1 WHERE IS FASHION?
This theme recognises the importance of digital advances and the increasingly blurred boundaries between physical and digital fashion. Spanning these boundaries, submissions could have a focus on smart textiles and new technologies in textiles and fashion design, AR and VR and their commercial application, use and ethics of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The theme also sees the landscapes, places and spaces of fashion as vital to its future, to include online and offline fashion retailing, locations of production and manufacturing, new and emerging consumer technologies, the shopping journey, and the commercial and social implications of these developments. We welcome work on the distinctions that are emerging in global, regional and local fashion.
2 WHEN IS FASHION?
Imagining and re-imagining have a temporal dimension, looking forward but also back. Fashion also operates in different spatial, geographic and cultural dimensions, given its global reach and operations across international supply and value chains. Debates about fast fashion or sustainable fashion, for example, have gained enormous significance in the past few years. The theme spans all aspects of time, space and place including histories of fashion and fashion culture, trends and forecasts, glocalization, changes in consumption and taste, design, manufacturing, supply chains and slow fashion and disposal inherent in the current system. It welcomes new contributions to sustainability problems of waste, longevity and durability of things, images, promotions, designs and techniques. The theme also includes topics such as time to market, to design, to make and to consume and dispose. Conceptual work that addresses the theme of time, space and place in fashion in any way is also welcome.
3 MediatiNG FASHION
The mediation of fashion concerns the increasingly complex ways in which products, brands, images, messages and stories are viewed, used and exchanged. Fashion has become more interconnected at different levels and across different disciplines and industries, particularly among young people. The theme embraces work on social media, images, branding, multi and omnichannel connections, experiences of fashion, co-creation and interactivity between actors and agency by producers and consumers, sharing and re-use of tangible and intangible fashion. the use of personal information, ethics and privacy amongst other emerging topics are also welcome.
4 DOING FASHION
This theme challenges us to explore different contexts in which the practices of fashion take place: in education but also an economic, social activity or self-realisation activity undertaken by individuals, enterprises and organisations.
Practitioners = people who are making, shaping and implementing fashion in education and enterprises, organisations, collectives and independently. Topics could include designers, managers, researchers, individuals, entrepreneurs and critics.
Praxis = all the various activities involved in the deliberate formation and implementation of fashion. This could include curriculum design, regulations, learning, assessment, methodologies, entrepreneurial activities.
Practice = practices might be formal or informal, organisation specific or belong to a wider system. Topics could include formal and individual practices of making and repair, craft, well-being and health, sustainability, in addition to issues of the politics of practice, conformity and inclusiveness.
5 WHAT IS FASHION?
In this theme we invite new work that enables us to re-imagine fashion systems and objects, and to reflect and take more critical positions. Submissions can be in the form of manifestos, provocations, practice, conceptual and empirical research papers that provide critical, theoretical and philosophical insights into the state of fashion and its future possibilities at all levels of the fashion system. Do we need new business models? What are our thought worlds? In what ways are new theories of fashion emerging? What is the future for fashion as we know it? How can we move from imagination to action? Change - and illusions of change - could be said to be the very essence of fashion – but what do these things mean now - and will fashion’s habits of change, change?
