The Fashion Futuring: a Sustainable Paradigm for The Time to Come

This paper aims to investigate the stories that fashion tells about its imagined future. It intends to identify and analyse the “futuring” discourses that are emerging as a possible way forward for fashion by taking into account the contact zones between critical thinking, environmental activism, and history. The purpose is to show the significant role that “futuring” and speculative fiction could play in redirecting fashion, and, broadly speaking, in reimagining fashion itself. The research would like to overcome the dominant identification of fashion with its own industry and to open up a different interpretation of inventions, fantasies, and alternate history beyond the promotional and heritage-related purposes of fashion design and communication. By doing so, it aims to challenge the dominant dualistic understanding of fashion as an unrealistic fantasy for a real industry, and to point out some possible aims for designers and fashion thinkers. In order to achieve the above-mentioned purposes, the research relied on “what if?” as a key methodological tool. This allowed the achievement of two major outcomes. The first is that speaking about fictional histories proved to be an effective tool to identify and understand current and actual issues, such as the precarity of the fashion designer vis-à-vis Artificial Intelligence, and the precarity of the real garments vis-à-vis the digital. The second is the role that speculative fashion plays in rethinking the idea of history, for example finding a counterhistory of European fashion to overcome the narrative of the big brands and the cliché of glamour and beauty. The research originality lies in its effort to experiment futuring and speculative methods to fashion, whose theory is still lacking in this regard.