Wild Fashion and the Circular Economy of Textiles

This book is a fascinating delve into the wild, controversial, and at times unsettling universe of fur and the lessons it can provide for ensuring a circular economy for textiles in the future, examining how 100 years of fur in Denmark can offer a valuable lens through which to view today’s fashion industry. Fur is a controversial topic that is deeply ingrained in exploitative practices and ideas of the 20th Century as “the Century of Fashion”. The so-called ‘fur controversy’ is nested in debates from early environmentalist movements which have now grown into the current critique of the Anthropocene that has driven industrialism since the late 18th Century. These same debates also gave birth to ideas about new types of systems, including the circular economy. This book unlocks these discussions while simultaneously arguing how current efforts of building up a circular economy of textiles in the EU can take inspiration from the rather unusual case of 100 years of fur farming in Denmark. While asserting that practices of fur farming need to be left firmly behind, the book highlights the concrete learning examples in fur design practices and the cooperative organization of Kopenhagen Fur that can be applied to guide a new circular infrastructure that is locally embedded and connected to wellbeing and prosperity, offering the reader a set of comprehensive arguments for what a ‘deep’ circularity would entail. Providing direct examples of design, user, and industry practices observed through five years of in situ observations and interviews with furriers, traders and designers, this book will be of value to students, researchers, fashion designers, policy makers and stakeholders in public procurement and the fashion industry.