A new approach to sustainable children’s clothing: Extendable clothes co-designed with children

Abstract

This master’s thesis investigates an alternative design approach towards sustainable fashion, especially for children’s clothing with a focus on the problems of fast fashion and overconsumption. The fashion industry constantly questioning how children’s wear can have a longer lifespan since their lifespan is too short because of children’s rapid growth.

The question posed by this work is how design can help extend the lifespan of children’s clothing by developing functional details and an emotional value by co-design method. This thesis can be classified as project-based and is made up of two parts: the theoretical research part and explorative design part. The research part includes several sustainable design strategies related to sustainability in children’s clothing that supports product longevity. Based on the problem-solving approach, research methods employed desktop study, analysis of numerical data, market research, and a literature review.

The primary goal is to produce extendable and emotionally valuable, thus sustainable, clothes to support the physical and emotional needs of users. Functional development has been studied in which the length of the clothes and sleeves are extended in the same direction as the growth of children.

In this study, the result shows that the significant size differences of children, between 4 to 7 years old, including height, sleeves, and legs, were able to be adjustable with the extendable-function clothes by user’s growth. Despite the significant growth differences of the ages, such as height (18 cm), sleeves (7,65 cm), legs (12 cm), a suit of clothes that is extendable and fits well for the children of different ages is a proposed approach for sustainable fashion with longer lasting products in children’s clothing. In addition, by applying children’s drawings for pattern design, the clothes can provide a new approach to the possibilities of design for person-product attachment with co-design method by adding experiential and emotional value to clothes. This value, granted by a co-design method, is expected to help extend the life of the product.

The conclusion drawn is that a designer can play a positive role in extending the lifespan of clothes by creating a new way of designing garments at the design stage. As a result, the extendable clothes co-designed with children’s drawings were created throughout the explorative design projects.