Sustainability in Art, Fashion and Wine (Critical Perspectives)

The art, fashion and wine industries are currently at various stages in their efforts to embrace and transition towards sustainability. While sustainability commitments are a necessary condition for progress, they are not sufficient. Instead, there is a need for sweeping transformative change that includes giving serious consideration to indigenous worldviews without recolonizing them.

Sustainability in Art, Fashion and Wine includes findings from recent research and contributes to a new understanding of familiar concepts such as sustainability, (de)colonization and corporate responsibility in the art, fashion and wine industries by adopting critical lenses and incorporating them with innovative perspectives on circular business models and digitalization. It endeavors to present remedies for effectively combating climate change and promoting social good.

While discussing specific issues such as sub-contracted labor, safe working conditions, living wages, environmental degradation, mismanaged waste, and more, the book argues that recognizing the significant role western colonization has played – and continues to play – in the developing world in our current conception of capitalism is itself unsustainable. To understand the true meaning of sustainability – to fully recognize the looming deadlines we face in combating the climate crisis and instituting sustainability as a new normal – the acceptance of a new conception of capitalism, one antithetical to colonization and exploitation, is required.

Contributors to this book address these issues by applying a critical studies approach to their respective chapters, allowing the book to set out what real sustainability could and should look like in the art, fashion and wine industries.