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Hole and Corner
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Kate Fletcher
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I liked the holidays.
What did you train as and what did it teach you?
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I trained in textiles and it taught me about detailed knowledge.
How have you ended up doing what you do now?
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With a large dollop of good luck. I focused on sustainability issues when I was an undergraduate and then went to live abroad for three years. In 1995 I came back for a conference and there I met Kay Politowicz from Chelsea College of Art and Design, who said that there was a PhD studentship. I finished my PhD in 1999 and have now been working for the best part of 30 years in the field, currently as a professor at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion and University of the Arts London.
Is there anyone who has influenced your work?
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Yes. So many people. From Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring, to Donella Meadows, the systems thinker and from Jacky Watson who wrote a report called Textiles and the Environment in 1991 that was revelatory at the time, to Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who casts a spell with her prose. It was Dillard who said of a group of her essays, ‘This is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.’ I feel like this about what I have done. Sustainability is not an add-on, a supplement. It is the real work, the work of change, the work of the present and future, such as it is.
What can you learn from a walk in the woods?
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That a skirt can be a good ally… (see Wild Dress), that in the woods you are accepted there just as you are, that there is great friendship in nature.
Is there a book/film/artist/designer that changed the way you think?
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Nan Shepherd’s book, The Living Mountain. A sensual and vibrant account of being alive.
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I wrote Wild Dress after I’d been on a sailing boat on a trip around the Hebrides. It was a work trip. I couldn’t quite believe my luck. Many things were impressed upon me on the boat, but perhaps most of all was a total sense of being a part of – connected to – the natural world. There’s a one liner by Stephen Graham that captures the experience perfectly: ‘And as you sit on the hillside. Or lie prone under the trees of the forest... the great door that does not look like a door, opens.’ On the boat I gleaned a new type of understanding and ramped up the way I take responsibility for the world. For me this meant turning my work – about clothing – towards nature.
How do you link fashion with the natural world and why is that important?
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What we wear is important because clothes can act like a lens and can change our experience of the world, including the natural world. Clothes are most often talked about chiefly as something to shop for, but most of their lives are spent on our bodies and in our wardrobes. They can be part of lives where we choose to value other things and where we make different choices necessary because of pressures like climate change.
Clothes can get us close to the real world in which we live. Clothes, through their wearing, can help us see the world differently; that help us notice more; value it more; prevent us from thinking that how we dress is somehow separate from the world (not true and which has got us in the mess we are currently in).
What is the greatest challenge facing the fashion industry?
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The growth logic. We need instead Earth logic.
What small thing do you do every day to make a difference?
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I try to love the world fiercely. Wild Dress: Clothing & the natural world by Kate Fletcher is available from uniformbooks.co.uk. It includes 15 colour photographs of the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales by Charlie Meecham