In World 266, the institution called The Alternative Fashion School (TAFS) exists in Norfolk, UK.
The ways that fashion is imagined, communicated, produced, shared and enacted at TAFS perhaps look quite different from what we might be familiar with, in our own world.
Students at TAFS are trained to contribute to new and pre-existing fashion systems which foster human (and non-human) flourishing, within planetary boundaries.
TAFS has existed for a long time, although it may have taken different formats and held different names over that time.
In 2025, TAFS historians, archivists and curators are researching the history of the institution.
What if …
… there was an institution called ‘The Alternative Fashion School’ where students are taught to radically reimagine how we think about, talk about, produce, communicate, share, enact and use fashion(s) in ways that foster human (and non-human) flourishing within planetary boundaries?
Issue targeted:
fashion education
Inspiration:
We Wear The Trousers launched ‘The Alternative Fashion School’ in 2023 as a concept exploring how we could curate a grassroots, DIY fashion curriculum, open to all. We wanted to posit ways that fashion education could be fit for the future(s) that our planet needs! TAFS centres the ‘Earth Logic’ principles of Less, Local and Plural – see Earth Logic by Fletcher and Tham. We were also inspired by Folk Fashion by Amy Twigger Holroyd, and imagining fashion education as a ‘commons’.
Related Explorations
This World was contributed by We Wear The Trousers, 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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