Re:Re:Re: Supermodern Fashion - Fashion Design in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

One of the major problems with fashion today is waste.According to Tearfund's 2021 research (Keegan et al., 2021, p. 55), people now consume approximately 80 million items of clothing per year, which is 400 per cent more than they did two decades ago.People also only retain clothing for half as long as they did 15 years ago, and some reports suggest that the cheapest apparel is treated as if it was disposable -worn once and then discarded.These are some of the reasons that the fashion industry is identified as a significant factor in current environmental problems.Knowing all this, I began a research project as part of a Master of Design at Otago Polytechnic in July 2021.My research is an attempt to understand the global fashion system as it operates today.I initially set out only to explore the idea of "non-places" (see below) through the medium of a fashion collection.I ended up discovering a way to explain the prevalence of 'fast fashion.' Supermodernity is a theory developed by Marc Augé in 1992 to describe the modern urban landscape.Supermodernity has four significant aspects: