The Future Fashion Expo
The Future fashion expo is a project that explores alternative perspectives on fashion. Having worked as a designer within the fashion industry for a number of years, as well as running my own brand, I wanted to explore ways that we can interact with clothing outside of the rigid retail model. A series of participants were engaged in idea workshops where they were invited to reconsider how fashion could look using economic models, speculative design and sci-fi prototyping. Completed as part of my final masters project, the outcomes of the research are visualised through 3 digitally modelled virtual reality spaces. The project can be viewed further down this page and the accompanying dissertation is available in the link below.
The spaces and website were created entirely by myself, using Modo, Adobe Suite and Pano2VR
What if fashion was more than buying clothes, can we re-imagine it’s future?
The current fashion system is failing us. The constant pressure to buy clothes is inconsistent with our growing awareness of the environmental and social impacts fashion has. But perhaps there is another way. What would fashion look like if we focus not on fashion as a commodity, but on the deeper reasons we connect with it?
Based on participant led research, The Future Fashion Expo brings together three digitally imagined rooms that do just thist. Each room looks at a different set of themes associated with fashion, from community and sharing, to self-expression and nostalgia. There are so many ways we can look to re-imagine fashion, and the ideas in these rooms are just the beginning.
Each room in the Expo sits within a different future scenario. The Expo is an ongoing project with the aim of adding more rooms to this diagram in all manner of scenarios – political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, positive and negative.
The Department Store of Dreams imagines how fashion might look if it were based on community, up-skilling and co-creation. With many high street stores empty, could these spaces be reclaimed not as retail opportunities, but as fashion communities? Spaces that involve visitors in all aspects of the birth, life and death of a garment. From weaving, dyeing, and printing of fabric, to pattern cutting, sewing, styling, upcycle and repair.
This room is a showroom designed by the fictitious fashion company MYKEA. MYKEA understand that fashion is personal, it is a source of self expression that mass produced fashion cannot cater to. They realise that by producing clothes designed to fit the ‘average’ person, many bodies are excluded. MYKEA’s inventions show how fashion can intergrate into our lives, giving the power back to people to design and create their own clothing, and to have fun whilst doing so!
All of the inventions MYKEA produces are designed to be repaired easily and can be taken back by the company at the end of their life.
In this room, Big Tech have teamed up with fashion companies in a bid to make fashion more sustainable. Set in a world with increasing awareness and restrictions on the amount of clothing we are allowed to produce, consume and dispose of, how far would you be willing to go to continue your shopping habit? On display are some are some of the solutions big tech has come up with.