Fashion and textiles have been a vital part of our existence since the beginning of time, adorning our bodies while carrying stories, connecting us to places, to the hands of makers, to beauty, joy, pleasure, to ancestral wisdoms and the entire web of life. As embodied through my Slavic pagan ancestral traditions, crafting materials and garments were important practices for cultivating well-being for each community and future generations to come.
What was once a celebration of interconnectedness, has now transformed into a global system of degradation, exploitation, and disconnection. Fashion-textiles epitomises the broader modern crisis that is rooted in a consciousness of separation and prioritises profits, progress, efficiency, and exponential growth over the well-being of all life on this planet. Despite numerous sustainability initiatives within the industry, there has been minimal meaningful transformation as industry responses continue to perpetuate the same extractive logic that generated these issues in the first place.
How did we drift so far from this original understanding of fashion-textiles? How might we reimagine fashion-textiles not as an industry, but as a living, breathing organism entangled with relations, places, diverse ways of knowing and authentic expressions?
True transformation demands sustainability efforts that dive beneath the surface— challenging the dominant western fashion-textile worldviews that prioritise speed, efficiency, and endless growth while prioritising care, community, context and the wellbeing of future generations.
So what if there was another way? Or rather, what if there were many other ways? What might fashion-textiles become if we liberated it from a singular vision and opened ourselves up to a pluriverse of possibilities?
Imagine standing at an intersection where multiple walkways of varied understandings and ways of being in the world stretch before you—this is the essence of a pluriverse. "A world where many worlds fit," as the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, expressed through their autonomous community. When I first encountered this concept through the work of anthropologist Arturo Escobar and decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser and Renata M. Leitão, it felt like a homecoming—a pathway that contributes to sustainability that is rooted in place, relationality, sovereignty and a holistic understanding of existence.
The pluriverse challenges the dominant western notion of a single "correct" reality by embracing the understanding that multiple valid worlds exist simultaneously, each with their own intricate knowledge systems, values, and ways of being. This isn't a novel concept, but an ancient way of being that diverse cultures have practiced for millennia before colonial powers imposed a singular worldview. Australian First Nations elder Mary Graham explains that Indigenous knowledge systems long developed social frameworks where "all perspectives are valid and reasonable, and all localities have their unique voice."
Consider the rich, two-century relationship between the Yolŋu people of northeastern Australia and Macassan traders from Sulawesi. For generations, they interacted through deep cultural collaborations—sharing languages, technologies, and practices while respecting each other's fundamental differences. Neither sought to assimilate the other; instead, they danced in the nuanced spaces between their worlds. Similarly, ancient Chinese philosophy, as reflected in the Tao Te Ching, offers a perspective that views contrasts and differences as complementary elements contributing to a "harmonious whole."
This is not about creating new hierarchies or replacing one dominant worldview with another. Instead pluriversality recognises the rich diversity of human and more-than human experiences that have always existed alongside one another. The pluriverse represents a radical reimagining of how we understand our world, each other, and—in
this context—fashion-textiles.
Applying this lens reveals how deeply colonial mindsets have shaped our understanding of dress and adornment.
As fashion anthropologist M. Angela Jansen observes, western fashion has historically aligned perspectives with those who define it, reinforcing its perceived superiority while othering all that doesn't fit its eurocentric worldview. When British colonisers arrived in Australia, Treena Clark, a First Nations Kokatha and Wirangu woman, notes they dismissively labelled Indigenous people's dress as insufficient, primitive, and static.
A pluriversal approach to fashion challenges what sociologist John Law calls the "one world world" by opening up to a multiplicity of ways of designing, making, wearing, sharing, and relating to clothing. It asks us to imagine fashion not as a single global industry rushing toward the same unsustainable horizon with Paris, London, Milan and New York as its epicentre, but as a vibrant tapestry of diverse expressions, each emerging from and honouring place, context and the relations that occur there. Pluriversal fashion-textiles embraces:
- Caring for the land, communities, and more-than-human beings.
- Honouring local knowledges, ancient technologies, and histories.
- Celebrating diverse aesthetics and bodily autonomies.
- Celebrating plural bodies and promoting bodily autonomies.
- Fostering community-centric and regenerative practices.
- Building relational connections across supply chains.
- Shifting from purely individualist to collaborative approaches.
- Engaging with textiles as sources of joy, healing, and pleasure.
- Acknowledging materials, plants, and landscapes as alive, agentic and co-creators.
Consider Lyn-Al Young, whose silk garments painted within her Gunnai Country aren't merely "sustainable fashion"—they're living dialogues with place. Or Lunarc Studio, infusing garments with locally foraged plants and ancient wisdom forgotten by industrial production. Look at Farfarm in Brazil – they develop textiles using natural fibers grown through agroforestry within a 100km radius—creating economic systems that honour place, community, and ecological wisdom.
These examples aren't mere "alternatives" to mainstream fashion, but present fundamentally different relationships with garments and materials. As sustainable fashion pioneers Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham articulate in their radical action research plan "Earth Logic", alternative approaches have to be grounded in care, reciprocity, and responsibility rather than endless growth and extraction at the expense of planetary well-being.
In this time of ecological and social crisis, pluriversal fashion-textiles illuminate a different pathway for how we create, make, wear, and understand garments and materials. This journey isn't linear or universal—it unfolds uniquely in each context, guided by specific places, relations, histories, needs and desires. As decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez asks:
"Can we think of design that is capable of healing, of enabling relationality, of recovering the possibilities of listening to the communal, to the ancestral, of caring for earth?"
I invite you to consider: What fashion-textile worlds are waiting to be heard and to take up space in the world? What ways of engaging with fashion-textiles feel true to your spirit, yet remain unexplored? How can you begin to explore some of these today? The pluriverse invites us beyond mere inclusion in a broken system—it calls us to imagine and create fashion-textile worlds otherwise.
——————————————————————————————————————— This is the first exploration in a series diving into pluriversal fashion-textiles. In the next two articles, we'll journey through the four grounding pluriversal values: relationality, place, autonomy, and wholeness.
