By Hannah Lauren Riley
March 04, 2025
This article is a contribution from Next Gen Assembly 2024 Member, Hannah Lauren Riley.
Imagination, play, and speculative futuring are pivotal practices in responding to the ecological and climate crises and aiding just transformations to more equitable, sustainable futures. They are tools which can be utilised to engage in economies and cultures of wellbeing in and through fashion, for individuals and industry. Our imagination is one of our most powerful tools as humans and, ‘an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic and cultural well-being,’ according to Michele-Lee Moore, Director of Transdisciplinary Education and Deputy Science Director at Stockholm Resilience Centre, and Manjana Milkoreit, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oslo’s Department of Sociology and Human Geography.Yet we have not been imaginative enough in the midst of global climate collapse, ecosystem breakdown, and rising inequality and oppression. Moore and Milkoreit attest there has been a ‘triple failure of the imagination’ in our inability to transition towards just futures for all. These ever-urgent, colossal challenges are manifestations of the current systems that pervade our world and our lack of reimagining and enacting otherwise.The current dominant fashion system contributes to the detrimental deep narratives in culture, society, politics and economics.
The pursuit towards material growth, extracting and consuming with acceleration, is having a devastating impact on our planet and those living on it. The fashion industry must significantly reduce its material outputs and excessive consumption practices to stay within planetary boundaries. Imagining and adopting a more equitable and inclusive understanding of growth is crucial for our ecosystem’s survival.
Moreover, fashion needs a holistic values transformation. We need to truly value the earth from which our clothing comes from and the people who make our clothes. Rather than perpetuating exploitative power structures, fashion needs to practice collective care and reciprocity. We need to recognise the rippling, powerful impact fashion has and utilise its potency for fostering worlds that value inclusivity, revitalisation, and regeneration.
Shifting focus from the material to the experience can help us realise fashion’s vitality, de-emphasising consuming the physical. Otto von Busch, Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design contends, ‘we can be fashionable; it is about being, rather than having, a fashion-ability’. But how can we transform our mindsets, behaviours and the deeper structures from which the soil of our society grows? Imagination plays a significant role in this wider scope of experiential re-engagement with our clothing personally and the fashion system more broadly. Additionally, inner dimensions and transformations, meaning shifts in consciousness, emotional capacities, values and beliefs, are needed for effective education for sustainability and transitions towards more sustainable futures.
Imagination is more than just about creating new ideas – it is about an ability to envision beyond our everyday realities and seek transformation at a personal and systems level. It involves embodied sense-making, speculative futuring through ideating alternative worlds and future possibilities, and practicing diverse, experimental play and creative learning methods. If we embrace our imagination in its widest capacities, utilising critical thinking, engaging curiously and playfully, we can speculate, generate ideas, questions and worlds that are focused not on today or yesterday, ‘but rather what we can imagine for a range of tomorrows’. Speculative thinking and imaginative play are potent tools which augment people’s sustainability understanding and encourage criticality of our prevailing damaging systems. Engaging with speculative learning and play methods, integral imaginative practices, are crucial in developing ecologically-safe futures.
The 2024 Next Gen Assembly cohort developed the Wellbeing Spiral as a tool to re-envision how fashion can value economies of wellbeing. The Wellbeing Spiral Playbook elucidates this unique framework that emphasises the iterative, reflexive, and deeply personal nature of systemic transformation. By centring the interconnected stages of Unlearning and Relearning, Ideating and Shifting, the Wellbeing Spiral holistically guides individuals and organisations in reimagining fashion by valuing wellbeing through actionable tools and insights. The Spiral is just one of the myriad, diverse alternative frameworks that challenges the dominant fashion system, aiming to advance climate, social and racial justice and transition towards just worlds.
By harnessing our individual and collective imagination we can challenge and transform the predominant pernicious fashion system, instead cultivating a nourishing ecosystem which values wellbeing for all.
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