Fashion futuring: a methodology for enacting values-driven transitions towards sustainability

In the fashion industry, fashion forecasting is currently the prevailing mode of futures-thinking. As a practice that articulates industry, consumption, and culture, fashion forecasting aims to provide certainty by ‘predicting’ futures to prevent financial losses in an intricate, large-scale market and linear system. While essential for maintaining the status quo of fashion systems, fashion forecasting serves as a cornerstone for the fast-paced replacement of fashion products, disregarding planetary boundaries and humankind’s futures. In a context driven by uncertainty, climate crisis, and erratic societal behaviours, a values-driven, collaborative and less predictive approach is paramount to promoting new ways of being, doing, and thinking futures for fashion. This practice-based doctoral research examines trend forecasting practices within the fashion industry. Drawing on my experience as a trend forecaster, I have reflected on my practice to take a critical position about the mechanisms of fashion and fashion forecasting. This led me to establish the research question: how could I shift or expand trend forecasting practices in fashion to enact a values-driven transition towards sustainable futures? In the search of new knowledge, my journey evolved into four stages: Deep Diving, Reorienting, Floating and Landing. In Deep Diving, through a literature review and in-depth interviews with leading trend forecasting practitioners, I analysed the current state of trend forecasting and its integration in the fashion industry, to establish the theoretical foundations for my future creative explorations. Reorienting was where I expanded my visions and investigated other possibilities and practices to inform the development of an alternative to fashion forecasting, by examining the intersection of futures studies, critical and speculative design, and transition design. Floating was where I experimented with the unknown, through a series of collaborative workshops, experiential tools and approaches to engage people in imagining futures for fashion beyond a commercial focus. Landing was where I settled and built connections between key concepts to lay the ground for my Fashion Futuring practice. As a result, I developed Fashion Futuring – a design-futuring methodology that intersects the fields of design, futures studies, sustainability, and material culture. As an alternative to fashion forecasting, Fashion Futuring articulates reality–fiction, materiality–meaning, pasts–presents–futures, individuality–collaboration, free-spirited imagination and strategic planning, not as oppositional poles but as complementary and interlaced concepts. It investigates how societal values that twinkle in our imaginaries can influence changes in fashion even before finding a solid ground to land and repose. Fashion Futuring relies on our capacity to embrace a transitional posture, a floating state between our convictions and doubts, inviting us to abandon predictive orientations and surrender our imagination into still unthought but flourishing possibilities towards sustainable futures. The Fashion Futuring methodology enables the co-creation of fictional artefacts as a medium to uncover and position uncertainty and shared values for desirable futures at the centre of futures-thinking. I consider the Fashion Futuring methodology is applicable to the field of fashion and the emerging field of design futures. Fashion Futuring bridges imagination and strategy, critical debate and planning for action, culture and systemic thinking. Formed by a set of open-ended tools and a supportive conceptual framework, Fashion Futuring is an invitation to trend forecasters to flip their stances from products to values, fashion-calendars to multi-temporalities, silos to systems, elitisms to collaboration. By focusing on values and allowing space for imagining, Fashion Futuring methodology starts with knowns and connects these to unknowns to explore values that can lead to transitions. This methodology supports fashion forecasters to guide stakeholders (such as clients working in fashion and aligned industries) in seeding a shift in mindset towards sustainability.