Fashion is Political: Sustainable Fashion and Entrepreneurial Feminisms

What makes the core of fashion-makers characterized by nature and queer theory? Professor Melissa Fisher has written the article 'Fashion is Political: Sustainable Fashion and Entrepreneurial Feminisms' with her colleagues Claudia Neusüß and Anna Perrottet and investigated the environment of sustainable fashion-makers in Berlin.

Since the last decade Berlin has witnessed a significant rise in the creative economy, including sustainable "green" fashion approaches and hub movement. Cooperatives have also grown more popular during the last decade. Notably, one of the pioneers in the field is the women's cooperative WeiberWirtschaft and its business center – rooted in the (West-German) women's movement of the eighties, with a sustainable and care oriented economy at the center of its mission. This article is based on several years of fieldwork in the cooperative, interviews with women fashion makers, and the researchers’ ongoing work and activism in the arena of gender and economy. It identifies a variety of different approaches of the fashion-makers characterized and inspired by, for example, ideas of slowness, nature and queer theory. In addition the authors argues that the fashion makers, and the structures and values of their small scale companies, share commonalities rooted in the core ideas of the cooperative: empowering women in the labor market and in society, a solidary economy and fighting gender hierarchies.

Melissa Fisher, Claudia Neusüß and Anna Perrottet: 'Fashion is Political: Sustainable Fashion and Entrepreneurial Feminisms' in Femina Politica - Zeitschrift für Feministische Politikwissenschaft, 2017.