Excerpt: For Amanda Tabet, clothing serves as a vessel of memory, often describing garments as “time capsules” that materialize emotions and experiences. Describing herself as “deeply nostalgic and classically sentimental,” Tabet understands garments as “heirlooms” embedded with personal history. Tabet’s work and design process resonate with Kopytoff’s (1986) framework of the Cultural Biography of Things, viewing garments and fashion as culturally shaped and emotionally charged, thereby encapsulating personal history. Memory and nostalgia play a foundational role in her design process. She often finds herself gravitating toward 1960s silhouettes, with an emphasis on colour blocking and boxy fits, as well as other aesthetic choices rooted in emotional resonance and nostalgia. Small design details, such as buttons, are a prominent feature of her work, evoking whimsy and childhood memories (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: The use of buttons in Amanda Tabet’s designs to evoke whimsy and childhood memories (Tabet, 2025). 

Excerpt: Northern Canadian Indigenous approaches to material use offer sustainability models grounded in relationships with land, responsible harvesting, and resource management. Given resource scarcity in Northern communities, which has long fostered deep traditions of mending, repurposing, and careful material use, the show reflected this reality in its costume design. Overall, North of North visualizes what Fletcher (2010) describes as sustainable practices – designing for longevity, valuing repair, and minimizing waste. In one of Siaja’s dream scenes, she is wearing a dress and accessories that blend Inuit and Regency-era styles (see Figure 4). When asked how Hanson created the Qaurutik copper headpiece out of salvaged electrical wire, he responded, “It’s the Inuk way of doing things, using what you have and not throwing things away” (Boutsalis, 2025). These details demonstrate that North of North emphasizes Inuit fashion as an inherently sustainable practice rooted in resourcefulness.

Excerpt: Niinimäki et al. (2020, 198) argue that fast fashion’s linear “take-make-dispose” model is ecologically unsustainable, as the industry’s overproduction – estimated at 80 billion garments annually (Thomas, 2019) – cannot be offset only by increased resale. Instead, a transition toward circular models of “efficiency, recycling, and reuse” is required (Niinimäki et al., 2020, 198), with overall consumption reductions as the primary focus. Niinimäki et al. (2020, 191) provide a graphic illustrating the key stages of the fashion supply chain, along with the geographic location and broad-scale environmental impacts (energy consumption, water use, waste production, and chemical use) for each stage. Despite being created to outline the lifecycle of fast fashion, the graphic remains relevant in the case of Depop, particularly given shifts in meaning and flow across the retail, consumer, and end-of-life sections. The graphic has been edited in red to emphasize the environmental effects occurring in the last three stages of the fashion supply chain (see Figure 2). On Depop, users act as both retailers and consumers, photographing, pricing, and listing items themselves or purchasing items from other users.