Antifragile - a textile design practice to hypothesise a future scenario for sustainable fashion

Antifragile draws upon my textile design practice to hypothesize a future scenario for sustainable fashion. As a small independent creative practice, I operate within the messy realities of making fashion and textiles in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. This research sought to not only contend with the practical challenges involved in establishing ideals in an imperfect scenario but to establish a practice of designing and articulating alternative values.<br><br>Through a series of practice-based creative projects the research explored surface design interventions as alternative upcycling strategies. The approach hinged on the intention to allow space for ambiguity, complicity and impurity. This opened up a dialogue to consider how best to structure a making practice such that it was relevant and specific to local sustainability issues and fashion production realities. How can a textile design practice preserve craft values across chaotic making contexts.<br><br>Creatively exploring craft-based responses to chaos cannot rely on any plan to restore `order'. `Order' for creative practice relates more accurately to a poetic response that preserves and translates felt impression and emotional tone. Craft's material grammar arises in conceding to agency through the internalisation of the materials and the embodiment of process. Complicity is not an impediment to craft-based practice but rather a necessary and enlivening condition. The projects developed seek to navigate a new creative path subverting and empowering traditional practices with new processes and materials.<br><br>Antifragile was primarily a stance of commitment and suggests an alternative, craft-centric interpretation of sustainability for textile design. It is an active stance which allows practice to remain fluid and open in the face of threatening complexity. The antifragile stance I adopted committed to stay with the trouble, to acknowledge and explore contingency, to adopt a local leanness in terms of material, technique and technology. Textile design in this context was articulated through, and thus committed to, the specifcs of local material sourcing, augmented around available techniques and technologies. An antifragile stance not only accepted these local limits but embraced them as creative provocation, grounding and authentication. An antifragile stance created the conditions to innovate around core sustainability meta issues of speed, technological mediation, material excess and the meaninglessness of un-reflexive simulation.  I committed to integrating mess into my creative practice and found it not only a worthwhile provocation but a flexible and adaptable approach which held up through a degree of integration with existing fashion and textile making systems and formalised critical inquiry.