From the sumptuary laws of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, to our present day understanding of ‘power dressing’, dress codes have been created to promote or preserve authority, status and respect. More recently, this ‘code’ has also come to mean a way of “deciphering” our identity and what we communicate through our clothing. The dress codes likely to emerge from our post-COVID, climate-challenged, digital world will be different from anything we have experienced before, even developing their own form of agency as part of a totally new approach to how we value, use and wear clothing. - Essay by Susan Muncey

As a Futurist, Educator and Designer I work across the Fashion Industry sector in areas as diverse as fashion, beauty, tech, marketing and innovation. When I started out as a full time forecaster in 2011, it was after being a design director and fashion designer for 11 years. At the time my work was about finding new trends to inform new products.

But now the scale of changes happening in the world, and what is at stake when it comes to our planet, is changing the value and need for fashion. And it is forcing us to bring to an end what I have called the ‘Hyper cycle’.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Have you ever thought about the message your clothes send and how your environment shapes what you wear?