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In Patagonia (Clothing): A Complicated Greenness

2013· article· en· W2239441608 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Sharon J. Hepburn

Bibliographic record

VenueFashion Theory · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFashion and Cultural Textiles
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaCoordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
KeywordsClothingCasualWildernessMainstreamConsumption (sociology)GreenwashingSustainabilityMarketingSublimeAestheticsRhetorical questionSociologyBusinessEnvironmental ethicsPublic relationsPolitical scienceCorporate social responsibilityLawArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Patagonia clothing company makes outdoor and casual clothing which is both functional and stylish. Although concerned with style and image, the company distances itself from any association with “fashion.” They identify their “core-customer” as a very fit person who aspires to step outside mainstream society, and who engages in extreme sports through which they have transformative experiences in sublime wilderness landscapes. Patagonia's marketing strategies and business practices intentionally minimize environmental damage, promote sustainability, and encourage people to appreciate wilderness and what can be experienced in it. Even assuming that the company has the best of intentions, the fact is that their marketing practices, and the messages they convey—about the integrity of practices, and the sublime aesthetic that motivates them—in fact increase consumption well beyond the needs of their “core-customer.” With today's movement towards eco and ethical production, companies will follow different paths in addressing, or appearing to address, “green” concerns. This article traces the trajectory of one company, Patagonia, over the past four decades.Patagonia's story illustrates the paradoxes that often arise when “green” practices actually increase consumption. I argue that Patagonia has a double greenness in its combined discourses of sustainability, and also of nature as place of transformation. This intermeshing of practicality and desire comprises what I call a complicated greenness. Customers buy what is “ecofashion” (despite the company's rhetorical distance from fashion) and in the process may literally “buy into” a process that carries forward the very economic and ecological trajectory they would ideally curtail.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0100.016
Scholarly communication0.0080.005
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.223
Teacher spread0.198 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations30
Published2013
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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