In recent years, the frequency of the word transformation has risen quite dramatically. Now it’s one of the 5000 most common words used in modern written English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; its frequency is similar to ‘hill’ and ‘weapon.’ These are both universally recognised terms, in languages around the world. ‘Hill’, a naturally occurring and sometimes hard-climb wonder and ‘weapon’, a predominantly human (plus occasionally ape) made means to curtail or harm. Transformation, however, is not universally understood, or recognised and its usage, at least in the fashion and sustainability discourse, tends to hold a promise that is loosely defined around a future state of society and business. Transformation, it seems, is something that we will achieve, by a certain time, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and Net Zero. But transformation is not a future event; transformation is a present activity, as every decision we make, and we make them multiple times each day, as activity in ever moving systems, affects those systems and relationships within them. This ability for present activity to change us beyond recognition gives us hope that all things are possible, with intention.
In the now widespread discourse of fashion and sustainability, there is a need to talk about intention. In many cases, it is to solve problems relating to the symptoms of fashion’s mess of exploitation and extraction and modernity and consumer capitalism, and other manifestations of a bigger systems mess called the Anthropocene. The intention being to smooth out the bumps in the fashion road, such as shortages of supply due to climate and social issues, and reputational risk problems potentially affecting sales, to get us back on the fashion road, lined with novelty and signposting us each to our own individual utopias. We are experiencing through our work, that stepping beyond awareness raising of the symptoms and risks of modern day, neoliberal capitalism, and that imagining possibilities of fashion otherwise than this state of play, involves striding uphill with the wind against us. It requires commitment and passion. It can be emboldening, exhilarating, and challenging, and it feels like the only thing that makes sense to us now.
In April this year, in reference to Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) frameworks, where the context is living systems and we are one of many interdependent life forms, the members of the Centre made a decision. It manifested through CSF’s three day festival, LCF Fashion Undressed: Imagining Possibilities, to shift our sights from awareness raising about fashion’s harms (although we still have important work to do here) and ideas that could fix fashion (here too, we continue to push at the edges of what we are asked to help solve) and to focus on the skills and capabilities of imagining and realising fashion otherwise. To practice interdependence – and to do so through practices of care, creativity, design.
Seeing transformation as a daily earth and equity first practice, requires tenacity. There is little apparent incentive to walk into the wind and up the gradient. As Bayo Akomolafe reminded us of when he joined us at our Imagining Possibilities Festival, consumerism is a monster that invites us in, feeds us, offers us membership, but only as long as we abide by its terms. Only as long as we keep it alive, even though feeding it is bleeding us dry. But the monster is all that most of us know. The well-used phrase that, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism’, seems very near to reality. There has never been a more important time to dream. And, as researchers, designers, practitioners, citizens, we have the ability to do so, if we have the right conditions. There has never been a more important time to recognise each other and to recognise ourselves, our own oversights and our power. Through our methods, frameworks, practices and habits, we recognise the value of imagining possibilities.
This sense of creating otherwise than anthropocentric logic, is not to create binaries between what is right and wrong, fault and fix, good and bad. Life just isn’t that simple. We are not that fixed and, despite the norms of reductionist, mechanistic, industrial societies, we cannot be categorised in singular terms. I hear the words, ‘we need to break down the silos of (insert …this company, this department, this university…as appropriate)’ all the time. At the same time, the Centre sometimes struggles to be understood in its multiplicity. Our subject of inquiry is us, as fashion wearers, makers, designers, photographers, creatives and all. We develop capabilities, knowledge and agency in those we teach, research, practice and learn with. The materials and products of fashion are the conduits, not the subjects, of our ambitions to grow relationships, based on respect, trust and curiosity. We believe that this is the true basis of innovation, to recognise each other differently. The multiplicity of our strands of enquiry also distinguishes us, nourishes us and buoys us.
As a research, education and knowledge exchange centre, we are still unrecognisable in our whole. But it is in and across these areas of co-learning that we find ways in which cultural, ecological, social and economic thriving can co-exist and benefit all. This mutuality is our power. It creates a genealogy of multidirectional practices, that explore ways to live well together through a range of perspectives and positions that are cross-generational, cross-sector, cross-scale, cross-geographic and cross-disciplinary. Together, we carefully cross borders, whilst understanding the dangers to some and the disparity between those who can freely move and those trapped in danger, of all sorts and kinds. Entrenched in shareholder expectations, vulnerable due to displacement and lack of home, caught up in short-termism, power imbalance, business logic, targets and belief systems.
CSF is a space that has been bringing people together through concern, creativity and collective imagining to transcend, whilst remain cognisant of these tensions, for a long time now. In refugee camps, in classrooms, in design studios, in committee rooms. There is now a great murmuration around the world - look up and you will see it in student projects, in designers’ studios, on factory floors, in some party conference discussions, in unexpected places. Shifting to transformation as present activity, involves braking on some things, stopping others.
It is time to stop perpetuating the crisis by trying to fix fashion using the same logic that caused its ecological, social, cultural and economic problems. Fashion is not static, it is always moving, its direction dependent on intention and perception. Most of the solutions to date are adding to the problems. More innovations, more new models, more new sustainability ideas, leading to simply more. But less is not in the lexicon of the top 5000 words. In fact, ‘less’ appears about three times per one million words in modern written English. It's not appealing. We’ve grown used to ‘more’ being the sign of success. It is our minds that we need to transform. Beyond the expectations of our names and titles, how others see us and how we rate ourselves. Beyond more publications, more funding, more sales, more, more. But there is a huge tension. ‘We’ can take chances, as a group of researchers, designers, tutors, students, people with jobs, in the main, not all secure, but contracts of some kind, and people who have traversed terrain to find places of greater safety than those they have left. People working in roles they can question, with enough agency to explore beyond the confinement of business as usual. Those able to imagine otherwise and test out some of their ideas with likeminded people. Able to consider beyond what is expected of them, beyond what pays them in recognised currency, beyond human-centred benefit. We have a task, to work for that agency, to create space for others to come in.
I live, in the expectations of many, as a material and product maker, a sustainability solutions creator and improvements maker. This is unsurprising, due to my training and long-held practice as a designer, and my role in establishing, evolving and guiding Centre for Sustainable Fashion. And I sometimes wish that it was in these realms that I felt drawn. But it is not. I feel compelled to apply my creative skills to the making sense of things. To create crossings, learnings, interactions. It is through these feelings, perhaps, that the members of the Centre are drawn together. None of us have taken an expected route. We come from a great range of places and backgrounds, life experiences and understandings. We come together through an interest in what lies between things, in transition, in the cracks between things. To look rather than at the monster of consumerism, but monstrous entanglements, previously unimagined. And rather than fixate on the monster, focus on the imagining and creativity that it realises. All is possible. Nothing is singular. Fashion is always responding and demonstrating. It is dependent on others. Whilst it upholds the mantra of individualism, without contact with others, there is no recognition of self.
I am filled with joy not only when I think back on all who have been involved in our projects and us in theirs, over nearly two decades. And when I look around at what is happening right now. Mary Creagh is Minister for Nature, yes! Dian-Jen Lin, co-founder and CEO of Post Carbon Lab and one of London College of Fashion’s (LCF), MA Fashion Futures graduates, is a recipient of Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Award and a Purple Plaque - total respect due. CSF recently launched Governance for Tomorrow, our new multi-phase innovative programme created to address governance in the luxury fashion sector, one of the most powerful yet unexamined means for driving sustainable transformation in the fashion industry.
CSF won the 'Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Sustainability' category at the UK & Ireland Green Gown Awards 2024 for our 'Decolonising Fashion and Textiles: Design for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities' project. We were also finalists in the 'Next Generation Learning & Skills' category, for our Fashion Values sustainability education programme and online courses, and a finalist in the 'Tomorrow’s Employees' category for our Fashion Values x Global Fashion Agenda: Next Gen Assembly programme. Additionally, CSF was a finalist in the prestigious Sustainability Collaboration of the Year category at the PraxisAural KE Awards 2024.
All these things are dreams come true. All demonstrate the transformative nature of fashion. All are ways that joy can turn helplessness into agency. All is possible, with intention and with transformation as a daily practice and the health of our relationships as our barometer.
Comments