Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

While fashion design as a discipline aims not at producing single garments but at re-appropriating the meanings that a fashion design practice produces, both of an economic and socio-cultural level, the worldwide fashion system is still focused on the traditional production-consumption dichotomy and did not actually address the urgent need of promoting a creative innovation leadership, as during its glorious past. Fashion education is oriented toward a process-based/project-driven practice inspired by a design-driven approach where all fashion processes are integrated, balancing traditional know-how, tech-driven innovation and sustainability urge. However, in a changed and continuously evolving context, where the paradigms of Open Innovation and Open University look at the universities’ Third Mission and aim at growing skilled and conscious citizens, fashion design education needs to review its traditional framework to grow future professionals able to embrace the contemporary challenges of one of the most globalized and impacting sectors at international level. Fashion design professionals in the near future will be asked to promote a radical change, exploiting the potentialities of new technologies, and to advocate for a new critical and deontological vision of fashion. The paper discusses the theoretical and contextual conditions that are raising the need for a fashion design education oriented toward a “thinking through fashion” approach. Moreover, it positions the concept of “reshoring fashion as a system” –moving to the education of “process designers” instead of “product designers”, which avoid a fast-fashion logic which is all about clothing– and the idea of “learning with fashion”.