Can Modular Garments Be a Sustainable Fashion Solution?

Fast fashion dominates the fashion market, which is often described as contrasting to creating a sustainable industry, seeing as fast-changing fashion trends can lead to overconsumption and waste. This chapter aims to discuss whether the detachable features of modular garments could be a design strategy to mitigate this conflict and move fashion towards becoming more sustainable. A modular garment can be defined as an integration of independent garment modules with standard interfaces, by which modules can be disassembled and reassembled. Based on a critical literature review and analysis, this chapter suggests that modular garments potentially can extend the lifespan of garments and be adapted to meet consumers’ demands by module mixing and matching, thus becoming a design solution for sustainable fashion. However, modular garments come with their own challenges, as the detachable features could foster overconsumption. Thus, more research relating to integrating a complete system centred on modular garments is needed, which can minimize the potential negative effects and create a closed-loop new system from design to end-of-life.