Fashion Industry's Stories and Societal Change
- The fashion industry has faced calls for significant change during the COVID-19 pandemic, but progress has been insufficient.
- The industry's narratives about time, progress, and modernity have perpetuated inequalities related to age, gender, race, and sexuality.
- Fashion acts as a meme, shaping social interactions and identities, making it challenging to transform the industry without broader societal change.
Fashion as a Storytelling Medium
- Fashion is a significant storytelling medium that plays a crucial role in our lives and relationships.
- It can convey ideas and become embedded in our minds, spreading across time, cultures, and geographies.
- Narratologists should consider fashion as a vital storytelling medium due to its profound impact on our lives.
Overcoming Essentialist Binaries in Fashion
- Fashion can be seen as a conveyor of human stories that maintain essentialist binaries linked to age, gender, race, and sexuality.
- To drive meaningful change, we can use fashion to transmit new stories that reflect the complexity and diversity of our lives.
- Overwriting the narrative that fashion is focused on linear advancement and understanding its creative force will be challenging but necessary.
The Role of Storytelling in Fashion Education
- Former Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele criticized the industry's reckless actions and loss of heart, harmony, care, connection, and belonging.
- Effective change in the fashion industry and fashion education requires understanding the role of stories in consolidating and critiquing essentialist binaries.
- Focusing on storytelling has the potential to transform the fashion industry and bring about a radical reset.
