Fashion Futuring : rethinking sustainable fashion design

The paper investigates the possibility to re-imagine fashion design in a sustainable direction and to conceive alternatives to the current unsustainable growth of which fashion has been a carrier in recent decades. The paper relies on the emerging design-theory-based concept of “futuring”, which concerns ecology, sustainability, and social innovation. It sets a methodological framework that develops eco-fashion beyond environmental sustainability, and slow fashion beyond the critique of the acceleration of fashion production and consumption. The proposed framework leads into the four directives of Do it Yourself; Future Artisans; Digital Manufacturing; and Industrial Experimentation and allows to encompass initiatives ranging from circular economies to participatory design models and open design. Future research on Italian case studies will test the validity of this framework. The research hypothesis is that there is an Italian design laboratory in fashion, able to prefigure new material cultures and shape the ways we live and interact.