Visualizing “Slow” Fashion: Communicating Sustainable Fashion through Romanticizing Artisanal Hands

As the fashion industry attempts to move toward a more sustainable model for design and production, strategies for effectively communicating this shift to consumers on social media become a critical part of fashion brands’ marketing discourse.

In the case of Indian fashion, artisanal textile crafts have been positioned as the essential mediums through which a distinct design culture can be imagined. Textile crafts—like handloom weaving and hand embroidery—have also been positioned as agents for local empowerment, decolonization, sustainability, and social wellbeing by various stakeholders. This is because India’s craft sector is the second-largest provider of rural livelihoods and the resources it relies on ‘are not only indigenously available but also [considered] environmentally friendly’ (Tyabji 2003).

This paper explores the linking of Indian crafts with the concept of sustainable or “slow” fashion through visual narratives on social media by leading fashion brands and craft-based initiatives. Through a visual analysis of such brands’ social media profiles, the paper examines popular visual strategies of “sustainability communication” (Godemann & Michelsen, 2011) focused on conveying the value of traditional crafts through images of artisans, handmade textiles, and artisans’ hands. In doing so, the paper highlights the success of such strategies as well as the elitist nature of the same as they exoticize and reduce artisanal production to a curated image­ for online consumption. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how representations of indigenous crafts in fashion remain caught between decolonial strategies, on one hand, and those that reinscribe the colonial encounter, on the other.