Future Ideations Camp Vol.8 30年後のファッションを想像する

About

Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT) is hosting another edition of the Future Ideations Camp, its series of short-term intensive workshops bringing together different individuals to engage in creative activities through art and digital technology. Around twenty selected participants take part in several days of lectures for acquiring new ways of thinking, workshops for building skill sets, and collaborative group activities. The general public are also able to attend talks and exhibitions of the results.

This eighth iteration of the camp explores the theme of fashion.

Fashion is the result of an extremely broad and impersonal network encompassing the plants and animals from which materials are sourced, the labor involved in production processes of cultivation, spinning, and sewing, and finally the distribution, consumption, and disposal. By reconsidering clothing not merely as a means of expressing individual identity, but as a mesh of complex layers where different stakeholders intersect, we can envisage the contexts contained within a single garment. A piece of clothing is something we wear, placing it in close proximity to our bodies, and yet is also intricately connected to numerous macro-level issues.

This camp begins by imagining the macro-level contexts related to a single garment, and then jumps thirty years into the future. What kind of clothes will we be wearing three decades from now? In what kind of society will we live when wearing those clothes?

The camp director is Ashida Hiroshi, a professor of design at Kyoto Seika University and specialist in fashion studies. As instructors, the camp also welcomes practitioners with an array of expertise in such fields as engineering, anthropology, and views on life and death. Through lectures and workshops by these instructors, the camp unravels the multilayered and multiplex world of fashion. Through collaborative work done in groups, the participants challenge themselves to create new forms of expression set to transform society thirty years hence.

Director’s Statement

“What will you wear tomorrow?” How would you answer this question?

When deciding what to wear tomorrow, you first need to consider what you will be doing: working at the office, going to a theme park with friends, relaxing alone at home, and so on. Clothing choices, however, aren’t determined solely by your own circumstances. You may be constrained by certain rules you must follow, such as is the case with school uniforms, and you might need to adhere to dress codes, especially for formal occasions like weddings and funerals. We also cannot ignore the impact of environmental factors like weather and temperature. And more broadly, your wardrobe is heavily influenced by your finances.

While we live in an era where we can freely choose what we wear, those choices are also heavily swayed by society. Fashion choices are ultimately negotiated in the interstices between individual preferences and societal expectations.

So, what will you or anyone be wearing in thirty years’ time? Perhaps making your own clothes will be the norm, or clothing technology will have advanced so much that whole clothes can be made at just the press of a button, without even need for a sewing machine. Or maybe the very value of fashion—caring about dressing “well”—will have disappeared altogether. Envisioning fashion thirty years hence is incredibly difficult without also imagining what our future society will be like.

This camp is an attempt to encourage participants to explore the possibilities for fashion three decades from now. Some might respond that this is a task more suited to fashion designers. However, a wide range of stakeholders are involved in fashion. Take, for instance, the process of making clothes, which includes many people, each with their own role, from the cotton farmers to spinning mill workers, textile designers, weavers, fashion designers, pattern makers, seamstresses, and more.

Then there are those who project the image of fashion to the public, like the stylists, photographers, and editors, and those who sell the finished clothes. And above all, fashion would not exist without people actually to wear the clothes and accessories in the first place. No matter how brilliantly conceived by a designer, a proposed item of clothing only becomes widespread if people want to wear it. In that sense, there is a need for everyone involved in fashion—to wit, everyone living in society today—to cultivate their imagination.

At this camp, we imagine the ideal form of fashion through thinking, hands-on practice, and discussion. I hope it will be a place for conceiving the as-yet nameless future of fashion.

Ashida Hiroshi

Results Exhibition

Participants

Program Director

Lecturers / Facilitators

Staff

Cooperation

SINA SUIEN

Spomenik

SOKKYOU

HIDESIGN

HATRA

POTTO

Masakazu Furusawa

MOTOHIRO & CO., LTD.