Course description
The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the “futuring” practices that are emerging in fashion in order to achieve desirable futures. It would like to overcome the dominant identification of fashion with its own industry and open up a different interpretation of inventions, fantasies and alternate history beyond the promotional and heritage-related purposes of fashion design and communication.
By doing so, it aims to challenge the dominant dualistic understanding of fashion as an unrealistic dream for a real industry, and to point out some possible aims for designers and fashion thinkers. In particular, the course identifies and analyses the “futuring” discourses that are emerging as a possible way forward for fashion by taking into account the contact zones between critical thinking, environmental activism and fashion history.
The course draws on the concept of “futuring” as a paradigm shift in the 21st century fashion. “Futuring” stems from the work of the design theorist Tony Fry (2007, 2009), who has argued for the need of re-directing the current design’s aims and scopes to better respond to a world that has become unsustainable. Futuring, which has been recently adapted to fashion by sustainability scholar Alice Payne (2019), is among the most innovative concepts featuring in the 21st-century debate on the need to give new directions to the key themes of ecology, sustainability, and ethics. It also draws on design speculative methods (Dunne and Raby, 2013); historical and theoretical approaches devoted to sustainability; uchronic temporalities and alternate history (Evans and Vaccari, 2020, Vanni, 2016, 2020). In order to achieve the above-mentioned purposes, the course relies on “what if?” question as a key methodological tool to stimulate critical thinking.
Possible topics of interest include: history of global fashion industry; fashion sustainability and social change; uchronic temporalities and speculative fashion; experimental fashion; sustainable community, fashion history and counter-history of the European fashion; ethical and esthetical values in global fashion; fashion vis à vis environmental history.

Learning outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Understand the fashion process in an historical perspective;
• Explain current attitudes and behaviors with regard to fashion consumption;
• Identify and describe environmental, social and cultural sustainability issues in the global fashion industry;
• Provide examples of socially responsible fashion designers and brands;
• Discuss the role of speculative fashion and alternate history as a possible strategy to educate professional and empower fashion lovers;
• Discuss and analyse the fashion futures.

Teaching and evaluation methods
Teaching methods include lectures, group discussions, question and answer sessions; brainstorming and live interviews with researchers, fashion designers and professionals who work in the spirit of redirecting fashion.
Discussions 10%
Call to action activities 20%
Individual homework 20%
Paper or students’ course portfolio 30%
Final Exam 20%

Bibliography
BERARDI “BIFO”, F., (2017), Futurability, London-New York: Verso.
DUNNE, A. AND RABY F., (2013), Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press. Edelkoort, L. (2015). Anti- Fashion manifesto for the next decade. Paris: Trend Union.
EVANS, C. AND VACCARI, A., eds,, (2020), Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
FRY, T., (2009), Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
PAYNE, A., (2019), Fashion Futuring in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Fashion as “Taming” and “Rewilding”. Fashion Theory, 23(1), pp. 5-23.
STEELE, V., (2019), Fashion futures. In: The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization, eds, A. Geczy & V. Karaminas. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 5-18.