experience fashion is through a lens of commercialisation and industry demands.

Rewilding in a fashion context endeavours to release fashion from the grip of fashion industry codes of constant change, newness, and profit motives, to build more diverse, inclusive and community accessible experiences of fashion.

‘Rewilding actions, then, are those that make wild spaces for fashion to flourish beyond the dictates of the fashion industry’, states Professor Alice Payne (2019:14), Dean of the School of Fashion & Textiles at RMIT University

  1. Fashion Futuring in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Fashion as Taming and Rewilding
On a broad scale, Payne (2020:159) explains, ‘rewilding fashion may mean producing far less clothing, shifting to regenerative agriculture methods, relocalising supply chains, as well as activism’.
  1. Designing Fashion's Future: Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change

RMIT PlaceLab ‘Wear & Care’ Community Repair Series.
Image: RMIT PlaceLab.

On a human level, it creates space for more people to experience fashion as cultural expression and a creative practice of making, wearing and caring in new and different ways, not confined only to the experience as ‘consumer’.

We see communities of makers, menders, sharers, viewers, wearers and carers of clothing building humble practices of fashion rewilding in our neighbourhood of Brunswick, and we want to find out more!

Dye Garden at RMIT Brunswick Campus during RMIT Sustainability Week 2022. Image: RMIT University.

  1. Fashion Futuring in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Fashion as Taming and Rewilding
  2. Designing Fashion's Future: Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change