Future Humanity Systems- Making Good(s) and the Future Fashion Factory part 1
Thought this week
“To pursue an unwavering goal is to disarm the unknown. We don’t waste time trying to predict what may come nor bend our strategies around what currently is. Our vision of a thriving future acts as a compass that both steadies us through uncertainty and reduces the uncertainty outright.”
Statement of Intent
Innovators tend to see the world from a big-picture perspective, bypassing incremental progress to reimagine possibilities across industries and society.
Many of us here (in this amorphous space between my desk and your screen) share visions of a radically different future for the style industry and broader creative fields.
Many of us here share an interest in regenerative futures in all that they mean for the people, all living species and our planet. Join the regeneration as the RSA states.
The Futuring Dispatch series (my newsletter if you’re reading and wondering what I’m referring to) I have been crafting for you was spurred by my February keynote at Source, Europe’s leading responsible sourcing tradeshow.
I intended to publish swiftly an edit with 3 out of the 12 macro trends of Fashion Futurology – macro trends redefining the future fashion factory. I assumed this would be fairly straightforward.
This is still what is about to happen. But many years of including this topic in forecasts, speculative works, guest lectures and keynotes, let alone my 12 years as a fashion designer and months spent at factories in China, Europe and the USA, have made this subject feel full of weight.
More importantly, we have very little time to address the climate crisis.
Although much game-changing innovation is underway, diving into the Future Fashion Factory (meaning industry - supply chains - manufacturing - next-gen materials) holds immense tension between the progress and stasis we still all experience as we fight to make sustainable fashion the norm.
The Future Fashion Factory touches on a web of human life, from farming to raw materials to labour, design, community, technology to what we wear on our backs and how all of this seeps into our ecosystems, from our bodies to our planet. It’s-a-lot.
Paired with the good, is a lingering systemic paralysis in how we fix the fashion industry, which we can’t seem to shake off.
In getting to grips with the complexity of the times we live in, we need to identify the root obstacles in manifesting a regenerative future on a faster and larger scale.
This, as humans working in and around fashion futures, is part of the difficult work we must undertake and be very strategic about, even if it will take a lifetime and beyond.
I define the field of fashion futures as the tentacular fashion foresight world ranging from agencies to consultants to journalists to influencers.
This nebulous media / consulting / innovation / design / marketing / strategy apparatus shapes the systems we deem ‘normal’ to live in.
Why focus on the Future Fashion Factory?
”90% of a fashion garment’s emission happens at the manufacturing stage. If the fashion industry is to become sustainable that has to happen in fashion manufacturing”
- Brooke Roberts Islam in Fixing the Fashion Industry Through AI and Social Innovation By Clean Cut TV.
This quote by Brooke Roberts Islam says it all. How can we make the case for how transformational manufacturing, supply chains and fashion factory systems could be for our communities, workforce, environment, technology, and economies?
As a futurist, I do not specialise in the future of fashion factories and manufacturing. I specialise in:
Future Humanity Systems:
Transforming Culture, identity and Technology in the Age of Regeneration.
There is a groundswell of innovators hard at work. Thousands - way too many to list - embody the connective tissue to how we get to make regenerative futures a reality. I hope the way I include my selection in future scenarios will do them justice.
We are perfectly positioned to revolutionise more than how we make fashion good(s).
It’s about how we live. Questions around commerce, society, climate and culture are at stake. This is the most exciting conversation to be immersing ourselves in and advocating for.
Fashion’s relevance is infrastructure. It no longer is culture.
The fashion players with the real power to drive change and innovation:
The manufacturers and suppliers.
The next-gen material, engineering and design innovators.
The communities and people holding our ancient wisdoms.
The organisations and people working in infrastructure.
Those planning for a circular economy future.
The infrastructure of the fashion industry is the hardest yet most sure way to transform the fashion system into the regenerative fuel for life it can be.
Yesterday, the book launch of Materials & Sustainability by Julia L Freer Goldstein and Paul Foulkes-Arellano was a potent reminder of a few things though.
One - how transformative the field of manufacturing is yet how much more attention it needs from cultural producers and the fashion futures space.
Two- Colour, Material, Finish Designer, Editor & Author Laura Perryman pointed out that, unlike many other industries, fashion has regenerative and circular innovations on its radar, far more than we realise. We've come so far as an industry.
The fashion supply chain, manufacturing and factories address the interconnected needs of people, communities, workers, businesses, and the environment.
But as an industry, what is our perceived relevance vs our real influence?
We are not on the radar of the most attended future foresight talk at SXSW, if not one of the most anticipated in the world. The Fashion industry is not being taken seriously in terms of its impact on global economic infrastructure, policy and innovation. We do not have a seat at the table. The creative and fashion industry is not seen as a whole sector that matters.
We fail to realise our Infrastructural Clout is just as important, if not more important than our Cultural Clout. We’re stuck, and we are also to blame for this, in a stereotype that we’re just good for aesthetics.
Fashion is one of Steward Brand’s 6 Pace Layers for a society to function cohesively because it is so closely related to commerce and infrastructure.
“Thus the churn at the fastest level, fashion/art, is governed most by the pace of commerce, which is itself constrained by the pace of infrastructure (education, science, etc.), which is in turn regulated by the pace of governance.
- Defuturing the image of the future by Andrew Blauvelt
3 Futures / 9 lenses
In Fashion Futurology – macro trends redefining the future fashion factory I unpacked 12 key macro trends.
This Futuring Dispatch Series series will go deeper into 3:
I Trust You Systems
Agency of Governing Interspecies
Human Transition Industries
Here are the 9 threats and opportunity lenses:
End of Plenty
Future of Work
Power Dynamics & Legislation
The Future of Cities and Infrastructure
Regenerative Leadership
Resource Allocation and Fabrication
Living Within Our Planetary Boundaries
Next-Gen Technologies and Materials
Supply and Logistics for Fluctuating Demand
The goal of this series:
This series serves fashion, regenerative futures and post-growth thinking. This is not a series on automation, AI, how to drive profit, or digital fashion. It is a series mentioning all of those things in the service of: regeneration.
We are not only one of the biggest industries but one of the biggest polluters in the world. Therefore the more we change our outdated systems, the more we serve the greater good of our planet, living systems and people.
Furthermore, as an industry, we don't have agency in the futures currently being built. We do not have a seat at the table with other industries dictating big moves.
The strategy is to further connect us with our power to shape infrastructure. Our key is how we shape culture. It is through culture, legislation and information that people feel safe enough to welcome new infrastructure.
World Building Futures
World building is the framework I use, created in 2022 for Trend Atelier. Traditionally world building is known as the practice of creating imaginary worlds in science fiction and gaming.
I believe that worldbuilding can be more than creating fictional worlds. As we find ourselves within structures and narratives that don't work anymore in our everyday realities, the act of imagining new worlds is a pragmatic imperative.
Futuring + Learning Hybrid
This is the foresight and learning pathway I'm planning for the series:
BRIEF PRIMER ON OUR CURRENT STORY. To establish our sense of place, present or historical.
POSSIBLE FUTURES/ WILD CARD. The future context is not the same as the present. Think of a big difference, not an amplified version of the present.
THE SIGNALS. These futures are already in transit, happening and will at some point arrive at their destination.
A WORLD BUILDING GUIDE. An activity from the World Building framework created at Trend Atelier. This part brings the educational component to go from reading a forecast to experiencing a transformation.
Making Fashion Good(s)
Before I go and rejoin you soon with these Futures I've just previewed, Imagine if the number ONE viral hype on TikTok was a new material? Are you out of your mind? Yet kids in the 1950s USA all wanted to be astronauts.
Fashion factories and supply chains? Not a juicy ‘future of’ fashion sound byte.
How can we make fashion good(s) and systemic change the central cultural conversation, not limited to the many trailblazers and insiders who've been doing the work? There's coverage. But not enough.
At a time when we as foresight professionals and cultural producers in the fashion futures space are increasingly invested in creator economy mechanics of subscribers and likes, it’s particularly important to harness our power to advocate vs distract.
We are compelled to tether our publishing and reporting to the hot topics of the day, encumbered with the hypercycle. Let's not.
This plunges fashion ever increasingly, like a series of microaggressions, into irrelevance, because the focus is not on systems and infrastructure.
That is the fascination with AI. It is rewriting the very architecture of how we live and work.
The OS of what matters in the fashion cultural conversation needs a reboot.
As always, I would love to know your thoughts and what you’re interested in at the moment. send me a message and don’t forget to subscribe to The Futuring Dispatch, my Newsletter for Creatives Seeking Emergent and Regenerative Future Foresight.
By Geraldine Wharry