Fashion Fictions: imagining sustainable fashion worlds

The globalised fashion and textile industry is deeply implicated in the devastation of Earth's life-supporting systems, with negative environmental and social impacts generated at every stage of a garment's lifecycle. Incremental improvements delivered by recent industrial initiatives have been overshadowed by a dramatic increase in the volume of garments produced and consumed.

In contrast, a 'post-growth' approach to fashion would work within the Earth's capacity to support life, requiring an uncompromising reduction in resources used in the global North, of between 75% and 95%. To achieve this, we must look beyond specific strategies for design, manufacturing and disposal - which remain the focus of much public, professional and academic attention - to reimagine the entire fashion system.

This research aims to influence and energise the emergent post-growth fashion movement by bringing people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. The participatory process for collective speculation has a three-stage structure, with Stage 1 inviting researchers and laypeople to submit concise written outlines of worlds in which invented historical junctures have led to familiar-yet-strange sustainable cultures and systems.

In Stage 2's prototyping workshops, diverse groups of participants will add complexity to a selection of these fictions, while Stage 3's 'everyday dress' projects will see participants performatively enacting four of the prototyped cultures and systems. These activities will produce rich data for analysis, allowing consideration of the material and social practices within the fictional worlds.

Historical or contemporary real-world examples which connect to the fictions will be gathered in order to highlight hidden sources of inspiration for sustainable fashion and identify theories and insights that could be usefully applied to the imagined cultures and systems.

Stories of the fictional worlds and findings of the research will be disseminated to three target groups: researchers, professional practitioners and laypeople with interests in sustainability and fashion. The prototypes created by participants, along with engaging video, textual and visual content developed via four creative commissions, will support communication of the worlds to a wide audience.

Dissemination activities include a scholarly book, an exhibition and associated events at Nottingham Castle, and online dissemination in partnership with Atlas of the Future, a platform which promotes people and projects working to create a better world. Two conference papers and a journal article will target academic audiences. The project also creates opportunities for people to explore alternative fashion worlds for themselves via online prototyping workshops and open 'wardrobe challenges'.

An international network will support related projects run in higher education contexts, while how-to guides will enable people to run their own Fashion Fictions workshops and events.

The project forges a productive connection between the field of fashion and sustainability and the intersecting disciplines of design anthropology, speculative design and experiential futures. It also links the nuanced cultural understandings associated with fashion theory and history to generative design-led research in fashion and sustainability. This novel approach to the investigation of post-growth ideas will make an influential contribution to the field by reshaping academic, professional and public understandings of the possibilities for sustainable fashion, from incremental changes to the design and manufacture of clothes to radically different ways of fashioning our identities.

With the ongoing global pandemic disrupting the fashion industry and prompting debate about the pursuit of similarly drastic action to address the climate emergency, this research is especially timely.