'Rewilding Futures' emphasizes the importance of integrative ecological thinking and radical imagination in foresight, design, innovation, and business, whilst proposing emergent foresight models.

When I first began working on Rewilding Futures, I never anticipated the immense interest it would generate. It has been featured at events such as the Futures Perspective Conference, The Future of Product Design Conference, leading universities, and most recently, the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum. The mainstream fashion industry publication WWD even referenced one of the core ideas, ‘The Planet is the Client,’ in the title of this recent article.

The response has been incredible, growing from a seed essay I wrote in a 2021 essay. And I think this is because Rewilding Futures comes at a time when the creative industries, especially fashion, media and marketing, are having a reckoning with the fact we've built a culture of information and physical consumption completely incompatible, not only with our planet's operating system, but with our creativity operating system as well.

The ideas shared at the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum hosted by European House Ambrosetti and its Think Tank could have been received as too niche, but following my presentation on 'Rewilding Futures' and its implications, I received an overwhelmingly positive response from a diverse audience that included policymakers, financiers, designers, and various stakeholders across the supply chain.

There is incredible openness to systems change in the fashion industry, even as sustainability commitments are being rolled back across industries.

Make no mistake. Change is happening.

To bring some further context, the Italian Fashion and Luxury industry generates 100 billion euros in turnover, providing employment for over 500,000 individuals across 60,000 companies. The Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum is dedicated to the sustainable transition of the fashion supply chain, bringing together the companies all along the supply chains from materials to brands, to identify the priority challenges, and indicate an agreed roadmap of change.

The assessment at the forum:

• The fashion industry is in crisis, the problems are systemic.

• The priority is Re-generation, the roadmaps and innovations were at the centre of every event.

Here is the replay of Rewilding Futures (20 minutes).

By Geraldine Wharry