Designing for Disassembly – Adversarial Design and Future Directions for Athleisure Clothing in a Circular Economy

Abstract

This practice-based MPhil looks at circular economy innovation in athleisure garments, a hybrid of athletic and leisure clothing such as compression garments and yoga pants. The increasing uptake of athleisure garments as everyday clothing contributes to the environmental crisis at a scale that perpetuates the unsustainability of fast fashion due to their extensive use of blended plastic-based textiles. While there may be a current shift towards a circular economy in athleisure clothing, the industry’s approach is predominantly inclined towards recycling, which does not lessen consumer demand and, in fact, perpetuates increasingly rapid cycles of consumption and production.

Design for disassembly is an underlying strategy for achieving a circular economy in which the potential for waste is designed out in the conceptual phases. It considers the lifecycle of each product building block and integrates an optimum resource recovery and reassembly plan (through recomposition, repair, reuse, recycling etc.). However, while the practical advantages of design for disassembly are known, the uptake of circular economy as a design strategy is embraced by the industry and consumers according to their differential definitions, understanding and adoption of sustainable practices. This research argues that achieving a ‘critical circular economy’ in athleisure clothing requires investigation into the socio-cultural functioning of the industry as well as the political aspects of the consumption patterns of its’ consumers.  

Informed by Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism, Adversarial Design theory by Carl DiSalvo proposes that critical designers use their practice as a generative frame to expose inconsistencies and disagreements within the systems designed to build relationships between product, production, and consumers. For example, material design for disassembly, end of life, and post-use recycling might be popular industrial approaches for designing athleisure garments; however, adversarial design can provide other ways to navigate the concepts of labour, waste, the female body, time, movement and materiality of athleisure garments within a circular economy by confronting users with alternate versions of these concepts. DiSalvo’s concept for firstly revealing hegemony consists of identifying and documenting power structures and their influences in athleisure clothing design. Secondly, those insights can then be used to assess the excluded agendas in the design of athleisure clothing and reconfigure the remainder, thereby informing a third tactic of articulating an agonistic collective that includes designing participatory models in which alternative garments and material constructions are offered and experienced.

Moving the circular economy value propositions away from recycling using adversarial design opens the potential for a collaborative model that enables education, research, industry, and craft to connect in achieving alternative approaches to the circular economy, that retain and make the female body and movement, material and waste and labour and time visible through the design and making of athleisure garments. Therefore, this research intervenes into the preconceived materiality of athleisure garments to achieve experimental stretch, fit and moisture management capabilities for exercise and daily task performance by using and manipulating natural/ undyed calico and linen as ubiquitous and relatively sustainable, but surprising, material substrates for athleisure garments. Although the research began with concerns about the predominant use of plastic-based fibre blends in athleisure garments, the explicit intention of the studio experiments is not to change the normative typology of athleisure garments but rather to elicit ‘adversarial’ questions through the material choice and the experience of experimental prototypes. The adversarial design prototyping experiments work towards the critical analyses of ‘disassembly’ systems, and thus the assumptions, myths and promises of sustainability within the athleisure clothing industry and its’ fashion systems that support the predominant use of synthetic textiles and their near impossibility for disassembly.

The complete thesis can be read and downloaded here or from UNSW- Sydney library