Polyrhythmic Fashion Cycles: Tracing Multispecies Textile Production Across the Alps

Polyrhythmic Fashion Cycles: Tracing Multispecies Textile Production Across the Alps

Abstract: This paper reconceptualizes sustainable fashion by shifting from an anthropocentric focus on speed and efficiency to an ecocentric, more than human understanding of time in textile value chains. Building on temporality studies and phenology, we investigate how fashion production can be synchronized with the rhythms of wool producing sheep and dyeing plants in territorialized Alpine textile systems. Our empirical material stems from multi-year, multi-sited ethnography in the Alps, combining prolonged observations, secondary data, and in-depth interviews with farmers, artisans, designers, processors, and intermediaries. Using rhythmical calendars, we trace how actors organize phenophases, cultivate situated practices of noticing, and assemble rhizomatic constellations of humans, animals, plants, predators, insects, and infrastructures. The analysis introduces the notion of polyrhythmic fashion cycles and develops the idea of a more than human time to market as a practice of “waiting with” rather than minimizing lead times. We show how temporal attunement to ecological rhythms can regenerate local wool and dye plant economies, redistribute agency across species, and reframe slowness, variability, and seasonal bottlenecks as sources of value. The paper advances research on transformative sustainability and opens new directions for marketing theory and practice in fashion and beyond.

More information on Diego Rinallo, PhD can be found here.

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