Abstract

Dressing-up, experimental play with clothing, is a highly effective creative learning method for embodied imagining, speculative futuring and a universal pastime. It is a potent critical pedagogy and fashion practice that can foster explorations and responses to the ecological and climate crises, aiding shifts in behaviours and mindsets. Yet, it is largely underutilised in sustainability education and sustainable fashion engagement. Amidst rising eco-anxiety and geopolitical turbulence, counter pedagogies are needed to empower alternative practices and shift destructive paradigms. This hands-on playful participatory workshop bridges the theory-practice gap in education for and as sustainability, through engagement in imaginative learning-by-doing approaches.

Session and activities

This workshop is comprised of ‘recipes’ (activities) from ‘Fashion Recipes for the Future’, a ‘cookbook’ (toolkit) to engage in alternative ways of experiencing fashion. It began as my MA participatory action research and final project and has emerged into my applied sustainable fashion practice and pedagogy. 

Participants will be invited to dress-up, playfully explore, emotionally connect with and cook up out-of-this-world ways of wearing donated clothing that has been diverted from exportation and landfill, clothing considered ‘waste’. We will, literally and metaphorically, unpeel fashion, turn it upside down and inside out like a banana split.  

While music plays, we will experiment with these clothes by following ‘Wear Where?’ task cards, asking us to somatically and sensorily engage with where (and how and why) we wear clothing. Participants will imagine one item of clothing as their ‘Fashion Friend’ and empathise with the human and more-than-human beings that came to make and wear our fashion friends. Participants will write a short piece of creative writing, such as a diary entry, character description or scenario which explores this clothing item’s experiences of an alternative present or future world. Through anthropomorphising and personifying these clothes, participants’ understanding of embodied and speculative imagining in education for sustainability will be augmented.  

Clothing is a basic human right, dressing is a daily practice and fashion is not only fun but a fundamental form of human culture, expression and identity. However, we need to tremendously reduce our production and consumption of clothing to stay within planetary boundaries (Fletcher and Tham, 2021) and profoundly transform how wider society and the sector values and engages with fashion.  

We need to act radically in imaginative, interconnected ways to create the necessary reformation. Yet we have not been imaginative enough amid global climate collapse, ecosystem breakdown, and rising inequality and oppression (Moore and Milkoreit, 2020). Moreover, education generally centres on sustainability as an end goal, which it is not, with limited reflective capacities (Wamsler, 2020).  

This workshop instead allows participants to cultivate their own reflective sustainability comprehension through imaginative embodied sense-making. Through dressing-up and envisioning clothing as our fashion friends and speculating ways in which these clothes experience diverse worlds, participants engage in critical reflexivity and post-fashion paradigms. This workshop enables participants to understand the potency of playful participatory engagement in sustainability education, fostering ways and ideas for translating knowledge into action in their own practice.