Fashion Forward: Let’s Talk Fashion with Conscience

The “Fashion Forward: Let’s Talk Fashion with Conscience” event was held on Monday 5^th June. This was organised in collaboration between Royal Holloway University of London and Lancaster University, with support from the Academy of Marketing. It was held at a beautiful venue hosted by Regent’s University London. This was an exciting event designed to bring together fashion enthusiasts, industry experts, and technology innovators to discuss the intersection of sustainability, emerging technologies, and data sharing in the fashion industry.

In the first half of the event, panel sessions took place which included presentations by representatives from both academia and industry talking about how these issues come together and what the big challenges are in this space.

These panel discussions each focused on a specific topic related to the impact of fashion on sustainability from the perspective of fashion branding, data sharing, and trends and analytics in sustainable fashion.

In the second half, Imagination Lancaster’s researchers Naomi Jacobs and David Perez ran an interactive session using speculative design approaches to explore and experiment with the main insights from the morning session. In the workshop participants were asked to imagine possible futures, and their positive and negative implications.

As an outcome from this activity, the group proposed three potential ‘fashion futures’ with draft speculative prototypes. These ideas, which are neither utopian nor dystopian but suggest a possible path forward, will help us consider ethical questions which arise from the use of new technology in relation to sustainable fashion. The next stages of work will involve developing these co-created prototypes further to create design fiction provocations that will be taken forward to the next phase of the project.