Fashion Futures 2025 - the education module

As a fashion student I was heavily influenced by Forum for the Future’s Fashion Futures 2025 report. So influenced in fact that it led me to Forum’s London office this Summer to begin work as a communications intern. Upon arrival I was very excited to hear about the launch of the Fashion Futures education module. Here is my story about how this report inspired me, and how we hope it will do the same for future fashion students.

I have always had an interest in fashion, it appealed to me as an art for the masses, an aesthetic culture accessible for all. At its best it allows expression of identity, individual creativity and can create wellbeing.

When I began to study fashion, however, I became somewhat disillusioned. A closer look at the machine that drives the endless, and sometimes mindless cycles of consumption that characterise fashion revealed the negative impact this industry can have on people and the planet. Inspection of the production process uncovered the vast amount of resources this industry consumes, numerous and continuing cases of exploitation of workers and large-scale pollution of the environment. The systems at play in consumption were shown to fuel a seemingly endless desire for new fashion goods and encourage a throwaway attitude.

I became exasperated with the system, and began to search for a kind of fashion that embraced more positive values. I first sought to engage with the rhetoric around ethical fashion but initially found much of it negative, and perhaps a little condescending.

In my final year, however, I came across Fashion Futures 2025. I found this study truly engaging, I felt it helped to envision how fashion could be setting a more positive agenda. In it I had finally found the place where both my own values and my penchant for fashion met. And it helped to form the starting point for my dissertation, which was shortlisted for the Fashioning the Future Awards 2011.

It is this meeting of sustainable values and fashion that I believe has led to consistent interest in this report from fashion students since its launch in 2010. The new education module, aimed at fashion tutors, will provide all the information, inspiration and materials needed to use the Fashion Futures scenarios as a part of a curriculum. This will help further generations of fashion students to engage with this tool and will hopefully enable them to visualise how a more positive fashion industry could exist in a future where climate change, population growth and resource scarcity will bring about dramatic changes to our world.

You can watch the scenario animations on youtube, visit the education module on facebook or find out more about the education module on the Fashion Futures website.