State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury. Imagination, sustainability, Embodied Practice, Craft Revival, New narratives

The digitalization in 21st Century has generated a new generation of fashion designers who no longer need to move to established fashion centres to start a global career and to gain global recognition. Through web shops, blogs, social media and local Fashion Weeks they are able to establish a global business from any place as well as being part of the current critical Fashion discourse to re-think the system. (Teunissen 2005; 8-23, Teunissen 2018: 12-72).

In this paper I want to argue that this new generation of fashion designers is operating from a new and engaged vision. Being aware of social and environmental issues and the failures of the current fashion system, they are fundamentally rethinking and redefining the fashion system by implementing new values and new imaginations using an embodied practice as an activistic tool. Since more and more of these newcomers have a non-western background, they are not obviously using the conventional values and notions of the dominant Western Fashion history and its intertwining with movements conceptualism, modernism or post-modernism. Also they do not so much express the tradition from which they come (Brand, Teunissen 2005, 2011:157-177), Fukai 2006:288-314);Skov 2011:137-157) as the path they take between that tradition and the various contexts they traverse, and they do this by performing acts of transition. (Bourriaud, 2009 51-51).

More fundamentally, imagination is no longer being employed as a materialised fantasy, as a form of escapism or as a reflection of another world - as evoked in the conventional fashion glamour. The new generation is able to create attractive fresh new imaginations shaping new and more responsible and social connected worlds without any references (to the conventional Western Fashion history), where the imagination has become, in terms of Appadurai (1996: 3-5) an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice.