Slow Fashion Forecasting & the end of the Hypercycle
Credit: Geraldine Wharry
As a Futurist, Educator and Designer I work across the Fashion Industry sector in areas as diverse as fashion, beauty, tech, marketing and innovation. When I started out as a full-time forecaster in 2011, it was after being a design director and fashion designer for 11 years. At the time my work was about finding new trends to inform new products.
But now the scale of changes happening in the world, and what is at stake when it comes to our planet, is changing the value and need for fashion. And it is forcing us to bring to an end what I have called the ‘Hyper cycle’.
When I think back at the 11 years spent as a fashion designer, from 1999 to 2010, I loved my work and the people, the brands, but the amount of waste we produced and the constant churning of designs was after a while dizzying. It was the standard to fill in a number of SKUs because that is how the system and the supply chain was and still is built.
I was left feeling sucked out of creativity, the very thing that I had entered this field for in the first place. I was also left confused, and uncomfortable. I didn’t understand why we were wasting so much. I wanted to do something, but at the time I still couldn’t fully articulate this. I remember after living for several months in Tanzania as a volunteer thinking of creating a Fair Trade company. But swapped that dream for the security of my well-paid full-time job.
Fast forward to a few years later, in the face of adaptability and finally being an independent consultant, I set out to create my own trends consultancy in 2013. Figuring out my purpose and beliefs was paramount. It was constantly on my mind, for years actually, and still is. Because I am constantly wrestling with the meaning and purpose of fashion. Back in 2013, I had just worked at Wgsn as a senior forecaster for several years in the macro trends area of the womenswear team. It was great. I loved being able to design and focus on concepts, and revelled in the amount of research and writing needed, the presentations, the mix of design and intellectual work.
But after several years as a forecaster, even as a consultant, I felt the same pattern of behaviour that I had experienced as a fashion designer happen: the constant churning out of reports and trends. No questions asked. Just go go go as that’s the system.
The same urge to slow down became urgent. This just didn’t make sense to me. So I did some more soul searching as to where I wanted to position myself. I think this is key as before you go out into the world as a forecaster, think of your positioning and your purpose.
I decided the only way to survive no matter what I did was to stay creative. I come from a family of artists, have a textile design degree originally so there had to be a creative outlet. The other thing is I had witnessed how my mother, an entrepreneur with 100 employees, worked 7 days a week and as much as I appreciate to this day all of her hard work, I wanted a better work-life balance.
Concurrently I saw from my research that the emergence of data and social media would banalise certain aspects of forecasting and that having a personal voice would be key. This would be hard, as to be a good forecaster you have to remain objective. It’s a dance between your intuition and hard facts.
But regardless, with these different ideas in my head, and my core passions being climate and social justice, I set out to put purpose and creativity at the heart of everything I did. It seems that is what naturally led to teaching and starting a community.
I am writing this piece to explain it was all spawned by a need to slow down and find purpose, within my love of fashion and futures. Today I am more emboldened than ever to focus on making trend forecasting more accessible to help others conceive, design and implement planet and people positive growth. This is why in 2020 I set out the 10 000 mission and created the Trend Atelier Community, in a bid to merge future insights with education and flesh out as a collective how we can help change the world. No big ask!
Emphasizing on systems change, which is a hot term at the moment, requires a willingness to be vulnerable, to unlearn and slow down which is challenging.
But as 2020 marked the crossover point where the Anthropomass surpassed the Biomass (meaning the sum of what is manmade now outweighs what is natural on our planet), I believe this is a crucial moment we all must turn our attention to.
In a bid to constantly innovate and produce, what have we done to our planet?
By 2100 the earth will hold 11 billion people. Simple maths shows we can’t pursue the consumerist way of life we built over the course of the 20th century. In the next 10 years new economic models are expected to emerge, along with technological singularity, and climate change displacement, which will trigger new forms of business and human interaction. This includes our supply chains which are already changing, where we work and how we relate to clothing, its utility and its dream.
As part of the changes happening as we speak, for which we have not fully formed vocabularies and methodologies, it is essential to internalise the idea of slowing down and ending what I have called the ‘hypercycle’, what I see as similar to the hamster wheel.
The magnitude is difficult for fashion businesses to face in an industry slow to adopt change because of its complex structure and broad reach. But many fashion businesses are wanting to implement change and taking steps, for lack of support and initiatives from governments which is the key missing piece.
The possibility of an enlightened age of fashion is here for the taking and represents great opportunities at the convergence of philosophy, institutional change and wellness, for the greater good of the people and our planet.
Climate change, much like fighting a virus, requires a united and collective approach, hence also why we need governments to step up. The onus cannot be just on businesses and consumers. The scale of what is at stake puts a priority on new infrastructure creation, new legislations, skills transitions. Within this we need new approaches to the use and love of clothing that are not trends; they are fundamental changes in paradigm.
To embrace these shifts we must accept to ‘un-learn’ and transition to new infrastructures and ways of using and making clothing urgently, within the next 10 years, as leading scientists urge us that we have already passed several critical tipping points.
Unlearning is confusing for many of us who are solution-based and want an answer for everything, now. As part of unlearning, the first point of call would be to be in the now and accept the discomfort of uncertainty. Our current Eurocentric society glorifies certainty, perhaps a symptom of how anxious we have become as collective.
To “un-confuse” ourselves and unpack our overwhelm of “where do I even go or begin?”, we must humbly put ourselves in a learning mindset and implement collaboration with partners outside of fashion whether they are social scientists, philosophers, marginalised groups, farmers, biologists, engineers, children, artists to name a few examples.
Their help will help us end the hypercycle. From diverse points of view and a broad scan of society’s challenges, we can create the playbook of the future, and envision the possibilities in design, manufacturing, business, social contracts and lifestyle.
Finally, to loop back to our warped notion of time and efficiency which has caused us to live in the ’ hypercycle’, we must slow down, surrender to this notion, for our own good.
Defining this means re-imagining growth, changing the speed at which we produce and consume, the way we experience life, and the way we treat others. The ‘hypercycle’ has created an extractive global system that looks the other way. These days are counted. Or our days are counted.
To keep hope alive, remember that with great times of change comes tremendous potential to create and flourish in new spaces.
| Geraldine Wharry
Photo credit: Annie Harmeston