The Aesthetics of Eco Sustainable Approaches in Textile Design

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Art, Alzahra University, Tehran

Abstract

Textile design, especially in fashion industry, focuses on changing the public taste and creating continual and variable aesthetics to excite consumers in respond to the economic efficiency of industries. Fashion, especially fast fashion, has many bad influences on social behavior, ecological environment and economy of consumer societies, work opportunities in developing countries and work conditions in poor societies. All of these effects are the consequences of the struggles of fast fashion to produce low price clothes that encourage people to buy more. In this industry the designer plays the leading role, who must change the taste by creating a new aesthetics experience for people. Today though, the growing attention to sustainable development, ecological values preservation and the efforts to reduce the irregular use of natural sources, especially nonrenewable, create a critical condition for fast fashion trend as an appropriate way of production. Furthermore, some designers try to reject previous ideals and characters as a responder to industry and trade requests and replace it with commitment to various factors of sustainable development, especially environmental, social and cultural. New ways to design fabrics with natural and recycled materials, reusing old textiles, replacing the recyclable and long lasting with previous artificial textiles, especially nylons, and efforts to change the production process to remove harmful materials and techniques are common trends to find. However, only technical changes cannot change today’s conditions. Thus, changing people’s behavior and their taste to use new textiles and fashions is a significant factor to attain the goals of sustainability, and lack of public interest in them means failure. This means that changing the previous aesthetics and values with new ones is important to persuade people to use them and power these strategies to replace the previous ones. This article tries to investigate how the aesthetics of eco-sustainable textiles and eco-fashion can be generalized in theory and practice, and how it can change people’s perception of beauty through contemporary theories. It is demonstrated that two theories on naes deep ecology and Heidegger phenomenological view to the meaning of life, can change the aesthetics from formal to a moral point of view. To show some approaches on this, author tries to show how this moral view can be seen in some famous textile designers that try to transform ecological design from a technical method to a cultural face in order to influence the consumer’s behavior. Survey uses a descriptive analytical research method to show the relationship between theories and practice. Result shows that all practices of contemporary eco design insist on creating a natural aesthetic experience and moral view to inform human about their condition and their relationship with the earth as their living environment. Creative consuming and unique artistic practice as an alternative to dominance of industrial production factors and following the mass fashion provide the deep practice of individuality for each person, a unique sense of being and feeling different in comparison with others and a deep personality that does not need to use fashion as an outer,  pseudo-way to attain social identity.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 19, Issue 3 - Serial Number 3
November 2014
Pages 65-76

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