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

Due to the digitalisation and globalisation of fashion at the start of the 21st century a new generation of fashion designers has come to rise, 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 anywhere. As a result, the fashion discourse has slowly started to change into a more decolonial, inclusive narrative and practice. As stated in my previous exhibitions and research, this new generation of fashion designers are operating from a new and engaged vision. Being aware of the current social and environmental issues of the current fashion system, they have started to fundamentally rethink and redefine the fashion system by implementing new values and new imaginations that are more inclusive and informed, decentred, using sustainability, local economy, craft revivals and new micro-narratives as key drivers. With increasing amounts of newcomers having a non-Western background, the fashion discourse is opening up to include new voices, and different values and aesthetics which are not part of the conventional values and notions of the dominant Western Fashion history, and to welcome the intertwining of this discourse with conceptualism, modernism and postmodernism.