This issue marks 10 years of Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design, Creative Process and the Fashion Industry. Over these 10 years, scholars and practitioners have reflected on fashion practice within both small-scale and larger industry and within education. This decade has also marked a growing acceptance that “business as usual” within the fashion industry is no longer tenable from a sustainability perspective. We have tried to address the question of how to educate the next generation of designers and practitioners to facilitate change in the industry from within—in collaboration with industry—but also to disrupt the status quo and lead to systemic change. We have selected manuscripts that address the practice of fashion and the future needs of the discipline and the industry. We believe that fashion research has evolved significantly in the last two decades, evidenced by the expansion in PhD studies and academic journals related to fashion.
To celebrate this publication milestone, we invited contributors from the past 10 years of our journal to submit a commentary on their perspectives on fashion practice. We are so pleased with the many contributions that make up our first article in this issue entitled, “Perspectives on 10 Years of Fashion Practice.” These contributions set the stage for the remainder of the issue, as some look back on the past decade and others focus on the future. We invite you to review these diverse contributions. All reflect the need for reconceptualizing fashion and the practice of fashion, and Fashion Practice will continue to contribute to this end.
The first three papers are “thought pieces” looking toward new futures for fashion. First, Simon Thorogood writes about the need for a new model for creativity in education in his commentary “Shaping Speculation. Experimental Research Spaces, the Knowledge Economy and the Role of the New Fashion Augur.” His premise is that we must find a way to support students to nurture innovation by embracing risk, ambiguity, inconsistency, and the unfamiliar. Academic institutions need to champion their role as risky learning places where experimental fashion education is pursued, and students are allowed, even encouraged, to fail. Students might become new hybrid “fashion augurs” synthesizing information from many diverse sources, identifying radical opportunities and also taking a lead in de-stigmatizing such societal notions as disability and aging. If the fashion industry is to survive, we need educational models that prepare us for possible revolution and an uncertain (but likely digital) fashion future.
Second, Clemens Thornquist, in his paper, “The Fashion Condition: rethinking fashion principles from its everyday practices,” outlines an alternative theoretical perspective in the person-object relationship. He recognizes the prevailing idea of fashion as a system that does not fully recognize the social practices of the user. He maintains that the user’s emotional and inconstant state of mind is significant in maintaining stability in fashion and has potential consequences for thinking about and developing policy. An ontological shift may be possible with a greater focus on understanding and managing change and stability in fashion consumption and developing new perspectives and policies regarding ethical and ecological issues in the different material cultures related to fashion.
Third, Otto von Busch, in his commentary, “Inclusive fashion – an oxymoron – or a possibility for sustainable fashion?” calls for a deeper investigation of what it means for fashion to be inclusive or exclusive. He reasons that we need to be asking questions of inclusion: for whom and for what arena? He uses the example of the infamous door codes of nightclubs to illustrate that the discourse around sustainable fashion often lacks a socio-political perspective and speculates that making clothes cheap and accessible does not necessarily mean wider inclusion, but rather a displacement of the process of rejection. He concludes that designers must leverage this accessibility and experiment with wider communicative interfaces and even decouple fashion from consumerism and materialism: “Designers need to find other ways to use clothing to address the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, self-worth and social status.” The goal for a sustainable fashion practice may well be the ethical distribution of such a social leverage.
The following three papers focus on design practices within fashion and apparel businesses at both small and larger scale. Research entitled, “Partnerships in Practice: Producing New Design Knowledge with Users When Developing Performance Apparel Products” by Kristen Morris and Susan Ashdown explores design knowledge produced by the user of performance apparel. Design professionals who work at performance apparel brands provided detailed accounts describing the context of user involvement and explored the research methods product developers use to produce knowledge with users and the links between practices and knowledge production. They conclude that innovation in performance apparel products that meet or exceed user expectations can occur with collaborations that include both socialization and externalization, emphasizing the importance of users as partners in practice.
Maarit Aakko and Kirsi Niinimaki in “Fashion Designers as Entrepreneurs: Challenges and Advantages of Micro-size Companies” write about the challenges designers face who must be simultaneously designers and entrepreneurs. Interviews with European fashion designers who were considered entrepreneurial indicated the importance of merging design with a multi-layered business and managerial acumen. The freedom offered by establishing an independent fashion business must be pursued with the attendant realization of uncertainty, but also the fulfillment of the dream of expressing creativity through one’s own label.
Jee Hyun Lee, Jiwon Ahn, and Jieun Kim in their paper, “Theoretical competence model of fashion designers in co-designed fashion systems,” examine the role and capacity of fashion designers in the co-design process. In this qualitative research, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with fashion designers working in both general and co-design contexts to develop a theoretical competence model with specific causal, contextual and intervening conditions. This outcome is summarized through a comprehensive analysis of both general and co-design fashion designer competence models that expand to executional competence with design leadership and strategic execution.
Practitioner Ania Sadkowska in “Arts-Informed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: ‘Making’ as a means of embodied fashion enquiry into older men’s lived experiences” proposes an innovative research methodology based upon fashion practice. The methodology highlights the central role of a creative practitioner in developing an in-depth understanding of how a small sample of mature men experience fashion and ageing. She focuses on creating a series of three fashion artifacts for her participants in response to empirical data gathered via in-depth interviews and personal inventories that offered a new perspective. The making processes involved in de-constructing and reconstructing a series of second-hand suit jackets became an analytical tool to afford advanced insights into older men’s lived experiences of fashion and fashionability.
Namkyu Chun and Olga Gurova in their research entitled, “Place-making the local to reach the global: a case study of Pre-Helsinki” summarize the collective efforts of fashion designers and other local actors in the internationalization of Finnish fashion. Semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations provided the data. Analysis of the fashion showcase Pre-Helsinki illustrated how local and global disconnections were addressed in the activities. The research shows how Pre-Helsinki appeared as a reaction to local and global level disconnections in Finnish fashion and how these disconnections were addressed in its activities and ultimately how they could gain recognition within the broader development of the Finnish fashion ecosystem.
A book review and two exhibition reviews complete this issue. Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen reviews Niche Fashion Magazines. Changing the Shape of Fashion by Ane Lynge-Jorlén. Through a detailed study of Danish fashion magazine DANSK, the phenomenon of niche fashion magazines is explored, based on research conducted just before the explosion of social media. Thus, the nature of fashion mediation is revealed and, with echoes of Otto von Busch’s earlier article in mind, insight into the world of the fashion insider.
Over the past decade, major fashion exhibitions have been an increasing success story for museums in many cities including Maison Margiela “20” The Exhibition in Antwerp (2008), Alexander McQueen - Savage Beauty in New York (2011) and London (2015), The Future of Fashion is Now in Rotterdam (2014), Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between in New York (2017), and Christian Dior Couturier du Rêve in Paris (2017). Two contrasting fashion exhibitions recently staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London are reviewed here, both encompassing historical couture and contemporary fashions. Sandy Black reviews Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion (2017–2018), an exhibition celebrating this acknowledged master of pattern cutting known as the “couturier’s couturier” that utilized forensic digital technology to reveal hidden secrets of construction. Demonstrating the legacy and influence of Balenciaga on following generations of fashion designers was a major part of this exhibition. The second V&A Museum exhibition is reviewed by Katherine Pogson. Fashioned from Nature (2018) covers four hundred years of fashion history from the 17th century, tracing the often controversial relationship between fashion artifacts and their raw materials derived from nature. With its crucial agenda to expose the environmental impacts of fashion, this exhibition also explores many contemporary responses (both political and environmental) and presents alternative proposals, engaging the audience in possible future scenarios for fashion practice.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.