Life’s Principles; Explained to Fashion Designers

Like any good designer, we can pull our inspiration from the most unique or hidden places. Sometimes our inspiration can be staring us right in the face, we’ve been surrounded by it, but just couldn’t clearly see it. Fashion, more so compared to other product designs, tends to be heavily influenced by the cultural elements around us. However, what if we were to turn and pay closure attention to nature?

This seems a bit oxymoronic, as the fashion industry is, let’s face it, a very un-sustainable industry and very much conflicts with nature. Fashion requires so much use of raw material extraction, human labor, water wastage, and even more detrimental- it thrives in an economic system of early disposal to move on to the next “new” thing. However, the industry has placed more importance on making sustainable efforts. So what can we as fashion designers do to come up with a new way of looking at clothing?

In comes Life’s Principles. These are a set of principles to help guide decision making and begin a new thought process of solving problems. Mother Nature, is the expert problem solver, and has figured out tried and true ways to exist successfully on this planet. (Of course, any solutions that did not work, also have a way of showing themselves in nature). Life’s Principles is a way to parse out solution based decisions to our ultimate problem- how to sustainable exist on the planet.

Life’s Principles is divided into two major categories- Life Adapts and Evolves, and Life Creates Conditions Conducive for Life. Within those two questions, we can look to the following questions to aide in creating a product (see Life’s Principles Butterfly infographic).

In the context of apparel for example, we can ask questions during the creation phase such as- can this new material be recycled? Does this garment design integrate multiple functions? Is the garment constructed in such a way that it can be disassembled? Just to name a few examples.

As the fashion industry slowly makes more concerted efforts towards a sustainable future, I implore all you fashion designers out there in need of a fresh set of inspiration, to think about Life’s Principles and its functions and it apply it to your next piece of work.