future fashion
This article marks the fifth in Urban Times’ EcoFashion Series. We hope to shed some light on the eco fashion industry by exploring elements such as the sustainability, culture, ecology, psychology, labour and future of fashion. Our authors explore to what extent eco fashion is on the cusp of becoming the next big trend.
Previous episode: Psychology of Fashion
I was just having an incredibly insightful conversation with Dr. Frank Shaw of Centre for Future Studies about the proper methodology to predict the future, when I realized it is time to explain to the world how this ‘predicting’ thing works, before everyone assumes this is a job for psychics. I don’t know anything about crystal balls, but I can at least say there are other useful models to anticipate future scenarios at a global range with a highly reliable percentage of certainty.
Frank answered with wisdom and calm in his voice, and I could clearly perceive throughout the conversation an inspiring and optimistic way of thinking that made me immediately understand what he has that made him one of the top ten influential thinkers in the world by Time Magazine in 2003 – his vision!
And it is precisely on vision that I would like to start talking about The Future of Fashion.
A place for everything and everything in its place
When I say future, I mean a relatively distant future – let us say, maybe 5 to 25 years ahead – that rely on a foreseen scenario that starts with a shift in behaviour – today. This behaviour develops really slowly and has a large duration and rage of diffusion from innovators to late adopters. This is called a trend.
To make predictions with this range of sight requires a large dose of curiosity and a wise, wide and perfectly clear vision. Many analysts, such as Lidewij Edelkoort, have been studying both the future of Fashion and the Sustainability trend and their inevitable correlation with the Environment Zeitgeist topic – one of the major and universal topics of
Previous episode: Psychology of Fashion
I was just having an incredibly insightful conversation with Dr. Frank Shaw of Centre for Future Studies about the proper methodology to predict the future, when I realized it is time to explain to the world how this ‘predicting’ thing works, before everyone assumes this is a job for psychics. I don’t know anything about crystal balls, but I can at least say there are other useful models to anticipate future scenarios at a global range with a highly reliable percentage of certainty.
Frank answered with wisdom and calm in his voice, and I could clearly perceive throughout the conversation an inspiring and optimistic way of thinking that made me immediately understand what he has that made him one of the top ten influential thinkers in the world by Time Magazine in 2003 – his vision!
And it is precisely on vision that I would like to start talking about The Future of Fashion.
A place for everything and everything in its place
When I say future, I mean a relatively distant future – let us say, maybe 5 to 25 years ahead – that rely on a foreseen scenario that starts with a shift in behaviour – today. This behaviour develops really slowly and has a large duration and rage of diffusion from innovators to late adopters. This is called a trend.
To make predictions with this range of sight requires a large dose of curiosity and a wise, wide and perfectly clear vision. Many analysts, such as Lidewij Edelkoort, have been studying both the future of Fashion and the Sustainability trend and their inevitable correlation with the Environment Zeitgeist topic – one of the major and universal topics of