MCCI's Connect: Bridging Research, Innovation, Education and Professional Practice event 'Sustainable Storytelling in Fashion Media: Reorienting Sartorial Desire'

You are warmly invited to MCCI's Connect: Bridging Research, Innovation, Education and Professional Practice event 'Sustainable Storytelling in Fashion Media: Reorienting Sartorial Desire', with Dr. Morna Laing, Assistant Professor in Fashion Studies at the New School, Parsons Paris, in conversation with Dr. Rosie Findlay, on Thursday the 7th of May from 5pm to 6.30pm at City St. Georges, University of London. This will be a hybrid event. The event is moderated by Dr. Carolina Matos and supported by Devina Sarwatay. There will also be light refreshments on the day.

Abstract

Commercial fashion media is one of the biggest barriers to sustainable change in fashion cultures.
Most fashion communication works to encourage overconsumption and is therefore incompatible with respecting planetary boundaries (Rockström et al, 2009). This presentation maps the different ways that fashion media talks about sustainability: from greenwashing to green marketing to radical visions of change. From there, the emphasis shifts to pockets in the contemporary media landscape where fashion is already being profoundly reimagined. The focus here is on independent, English-language fashion media: from The Lissome magazine; to not-for-profit content produced by Slow Factory; to academic projects such as Amy Twigger Holroyd’s Fashion Fictions.

The argument advanced is that these independent platforms provide a space for social dreaming – rooted in discourses on slow fashion and green consciousness – making radically sustainable visions of fashion more desirable. This contrasts with the conventional fashion dreamscape which encourages neoliberal modes of consumerist desire (Wilson, 1985). The problem, of course, is that these are marginal forms of fashion media and the triple planetary crisis is far from being a marginal concern. To address the issue of reach, John Wood’s (2007) concept of micro-utopia is introduced to theorise these disparate media practices as belonging to a wider network of radical environmental communication.

Those discourses serve several functions: from re-enchanting nature through poetic imagery; to reconciling a love of garments with a love of people and planet; to making concrete the idea that another sartorial culture is possible.

Bio

Dr. Morna Laing is Assistant Professor in Fashion Studies at The New School, Parsons Paris. She has published widely on and gender, spectatorship and the fashion media, including the monograph Picturing the Woman-child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her current research focuses on the culture of sustainability and will be published as a monograph, Sustainability and the Fashion Media: Spectatorship, Emotion and Social Change (Routledge, forthcoming).