Did you ever buy an item of clothing on holiday? Did you ever get a train and two tubes up to Camden to go to the punkyfish or cyberdog shop because that's the only way you could get a punkyfish or a cyberdog t-shirt? Being a millennial, my fashion experience is shaped by two major historical factors- we didn't have fast fashion yet, so clothing purchase were still quite a big deal and you wanted to make them worth it- you wanted to treasure something and know you were going to wear it again and again. And the internet wasn't really a place for shopping- so you went places, you found hidden gem boutiques.
I worked in a coffee place (Suburb) in Covent Garden while I studied at Central Saint Martins and one of my favourite dresses (now 20 years old and still going strong) is a Pont de Roma mini dress with massive puff sleeves from an independent boutique (I kid you not) on seven dials. I would chat to the girl that worked there when she came in for coffee and she gave me a discount, and I totally couldn't technically really afford it, but however many wears later, I think I made the right decision. That dress isn't just a piece of very flattering, easy to wear clothing, its a part of my origin story and a moment from a time that got washed away when the tide came in.
I'm at that time in my life where I can't tell if the yearnings of my heart for things that seem to be lost, are just nostalgia, or if they hold genuine potential for getting us out of this climate/biodiversity collapse/exploitation of the global south mess; along with many other practitioners in this space (Orsola De Castro et al) I'm convinced that although we need to upgrade the processes of making our clothes We need to upgrade our relationship to our clothes at the same time. And that relationship comes from participation. It comes from being in on it. It comes from developing (no matter to what degree) skills and knowledge and insight through being part of the process. And its an industry shift from Fashion being a hierarchical symbolism of wealth and status, to clothing becoming a service of care for the uniqueness those around us and the beautiful contributions that we are all capable of making towards a healthy human society.
The ecological benefits of hyperlocal sourcing are numerous, Kate Fletcher and Mathilde Tham go into well funded detail in their Earth Logic Plan (earthlogic.info)-
1) Emmissions; A huge amount of emissions relating to clothing come from the way we ship components and garments around the globe in-between processes. With hyperlocal sourcing you immediately irradiate those emissions by using components fabrics and mills local to where the final garment is being made.
2) Proximity and Consequences; Much of the argument for hyperlocal sourcing comes down to accountability and decision making. I personally love this argument because it chimes beautifully with Commons ideology and the autonomy of conscious beings. It goes something like this- if you're sourcing the fabric for jeans in the vicinity of where you live, and the dye from those jeans is toxic to local water supplies, then that toxicity directly affects your quality of life and you are forced to take it into account when you make decisions about how the jeans will be made. Hyperlocal sourcing doesn't impose a restriction on you, its not about legislation or certification. It just puts you back in touch with the consequences of how we make things and gives you the information you need to make good choices, not a load of jargon and blurry stats.
3) Prosperity and Happiness; As we've seen with the UK water companies dumping literal shit into rivers and seas, public outrage and pressure isn't enough to make change. We need much more distributed forms of democracy where people can have genuine influence over the people provide goods and services. We currently have an incredibly centralised Fashion industry, with one or two umbrella groups owning multiple brands. A handful of CEOs, a few hundred buyers and designers, and thousands of garment/mill/agricultural workers being gobbled up at the bottom of the foodchain. Hyperlocal Sourcing has the potential to shift this dynamic, it makes it worthwhile to run a small local production facility, where a number of individuals have genuine say over how things are done and they are many less degrees of contact removed from both the other parts of the supply chain and the end wearers (who are probably part of the supply chain too). It makes distributed access to land and machinery make 'economic' (or whatever is coming after economics) sense. And in my experience we will get a better product at the end of it. Because mass production is not about making something that works really well for you (sorry every bespoke bra customer I've ever had) its about making money for a CEO. Whereas a bespoke bra maker very much IS about making an item that works for you. And that might mean they need a short run of a particular weight of jersey or a particular technical lace. At the moment these innovations are completely hindered by Minimum Order Quantities in mills that only cater to large manufacturers churning out thousands of standardised garments. If we want to be able to celebrate our uniqueness, then we have to admit that one size fits all probably fits one (or maybe two) people.