Workshopping a New Fashion System by Knowledge Exchange

There are immeasurable barriers to shifting our current corrupt fashion industry to a sustainable and socially equitable system. These barriers come in all different shapes and sizes ranging from unbalanced business models, a lack of time in an ever-faster industry cycle, paralysing eco-anxiety and business-as-usual mindsets. As practitioners within fashion and sustainability, the Knowledge Exchange team are faced with tackling these industry barriers and finding ways to work through them to be a catalyst of change with our industry collaborators.  

In our partnerships with fashion brands, we set out to raise awareness of sustainability concepts, ideate innovative solutions, and foster a shift in the industry. In these collaborations we see creative and progressive ideas and meet inspiring and passionate sustainability practitioners. However, we also see the micro and macro barriers that mean that a radical and necessary shift is not happening.  

For the CSF: Imagining Possibilities Festival, we wanted to create a unique space for our sustainability peers in UK fashion companies to face these immense issues with equally immense ideas. We wanted them to acknowledge the industry’s faults, but put these aside and instead collectively explore revolutionary ideas to unlock potential. The workshop enabled participants to relieve their mind of the fashion status quo that serves as a barrier to progression.  

To do this, we created a workshop to reimagine the fashion industry into a completely new paradigm in an alternative world.  Participants confronted our current hierarchical systems, set aside the barriers to change and contemplated the journey towards planetary equilibrium. We explored the work of Donna Harraway’s Children of Compost and used her Speculative Fabulation approach to create individual fashion systems based on participants’ own values.  The workshop used an explorative building exercise and discussion to create an environment for exploration, imagination and hope. In the exercise there was a series of questions to help design and create holistic and realistic worlds.  

As a result, everyone created a new fashion system set in an alternative world. The fashion systems were designed with their own, visual language, fibre cultivation methods, product life cycles and cultural fashion practice. These systems were situated in their fully realised worlds with their own value systems, economies, infrastructure, government structures, cultures and aesthetics that supported the fashion system. Together we shared our new visions with each other. These wildly varied within themes including technology, aesthetics and operations however they did all have similarities.  

In every world and fashion system there were four common aspects. They were… 

• Localism – every universe had their fashion system embedded into local culture, practice and infrastructure.  

• Overconsumption and production – were addressed in every world, with all reducing to responsible levels.  

• Nature – they all had a strong connection to the environment. Nature was imperative to the success of the world and its value.  

• Equity – they all shared themes of social fairness that were embedded throughout the value chain of fashion.  

We did not ask participants to create the most sustainable or ethical system possible. We only asked them to design a fashion system in line with their own values, beliefs, imagination and expertise. As a result, we got a wide range of diverse visions, all with the necessary ingredients to create a functional and resilient fashion system. 

Going forward, we have developed this into a workshop series called Shifting to Shift.  In the series this workshop sits between one on finding hope in the climate crisis and a road mapping workshop for the future.  These workshops are designed to support brands in taking more radical and practical steps towards a more sustainable future. We hope the impact of the workshop series results in more confident, imaginative and decisive action in the face of climate injustice.  

As an industry, we need to use radical imagination, speculative design and world building to give us the confidence to shift to a new, unknown, fashion paradigm. Together we can work towards a hopeful future, rather than working blindly away from an unfit-for-purpose fashion industry. We should see through the man-made barriers to change, and instead seeing the infinite possibilities that a new world could hold for us.