Mathilda Tham: Sustainable fashion forecasting – exploring alternative paradigms for fashion design
Design Department, Goldsmiths College
While fashion’s capriciousness in terms of look is evident, it is less obvious that even the very essence of fashion, or the role it plays for its users, creators and for zeitgeist, is also subject to change. In modernity fashion carried promises of a distinct, homogenous and technology facilitated future; post-modernity and beyond offered us fashion in the garb of a “supermarket of styles”. It brought us vintage, styling, customising and celebrity designers. This paper discusses the need and possibility for fashion to adapt or change, yet again, and explores future, sustainable paradigms for fashion.
An overview of the environmental fashion scene at the moment highlights a paradox. On the one hand, a small but growing number of researchers, designer-makers and small companies are engaging with environmental improvement by design at product and systems levels. Environmentally friendlier fashion of this calibre has become increasingly visible to a more general (fashion interested) audience through shows and exhibitions dedicated to a theme of sustainability. On the other hand a huge and rapidly expanding field of mass-market, fast fashion (at its best and as prompted by legislation, NGO’s, consumer pressure and the media) is engaging with environmental improvement focused on the process stages of the fashion product’s lifecycle but, in the main, not addressing the system.
While the above are highly positive developments, they do not constitute the systemic approach needed to reverse the alarming effects of a consumerist and producerist society. Moderate environmental improvements are easily eaten up by the astounding scale and speed of fashion; H&M alone handles over half a billion goods per year. Therefore, environmental improvement at systems level in the mass-market segment of the fashion industry is urgent.
This paper discusses findings from an empirical study, which formed part of a PhD project The Lucky People Forecast, Design Department, Goldsmiths College, the central question of which was how a futures perspective may empower environmental improvement at systemic level in the fashion industry’s mass-market segment. During spring 2006 a series of creative workshops with mixed stakeholder groups from the fashion industry took place in the UK and Sweden on the theme of alternative paradigms for fashion. The workshops generated scenarios for mass-market fashion in year 2026 and explored aspects such as user experience, retail outlets, emerging technologies, innovative products and services – all from within a framework of sustainability.
Building on the scenarios, this paper critiques and offers alternatives to the current highly specialised organisation of fashion companies, and the predominantly operational role of fashion designers that, it argues, constitutes an obstacle to sustainable innovation that a more open and varied knowledge ecology might support. The paper discusses:
- How mixed stakeholder working groups can enable idea generation into new and rich territories and be empowering for professionals;
- How metaphors can be used to unlearn stereotypes and spur creativity;
- How cultural probes can be used to access professional/personal value discrepancies.