Hack the black box: Consumer agency in the sharing economy

Fashion design pedagogy in higher education needs to engage with emergent consumer-led consumption schemes that are problematizing the roles of producer and consumer. Traditional fashion design pedagogy does not explicitly teach students to reveal the systems of fashion production to consumers, thus distancing them from the materials and processes that animate consumer products. Consumers are at a disadvantage as they have little agency over or knowledge of how garments are produced in the global top-down fashion system – a system that could be characterized as a black box. In response to this, consumers and designers have been employing concepts from hacker culture and the sharing economy in order to participate in novel consumption schemes that focus on underlying values of openness, transparency and collaboration. This article reviews a number of these schemes, using secondary sources, and proposes that their underlying values be introduced into sustainable fashion curriculums.