One Dress: Shaping Fashion Futures through Utopian Thinking.

Utopian ‘social dreaming’ often imagined societies whose inhabitants made do with relatively few material possessions, including clothing. Such visions of material resourcefulness stand in stark contrast to the currently dominant model of fashion production and consumption in which designers are pushed to meet increasingly faster trend turnarounds and where consumers routinely discard large quantities of fully functional garments. It is clear that this situation is not sustainable, and that fashion future must be radically different.

This paper draws upon and expands the research presented in the special issue of the journal Utopian Studies ‘Utopia and Fashion’ published in early 2018. The issue examined the under-researched relationship between fashion and utopia through the lens of Ruth Levitas’ concept of utopia as a method of exploring alternative scenarios for the future. By combining multidisciplinary perspectives from academics and creative practitioners, the issue aimed to trigger a long-term dialogue regarding both the role of fashion in utopian thinking and the potential of utopian thinking to re-imagine and inspire better futures for fashion.

The paper has two parts, it first develops selected themes outlined in ‘Utopia and Fashion’ and demonstrates how utopian thinking can provide a helpful tool for addressing some of the dilemmas and challenges involved in the current discourse on fashion and sustainability. In the second part, the paper employs the metaphor of One Dress, a utopian vision of one garment for life, that helps unravel the complexities that underlie fashion’s agency on individual, social and political levels. The paper argues that this inherent complexity of fashion demands stronger activist agendas in both design education and consumer behaviour in order to negotiate future solutions that embrace a holistic perspective on fashion as a system at the intersection of power, nature, culture and society.