Fashion Fictions: imagining sustainable fashion worlds

全球化的时尚和纺织业与地球生命支持系统的破坏密切相关，在服装生命周期的每个阶段都会产生负面的环境和社会影响。近期工业举措带来的渐进式改善被服装产量和消费量的急剧增长所掩盖。相比之下，“后增长”的时尚方式将在地球支持生命的能力范围内发挥作用，要求在全球北方毫不妥协地减少75%至95%的资源使用。为了实现这一目标，我们必须超越设计、制造和处理的具体战略——这仍然是公众、专业和学术界关注的焦点——重新构想整个时尚体系。这项研究旨在通过将人们聚集在一起，产生、体验和反思对另类时尚文化和体系的引人入胜的虚构愿景，从而影响和激发新兴的后成长时尚运动。集体思考的参与性过程有三个阶段的结构，第一阶段邀请研究人员和外行提交简洁的书面概述，在这些世界中，虚构的历史节点导致了熟悉但又陌生的可持续文化和系统。在第二阶段的原型工作坊中，不同的参与者群体将增加这些虚构的选择的复杂性，而第三阶段的“日常着装”项目将看到参与者表演地制定四种原型文化和系统。这些活动将产生丰富的数据供分析，允许考虑虚构世界中的物质和社会实践。将收集与小说相关的历史或当代现实世界的例子，以突出可持续时尚的隐藏灵感来源，并确定可以有效应用于想象中的文化和系统的理论和见解。虚构世界的故事和研究结果将传播给三个目标群体：研究人员、专业从业者和对可持续发展和时尚感兴趣的外行人。参与者创造的原型，以及通过四个创意委员会开发的引人入胜的视频、文本和视觉内容，将支持与广泛受众的世界交流。传播活动包括一本学术书籍，在诺丁汉城堡举办展览和相关活动，以及与未来地图集合作的在线传播，这是一个促进人们和项目努力创造更美好世界的平台。两篇会议论文和一篇期刊文章将针对学术读者。该项目还通过在线原型工作室和开放的“衣橱挑战”，为人们创造了探索自己的另类时尚世界的机会。一个国际网络将支持在高等教育背景下开展的相关项目，而指南将使人们能够举办自己的时尚小说讲习班和活动。该项目在时尚和可持续性领域以及设计人类学、投机设计和体验未来的交叉学科之间建立了富有成效的联系。它还将与时尚理论和历史相关的细微文化理解与生成设计主导的时尚和可持续性研究联系起来。这种研究后成长思想的新方法将重塑学术界、专业人士和公众对可持续时尚可能性的理解，从服装设计和制造的渐进变化到塑造我们身份的根本不同方式，从而对该领域做出有影响力的贡献。随着持续的全球流行病扰乱了时尚产业，并引发了关于采取类似激烈行动应对气候紧急情况的辩论，这项研究尤其及时。

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.