On Paper.

It may be argued that the Developed World’s progressive engagement with environmental concerns – a return to locally hand-made, bespoke economics, re-cycling, upcyling, circular economies, or anti-consumerist campaigning and behaviour for example, comes from a privileged Western stance of ‘enlightenment.’ The decision and ability to ‘opt out’ of things may often be an issue of education, or empowerment, or even ‘entitled’ morals and ethics.

Conversely, in some parts of the developing world, there is more of a need to make do with the resources, materials and skills locally available. And, of course, as we are discovering (again), this tells us something about how we might need to exist.

But to take things to extremes, what if there suddenly wasn’t available all the things that fashion has habitually required to ‘exist?’ What if there was no more aesthetic sensibility, no more fabric, no prints or patterns, no design colleges, no pattern-cutters or garment-construction technicians, no photoshop or visualising software, no trend-forecasters, no photography studios, no stylists, no PR, journalists, or influencers, no magazines or online platforms, no catwalks shows, no shops, and crucially no consumer?

However, what is suddenly ‘not there’ will not lead to emptiness or nothing. Neo-liberalism tells us that any ‘vacated’ space is quickly filled up with new opportunity, stuff, enterprise, markets, relevance and culture.

So, precipitous states of nothingness can, in fact, lead to unique states of complexity, whereby new forms of categorization can expeditiously arise, including different types of association, juxtaposition or connection, different types of language, and different types of personnel.  

So, what new perception or experience would fashion propose or expect from us? How would we move forward from a place where fashion might unexpectedly appraise, admonish, quip, yearn, embezzle, agitate, offend, or venerate us differently?

Thoughts down on paper please.

Sustainability Accounting.

Current models of creative education demonstrate a system in which students are perpetually engaged, trained and prepared for professional engagement. But, a question arises as to what happens to these students once they have graduated, or should they change creative direction in later life?

Artists, designers, and creatives of whatever description, often require states of ‘opportunity’ in which to conceptually and commercially operate, where this implicates notions of support, occasion, moment, fortuity, space, liberty, and excuse.

Furthermore, in an age of the evolving ‘gig’ economy, it is expected that many graduates, from different walks of the arts, humanities and sciences, may never know full-time or linear employment, in the way their parents might have.

So, if we accept that creative education is integral to wider education, surely a developed language of ‘opportunity,’ as a dedicated subject of learning and instruction, must be developed within art and design institutions.

If we are increasingly questioning how much fast fashion is produced, the working conditions of factory workers, and issues of landfill waste, etc., then why are we not similarly questioning what happens to graduates once they have been ‘produced?’ And, if we are now expecting fashion brands to take back old or unwanted clothing, do institutions have a corresponding responsibility to ‘take back’ graduates or alumni, to creatively re-train or transform them for new or revised activity?

This is not to say that individuals simply re-enroll for a new course with new tuition fees, but rather where there is formal obligation by the original host institution to provide access to forms of ‘upthinking,’ and programmes of educational enhancement for life.

Self-Awareness Courses.

Design must veer away from a focus on the physical production of products or garments, and instead concern itself with the arousal of awareness that leads to the idea of design.

Forget About It.

Within art and design institutions, there has long existed a debate about what are the important subject areas, skills, competencies, and curriculum of the day. What things are to be pursued, and what are to be discarded?

Correspondingly, a struggle can ensue about the perceived prominence and mixes of criteria, whether that of leadership, pedagogy, location, personnel, or ideas and attitudes, for example. Is the important bit, industry-oriented or vocational teaching, learning core-skills and techniques, questioning the status quo, developing progressive mindsets, dedicated staffing, place of study, or other?

But another, more complex and contentious scenario, could be even if ‘teaching,’ as we currently understand it, is required at all; if grand-gesture places of learning are relevant anymore; or if institutional stewardship should be determined at grass-roots level, rather than by those few atop hierarchical pyramids?

But, where bureaucracy may not be comfortable with conditions of dissension or discord, creativity is necessarily a messy and confused business. As the saying goes, eggs must be broken to make omelettes.

So, let’s consider a shift of focus away from anxieties of order, regulation, and a need to marshal states of knowing, towards creating new, multiple frameworks that harness the potency of turmoil. This may allow organisations and institutions to become creatively ‘amnestic,’ or in other words to act as ‘agencies of disappearance.’

Empowered, rather than impoverished, through a collective loss of memory and practice, places may learn to forget who they were. In turn, this can allow them the necessary liberty and agility to discover themselves and their futures anew or differently.

Total Recall.

The German term Gesamtkunstwerk, which approximately translates as a ‘total work of art,’ has been used to describe any artwork, design, creative output or process where a range of different media employed combines to establish a greater, unified whole.

The composer Richard Wagner would discuss the idea of the ‘consummate artwork,’ arguing "No one rich faculty of the separate arts will remain unused in the Gesamtkunstwerk of the Future".

The concept was developed and applied throughout the 19th and early 20th century, where it became a precept of much modern art practice. Whilst this notion fell out of fashion in the post-modern period, the term has more recently enjoyed a renaissance with regard to multimedia artworks and digital installations, and may also be applied to states of the ‘phygital.’

This can tell us that the pursuance of new creative futures, in practice and research, should be composed of ‘consummates’ of many different forms, types, and expressions. These can involve intriguing mixes of the real and the conceptual, but should reflect a broad spectrum of criteria, agendas, approaches, places and personnel, both familiar and alien.

Such complex and convoluted initiatives may facilitate compelling ‘idea alloys’ that allow us to find ‘undecided futures,’ over more convenient silo-thinking that principally ordains ‘determined futures.’

Experience Economies.

Art is often about artists creating situations in which to have experiences, where the experience is the work.

Therefore why not a fashion designer as someone who creates processes in which to have design experiences, where the experience is the product?

Funny Fashion.

After the Second World War, many UK art schools adopted some of the Bauhaus’s pre-war themes and skills, that were still considered contemporary and provocative.

These included Areas and their Divisions; Planes; Contemporary and Harmonic Shapes; Colour; Analytical Drawing, Modelling and Carved Mass; and Space Penetration and Division, for example. Such programming would go on to underpin much of the radical artwork and thinking of the flourishing 1960’s and 1970’s art scene.

So, what are the radical perceptions and agendas for the future fashion designer that design schools are looking to instigate now? What type of cultural revisionist will their teaching produce, and who are the creative agitators and insurgents challenging and informing progressive curricula?

Answers will likely depend on what kind of questions colleges are asking, where they are asking them, to whom, and of course, why. But, the interesting answers will not come from asking industry. I would argue, that the answer isn’t the interesting bit anyway; the question is.

So, how do design colleges become better at asking questions?  And how do they get better at providing evolving and adaptable ‘recital’ spaces to foster messy yet relevant creative anarchists that will found futures rather than respond to them?

Well, an emphasis on fun is always a good place to start.

Say What?

If we are customarily ‘completed’ through an accumulated sense of knowledge, intellect, empathy, optimism, humour, or dress sense, for example, how might we learn to imaginatively escape or extend our own standards and norms?

How can we create and communicate differently through ourselves, where we are the medium, where we might be saying, “today I am this painting, or this song, or this television programme, or this dream, or this car, or this building?”

Stretch Pants.

The 20th Century avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen routinely engaged in a process of ‘microphonic’ composition.

Microphony can be described as a phenomenon in which electronic equipment or devices transform mechanical vibrations into an undesired electrical signal or noise. It deals with conditions of sound, music, or aural information that is usually too quiet to hear with the human ear, something that is there but not there, and hence only detectable by amplification, or really zooming into the source.

Such a procedure of identifying and synthesizing vibrations as potential elements to be utilised within a composition also allows specific fragments of sound to be stretched out, or compressed, to any desired time-frame. An extended and comprehensive body of music can then be derived from an expanded momentary sound recording.

Can we devise analogous methodologies in which designers only engage with a tiny detail or ‘sequence’ of a garment, rather than being concerned with the whole or completed garment? Can we develop forms of ‘microscoping’ technologies that acutely examine components or structures that may be invisible, too small, or too unremarkable, to recognize otherwise, whereby the microscope becomes a design instrument or tool in its own right?

Making It Up.

If we consider a process of invention in creative disciplines other than fashion, experimental music for instance, we might see that ‘composing’ need not provide precise or prescribed instructions towards specific results, outcomes, or conventional aesthetic configurations.

Composing can establish procedures or systems that enable a diversity of unique objectives and outputs rather than any one particular goal. It is also often a procedure of acting without complete information. Improvisation, then, can allow musicians to arrive at unknown results through enthusiastic exploration, difference and heurism – a process in which people learn and discover for themselves, both independently and collectively.

Fashion can similarly investigate and apply forms of improvisation that may take a design process somewhere it might not go otherwise. Such methodology would not be intended to provide finished or complete garments, artefacts, or even ideas, but as a trigger for incomplete fashion experiences, opportunities, and compositions.

Vintage Clothing.

Historical depictions of dress and apparel conveyed through flat surface does not accurately portray everyday dress of a time, period, or geographical location.

Pre-historic cave paintings, Sumerian wall carvings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Medieval stained glass windows, a Paul Klee Cubist portrait, or even fashion photography of the last 100 years or so, a Lee Miller solarized image for instance, can all register unrealistic, abstracted, imaginary, or stylised representations of dress.

Today’s NFT and digital-only blockchain fashion is no different. This, too, exists as an ideal, is 2-D or screen-based, is conceived to be both traceable and tradeable, but will also diminish or lose popularly as its moment passes.

This can tell us that ‘representation’ does not necessarily convey certainty or truth, whether as silhouette, scale, materiality, texture, or colour. Like literary fiction, we see that ‘described’ clothing or attire does not necessarily convey reality, but rather agency.

Thus, the conceptual state of something remains as fundamental to its integrity as any physical characteristic. Where a garment might depreciate, wane or perish, existence as ‘spirit’ can still endure strongly in the mind, individually and/or collectively.

Fabricating Fashion.

Young children are generally extremely good at inventing imaginative worlds for themselves. As part of their capacity for role playing, they can also be inclined to tell lies in order to orchestrate situations or change narratives so these fit in with their own sensibilities and needs. For children, such ingenuity can establish alleviation, comfort, or control, helping them avoid conflict or trouble, to secure attention from a parent, to invent something they wish were true, to protect privacy, or where they might need to change the nature of a situation otherwise too difficult to handle.

Throughout schooling, in later life and adulthood, we are continually told that lying and forms of deception is unbecoming and wrong, where it can typify evasion, betrayal, or defiance, for instance. But as a means of imaginative world-building, ‘operations of falsifying’ can help nourish perceptual awareness for us. Such ‘thought experiments’ can sustain intuition and inspiration, where acquired knowledge need not rely on academic reasoning or empirical data but is formed as a result of investment in ‘what yet does not exist.’

States of imagining carry implication for how we think, how we engage with others, and how we formulate novel situations. In the realms of philosophy, this condition is variously discussed and debated as qualia (from the Latin ‘quails’), meaning “what kind” of individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

In a fashion context, qualia might signify what it means to wear and experience a particular garment. If we take a WW2 United States Army Air Force AN-J-3a flight jacket, as a specific example, we might consider this garment to be ‘charged’ with history, function and narrative. We can tactually feel the undulations of the jacket’s goatskin, we might detect musty storage smells, we can read details on the woven nomenclature label, we can peer inside the patch pockets, or we can mentally envisage the tribulations of a combat pilot.

Our encounter with the flight jacket will be determined, accurately or otherwise, by what the garment ‘tells’ us, and how we choose to read it. In doing so, we experience what it is like to be experiencing. But, where we initially engage with a perceptible item of clothing, we also experience something profound in the mind, which no amount of purely physical information may afford.

This can tell us that imagining is not a passive or ‘childish’ condition, but rather a dynamic and highly subjective creative activity. Correspondingly, can we discover different ways in which clothes ‘talk’ to us? Can we intently listen to the kind of lies, fantasies, stories, and inventions they might fervidly tell us in order to change a narrative or the nature of a situation, establish alleviation, or invent something they wish were true?

Idea Stores.

The American conceptual and minimalist artist, Sol Lewitt, published his Sentences on Conceptual Art in 1969, which outlined the role of the modern artist as conceiver of ideas rather than maker of things. Where concept is privileged over materiality, the idea is the artwork.

His thinking was instrumental to the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, and the principal objective of the Conceptual art movement to engage the mind of the viewer. Lewitt, and other conceptualists, challenged a long-held notion that the making, physicality or material presence was the central focus of any artwork. He considered that even colour, surface, texture, or shape emphasized the physical prominence of a work, and which would serve as an obstacle to the understanding of an idea.

As per Lewitt’s Sentence Number 10, which stipulated that “All ideas need not be made physical,” can we understand fashion as a medium in which all clothing need not be made physical, nor indeed digital? Can we imagine a scenario where an idea is the garment; where it is made in the mind; where a store or outlet trades in idealism; and where the physical garment itself proves an obstacle to a perception of fashion?

Fashion and Flattery.

Many people would acknowledge the Renaissance period of the 15th and 16th centuries as a significant cultural age, as characterised by such key painters as Raphael or Clara Peeters, for example.

The Renaissance was notable in that it marked a revival in learning, an increased awareness of nature, representations of Humanism, exploration of non-religious themes, and the prominence of the artist as celebrity, where ideas were expressed through skilled application of paint and colour. In many respects, the Renaissance period chimes with the various Humanist preoccupations, environment concerns, social distractions, and opening up of new cultures (the Metaverse, Blockchain and NFT’s, for instance) of our own time.

The paintings of many Renaissance artists were accomplished primarily on surfaces and expanses of board, canvas, or perhaps chapel ceiling – a place where expression, meaning, form and colour became unified on the ‘flat.’ The ‘flat’ is what these painters were good at, and in some regards this is what they had not needed to, or had not known to go beyond.

This understanding of, and adherence to the ‘flat’ is what has since bound many painters and movements together, from the Baroque, to Impressionism, to Cubism, to Minimalism and Perceptual art.

However, key avant-garde movements, expressions, mediums, processes, dimensions or ‘places’ of artwork pursued throughout the 20th Century would go on to contest the dominion of the ‘flat.’ They would lead to the demise and dissolution of the picture frame, plinth or mount, paint and brush strokes, representational objects, the gallery wall, the museum, aspects of time and occasion, and even audiences. These radical revisions and transformations would also serve to extend and abstract the very nature and presence of art and creativity.

So, where much modern art may be distinguished as notably omitting or rejecting aspects of what had defined art previously, can fashion similarly consider what it can radically leave out in order to go beyond the ‘flat?’

Hide and Seek.

William James wrote in The Hidden Self, “The great field for new discoveries is always the Unclassified Residuum.”

If we can understand design practice as implicating advanced insight, awareness and expertise, we may correspondingly experience ‘outcomes’ as agile or fluctuant amalgamations of theory, analysis, process, responsibility, activism, and storytelling. Here, ‘things’ can exist as peculiar expressions of ‘connected affordances,’ rather than as physical manifestations, commodities, or products.

Resulting synergies and interventions might progressively galvanise designers to re-appraise their discipline as a different kind of social and creative activity or experiment, which will demand different types of interdisciplinary learning spaces, tools, methodologies, stakeholders, evaluators, audiences, and epistemology.

One-Off Pieces.

In his Four Quartets, T. S. Elliot wrote “Through the unknown, unremembering gate…,” whereby license to pass through a perceptual portal is granted only through a condition of ‘not knowing.’ In this regard, a desire to know something that one currently does not know becomes an act or process of creative invention in itself.

Correspondingly, can we develop and apply forms of ‘unremembering wardrobes’ for fashion? What would we look like, and how might we dress, if every single time we perused our clothes, closets, or dressers, we simply did not recognise them or understand them at all?

Not only would we endlessly encounter novelty and wonderment through our apparel, we might never need to buy new clothes, instead entirely absorbed and surprised by never-ending ways to wear differently what we already have.

Applied Language Skills.

As one becomes increasingly aware of the descriptive, visual, or conceptual language employed by the discipline one operates within, or across, and as one becomes increasingly literate in the development of one’s own creative or philosophical language, an individual or group may become progressively adept at manipulating and playing with the logic of these languages.

That being so, what new languages are we discovering, making and applying to the perception and communication of fashion practice, and who are the new linguists, translators or interpreters of these languages?

Dressing the Mind.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a notion of the noumenon as a ‘positioned object’ that exists independently of human perception.

Kant argued that human comprehension is structured through ‘concepts of understanding’ that are found prior to experience in the mind, and which then links any external experience to internal attributes of the mind. He proposed, that whilst noumena ‘exists,’ it is also a condition that is essentially unknowable – an abstruse "thing-in-itself." 

Where, noumena is formulated in the mind, it becomes intrinsic to human creativity, and within any process and experience of imaginative conception.

Correspondingly, can we develop and promote fashion as a discipline increasingly formed in the mind, as an attitude that can produce expressions of ‘unknowable design,’ and leading to strange or different manifestations of ‘design phenomena’ as output, product, or space?

Clothing and Separates.

Creativity often involves acting upon or extending our heroes, inspirations and influences. So, where we engage in any process of ‘following-up,’ we may be characterised as ‘sequelists.’

However, to be regarded a ‘prequelist,’ we need to exercise detachment and difference that will allow us to escape our revered sources, references and places of persuasion in order to find creative discrepancy elsewhere.

Occasional Wear.

If much contemporary art or music tells us that the act of conceiving can be about creating occasions for something ‘charged’ to happen, can fashion similarly engage with the idea of creating fleeting or momentary occasions for clothes to ‘happen?’