In World 47 in the early 1990s, a radical group of fashion students used their highly developed forecasting skills to predict environmental and social devastation, if the clothing industry were to continue on its path of ever-increasing production and overseas expansion.
Squatting factories and chaining themselves to machines, the group won public support and forced business owners to agree to limit clothing production. They also implemented a 15-year apprenticeship scheme, involving on-the-ground training in every facet of the fashion system. With designers now guided, like doctors, by the principle of ‘do no harm’, great ethical deliberation precedes every design act.
What if …
fashion designers had to take full ethical responsibility for their actions?
Issue targeted:
designers not having the training or opportunity to fully consider the implications of the products that they design
Inspiration:
Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy by Tony Fry
This World was contributed by Emily Rickard and Amy Twigger Holroyd (located in Nottingham, UK) using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
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