Anchita Potumanchi

What Would You Wear?

 

A sustainable fashion project that attempts to rethink the current system of rapid cyclical change of trends in fashion that is the driving force behind so much of the industry’s wasteful and unsustainable practices and imagines what it’d be like to live in a world where this system did not exist. Somewhere we could dress as we pleased, without restriction or fear of judgement and mockery: what would we wear? The question is dealt with in a speculative sense, on the basis of existing research on sustainable fashion: by creating a forecast on what the future of slow fashion will be and resulting in a design collection. The same question is also posed to the general public in the form of a social media challenge inviting people to take part in a cultural probe that is aimed at helping them reconnect with and rediscover an emotional connection to their clothing. The result of both the cultural probe and the secondary research for the collection informs us that there are likely 4 major possible directions of sustainable fashion evolution in the distant future and that in a world without trends or set rules of dressing to determine what is and isn’t socially acceptable, people are likely to dress for:

1) Nostalgia

2) Self-Expression

3) Ethnicity

4) Sustainibility and Technology.

The Looks presented in the speculative design collection, unlike the garments of a traditional fashion collection, are a physical representation of these abstract concepts of clothing in the future. The project ended with a Virtual Exhibition as a way to display the entries of the participants of the online challenge and the speculative design collection.