OC.M Voices

A Conversation on Degrowth

&

Defashion

To launch the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth, Sara Arnold speaks with the books editors, Anitra Nelson & Vincent Liegey, and Sandra Niessen, author of the chapter on defashion

by Bel Jacobs, Sandra Niessen and Sara Arnold

Photos courtesy of Sandra Niessen

On May 16th 2025, Fashion Act Now (FAN) and the Islington Climate Centre had the pleasure of hosting a launch event for the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth, one stop on its European book tour. The volume edited by Anitra Nelson and Vincent Liegey, takes stock of ‘degrowth’ as ‘a concept and movement gaining increasing visibility’ with 35 chapter contributions, including a chapter that focuses on the concept of ‘defashion’, a term developed within the ranks of FAN.  

From Left: Sara Arnold, Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson and Sandra Niessen

When FAN members learned that both Anitra Nelson and Vincent Liegey would be in London in May, as well as Sandra Niessen, the author of the ‘Defashion’ chapter, they made the most of serendipity by putting on an event to bring public attention to the intersection of ‘defashion’ and ‘degrowth’. Sara Arnold, the convenor of Fashion Act Now, moderated this conversation.

The book is available for free online via this link or to purchase via Routledge.

Below is a shortened version of the transcript. 

---

Sara Arnold: Serge Latouche, father of degrowth, said degrowth was NOT an economic project. Anitra, your work has looked at lots of elements of degrowth and taken this radical approach as well. Do you have something to add to that in terms of your own personal definition of degrowth?

Anitra Nelson: I try to endorse Karl Marx’s approach and what I think are the foundations of degrowth. I had history in my undergraduate work in American studies. I became anti-economistic through that process and I ended up doing a major study on Mexico’s foreign public debt and that led me to do a PhD on Karl Marx’s concept of money. 

"I take the position that you can’t achieve degrowth or eco-socialism or these kinds of bigger frameworks for living better with a strong and good relation with earth without dispensing with monetary frameworks or economics."

Because in the women’s movement, in the peace movement, in the environmental movements, I’d become quite cynical about the way that economic systems worked and that gave me an opportunity to spend a few years looking at various ways that people look at money and economic frameworks. Through that, I came to a position of deciding that you couldn’t be ecologically sustainable and you couldn’t be socially equitable through economics -- in particular through the dynamics of money and the market. I take the position that you can’t achieve degrowth or eco-socialism or these kinds of bigger frameworks for living better with a strong and good relation with earth without dispensing with monetary frameworks or economics. 

In the degrowth movement, a strong number of people moved from economics to conceptualising the ways we satisfy our basic needs through collective provisioning. These could be non-monetary ways of providing for ourselves in communities (initially households and then communities) deciding what they really need and how they will satisfy those needs, with as much local sufficiency as possible. Then you don’t need a market because you’ve decided what you need, and once these things have been produced they come back to these people. 

We spend a lot of time with state politics through decision-making and then we have a market where all the decision-making is done by a very small number of people, in very secretive and competitive ways. This absorbs a lot of human time and it’s ending up with outputs, with results, that are really negative in terms of the earth as well as people.

That’s my take. Although it’s only a minority within degrowth who would take that position, a lot of people question monetary frameworks and have chosen to use non-monetary frameworks for the ways they approach their own projects.

Sara: You came across Sandra’s opening provocation at the Defashioning Education conference in Berlin[1]. What struck you and why did you feel you needed to pursue this further?

"I have never come across a sector that has spoken and worked in eloquent and clear terms around reversing the way that it’s functioning."

Anitra: Andrea, one of the authors on conviviality in the book, and I ended up at the conference and heard Sandra’s speech. I thought this is absolutely amazing. I have never come across a sector that has spoken and worked in eloquent and clear terms around reversing the way that it’s functioning. The whole idea of fashion being put into a historical context, into a context in which indigenous people’s ways of approaching fashion integrated into a future … that’s really positive. It astounded me! 

When it came to the handbook, I thought we really badly want that. 

Sara: Sandra, what brought you to the concept of ‘defashion’?

"That separation between making and designing isn’t made. The person who does the craft is doing the invention. Those separations have come from capitalism and the industrial system, divisions of labour."

Sandra Niessen: I was an anthropologist working alone. I was frustrated with the decline of the weaving arts in Sumatra, feeling angry and critical towards the global economy that was undermining what I saw as being precious. Angry at the fashion system for undermining other cultural systems of clothing and dress,, I was asked to speak at the first thematic event of Fashion Act Now. 

Bel Jacobs, Sara Arnold and Clare Farrell of Fashion Act Now, emerged from Extinction Rebellion to say ‘we need to give fashion its own due’. It’s a huge issue and I was pulled in, to my great delight, because it’s all about solidarity. And making connections. We have to move on. This book is not just an academic book, it’s a book about shifting not just our minds and our paradigms, but our economic structures and our cultures.

I’m anxious to infect all of you with the word ‘defashion’ and have it become a household word. That’s the goal of FAN. What Anitra has said so far really resonates. We’ve always asked in FAN: How are we going to situate ourselves as activists in the fashion domain? Everyone right now is working on reining fashion in, making it sustainable, how can we make it not destructive to wear clothes in this world? 

Initially, within FAN we talked about the problem of paring down. We had a sense of a dark blanket over our heads and no more color, no more fancy parties, misery and drab. 

But I disagreed.  

What has happened is that the industry has co-opted our creativity and design expertise. What I’m familiar with in North Sumatra is that everybody who weaves is a designer. That separation between making and designing isn’t made. The person who does the craft is doing the invention. Those separations have come from capitalism and the industrial system, divisions of labour. That’s part of what I saw was ruining the indigenous clothing system in North Sumatra. So I thought, let’s reverse it within FAN. We need to talk about dismantling the industry.

The ironic thing is most of the fashion people here today are working within schools of fashion, connected with the industry, and they’re the most critical minds. 

I love that. We all have to become ‘Trojan Mice’[2]. We all have to go into our separate spheres and become Trojan Mice to change the system. That’s where the networking and solidarity comes in. 

When we talk about defashion within Fashion Act Now, we have to understand the implications of the industry on our thinking, on our day to day patterns, how we relate to dress, how we buy, sell and so on. We have to break that all down and get back to what it’s all about and that is what Anitra says: joy. The joy of living, the joy of clothes, the joy of creating without the imposition of the industry weighing us down. 

Defashion is a liberating concept. I’d like the Degrowth Handbook to be called something like the joy handbook. To pull people in. When we talk about defashion, we’re not talking about the end of fashion. We’re talking about the beginning of the joy of fashion, of ‘doing’ with clothes and fibre; the heritage is so incredibly rich. There is so much knowledge out there. The fashion system has limited us incredibly, scrunched us down into this very superficial thing of buying, wearing and throwing away and we’re missing the joy of clothes. 

Sara: Vincent, I'm fascinated to know what you think of this idea of defashion and what Sandra's just presented considering your understanding of the origins of degrowth.

Vincent Liegey: I love defashion. I'm not an expert in that, so I'm happy to always learn more. And I was happy to review the text as well, to go deeper into defashion. Defashion is a type of metaphor for degrowth. You may find so much in common. It's like degrowth – what we try to do for the whole society, you do it in a particular sector. I will compare it with what's happening with technology, with low tech movement somehow. 

When you question, in a radical way, from the roots, how you've been de-possessed by the essence of the beauty of something. And while listening to what you were reading, you mentioned the commons and it reminds me of the history of degrowth in France, which goes much further. You may find a lot of what we call degrowth pioneers in history. You may find a lot of people doing degrowth by accident, all along the timeline of the history of Homo sapiens. 

Actually, most of the principles behind degrowth were in most of the societies, groups, people of Homo sapiens in the last 300,000 years, and suddenly there was a terrible turnout with capitalism, and also patriarchy, which turned into colonialism, where few people imposed brutality. It's well explained by Karl Polanyi, of Hungarian origin, historian of economics who used to live in UK, before moving to US and Canada - how commons have been de-possessed from the people and expropriating the people from the commons, expropriating them also from common know-hows, knowledge, the autonomy to be creative, the autonomy to have solidarity. And it's like they are selling things which are co-founded by humanity, making them less nice, less creative, and in making us buy them –the tragedy of the world we are in right now. And defashion is bringing the same story through another pathway which is very enlightening and fruitful for the debate and the conversation. And you may find all the ingredients that we criticise in degrowth in this process. And also you may find all the liberating concepts of beautiful ideas. You may find degrowth towards defashioning and toward the re-appropriation of freedom, creativity, solidarity and enjoyment of life by doing beautiful things.

We spoke about decolonising our imaginaries. And in particular for the Western world, it's about the economistic imaginary. We see the world only based on figures, in particular economic indicators and even more money. 

Sara: So often I think degrowth is talked about theoretically. And people are like, ‘Yeah, but can that ever really happen?’ So I wonder if you could give us some examples of real existing degrowth.

Vincent: We spoke about decolonising our imaginaries. And in particular for the Western world, it's about the economistic imaginary. We see the world only based on figures, in particular economic indicators and even more money. 

Mark Twain said, if you have a hammer in your head, you see all problems looking like nails. 

Our hammer is really the economy, and it's highly ridiculous, because I would say that there are already everywhere in our daily life, a very large dimension of degrowth principles happening – it’s just we don't see them. 

And even more, they are made invisible by these indicators. The most beautiful example is work. In most of European Western languages, we say that each work deserves a salary. It's a joke that the large majority of the most important tasks, what we do every day, and I must speak about care economy, mostly made by women, are not paid and are invisible-ised. They don't exist because they're not paid. They're not calculated into the GDP, and GDP growth and so on. So it's something which doesn’t exist. 

Informal solidarities are everywhere in our daily life. In particular, the richest people are very supportive of each other. They apply a lot of beautiful, convivial, caring, solidarity principles in their everyday life to each other. Even in a country like the UK, which is one of the most commodified societies in the world, if a child falls down in the street, people won't start to calculate how much money they will get. Everybody will naturally go to help. 

And the society is much more complex. Just the main narrative, or the dominant mindset, also on one of the first international books on degrowth vocabulary for a new era, all the vocabulary we use, all the concepts speaks about, how we should dis-intoxicate ourselves from toxic concepts. Growth is a toxic concept we have – like an addiction to a type of toxic concept. All the concepts, what we daily use in our western world, in our language, are making us blind to one that really matters. Degrowth is already here. Even in this highly commodified, capitalistic, patriarchal, technological, industrial society, we still have a large dimension of our daily life based on degrowth principles.  

And we are suffering a lot, because the main goal of capitalism is to destroy and to go into our intimacies, to totally colonise ourselves. 

"It's a pretext to experiment and explore in our daily life, what degrowth could be."

Anitra wants me to speak about Cargonomia. She spent two weeks with us in Budapest. Cargonomia is a cooperative, co-founded with a group of friends more than 10 years ago - we celebrated the 10th anniversary last weekend with big parties in Budapest. It brings together an organic farm next to Budapest, a bike shop, where we construct cargo bikes and bike trailers and logistics center, and we distribute our veggies with our cargo bikes. 

It's a pretext to experiment and explore in our daily life, what degrowth could be. What is degrowth already? We mostly rely on a ‘no money’ type of system – reciprocity, gift economy. We are very lucky. In Budapest, you have a very large network of wonderful people, a lot of them are educated under the former system where the notion of commons was not defined that way, but they were educated somehow to deal with commons. They have free access to a lot of things, and they knew how to share and to protect the commons and so on. So you have a lot of open spaces in Budapest where people self-organize themselves and do a lot of wonderful things and share and celebrate in their daily life. 

So I have the privilege and the honor and also the hard task and responsibility to be one of the coordinators of one of the projects of this ecosystem - and I would say one of small cooperatives among the millions, or maybe the billions of examples you may find all around the world.

The only danger in such a cooperative, it's to do too much. So you start to be free. Start to be very highly creative. You start to be very autonomous and well connected with a lot of wonderful people who bring you a lot of tools and know how to network and so on. So somehow you fall down into another type of hubris to enjoy too many projects. But it's a lot of joy. And it's about being happy all day long and to share. Everything is different from one day to the next. You may experience something different because the seasons are changing, the people are moving in, moving out, the projects are changing and so on.

Sara: I really love that answer. People also ask us about examples of defashion or examples of fashion within commoning. And it's happening everywhere. It's all around us, but we don't see it. 

Sandra: I’d like to respond in two ways. I agree it is everywhere and it's also

nowhere, because we're always dealing with that larger system. All of us here totally agree that we don't want clothing that destroys the earth and each other. But we're all wearing clothes that destroy the earth and each other. That's the problem. We don't want to use plastic, but we wanted to have a sandwich before we came here, so then we bought something and it was wrapped in plastic. This is the reality of our world. So we're creating alternative systems. Hopefully they'll become dominant, but in the meantime, we're dealing with what we've got.

Fashion Act Now has had a child, and it's called ‘Our Common Market’. That's our oldest child, and you can find it on the web. And there, we decided that in the activist community, relative to fashion, there were many people doing what they can to dismantle a harmful system or alter it. We don't believe it can be altered because it's too embedded in a deleterious economic system, and so we're about creating alternatives, setting up commons, or at least highlighting them, giving them their due. They're always ignored. So we're trying to de-invisibilise the invisibilised through our Our Common Market. It's a project with huge scope. We want it to have universal scope, even though we haven’t quite figured that out yet, but starting in the UK, mostly because most of our members are here.

We've been looking at how people are organising to de-grow or avoid the fashion system and still be able to dress ourselves by mending circles. We've got a huge number of dots with mending circles on our map. We've got this interactive map that you can expand and see where there are communities near you. We encourage people to set up communities, and then have our map of the world filled with communities. It's a way to be infectious. We hope there you'll find many communities.

And also, we were just in ‘Defashion Dorset’[3] this past weekend, where one of our members, Jenny Morrisetti, has set up a kind of a commons.  She's working on it. It's not perfect, and it's what you say: you feel your way, it's an experiment. You're feeling your way by doing it. You make the road by walking on it.

Jenny pulls together people who are experimenting with fiber, sheep and flax, and we have lectures, and we talk with each other, and we share information. So there's nothing that really presents itself as an alternative to the fashion system. Yet at the same time, it's all presenting itself as an alternative to the fashion system. It's just that we have to kind of shed this heavy weight on us that is the industry.

I think of that article that Naomi Klein just wrote with Astra Taylor about ‘end times Fascism’[4]. These people have power because they have money; they don't care. They think they can live in a bubble. And that's what I mean about shedding. We do have alternative imaginaries to what theirs is. They're creating an alternative imaginary to what we have. It's alternative imaginaries, but it's also alternative systems, and dealing with that nexus between that alternative system that we're conceptualising, working on, experimenting with, making headway on, and those oppressive structures that are getting in the way. We all need each other because we're all doing it in different ways, and we all need each other because we're all tackling it from our own angle.

60.5% of Europeans surveyed express support for post growth and degrowth approaches.

Sara: I want to acknowledge that you quote in the book that 60.5% of Europeans surveyed express support for post growth and degrowth approaches. There's also been this big global survey that said 89% of people in various countries around the world want stronger climate action. So  it seems like we're winning, but we're not winning, or are we winning? And I want to talk about strategy, because with defashion we've taken this dismantling strategy. 

I know that within degrowth there's tension between some strategies being labeled as escapistand on the other side, strategies of resistance. I know it's not necessarily one thing or the other, but I want us to end by talking about strategy and also acknowledging our positionality here in the global north, as people from the global north - and how we navigate north/south relationships. 

Anitra: What I thought Sandra was kind of moving around in her discussion was very much politics, and then you've reinforced that and I think very much the strong theme in the handbook for degrowth is this is political, not economic, and it's only politics that is really going to get us there. 

The point is that there can be so many of us wanting to do something different, but we have almost zilch power. You know, there's been a kind of arrogance in the Global North that we have democracies and what this means is that every three or four years, we can go and tick boxes for people who've become representatives that have put up candidates for elections. 

It has required lots of money for them to do so, and it has been a small number of people who've selected those candidates. This is not us having any control over our lives at all, because everything that is out there in terms of shops and even the work that we do is all decided by a small number of people, so they're part of the whole degrowth push and cause. Fashion Act Now is a politics, a very strong politics of raising our consciousnesses, collectively, listening and sharing and deciding; how can we break this system?

"This brings to my mind that we need to be using more strategies like occupying."

In terms of practices like Cargonomia, we don’t just talk about them being prefigurative. Terry Lane, who I work quite a lot with, an Australian degrowth and gift economy advocate, calls them pre-figurative hybrids and the hybrid is working in this world, and at the same time trying as much as possible to be representing how we want the world to be.

Sara Arnold & Bel Jacobs

 I think that we can see that as resistance on one side, as well as being really determined to move ahead and not simply resist. But we do have to resist, but not simply do that. 

This brings to my mind that we need to be using more strategies like occupying

– so that is making the world completely different. My own bias is for grassroots. If we're going to have the revolutionary change we need, all of us, singly, individually and as communities, have to internalise and be and act out those values. Therefore, it has to be a Grassroots Revolution. It can't be anything else. It can't come from top down. 

 Sara: Thank you. And I think that is a good place to end. Thank you. 

---

[1] Digital Defashioning Education Conference, Berlin, 2023.  udk-berlin.de/veranstaltung/de-fashioning-education/

[2] Term used by Tom Crisp, Falmouth University.

[3] Defashion Dorset, a two-day sustainable fashion initiative hawkersfarm.org/defashion-dorset-2025

[4] The rise of end times fascism, The Guardian, 13 April 2025. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor,  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk