Discourse: Debating the future of fashion design

The conference track theme in relation to this paper is Disruption & Innovation - Academia & Industry. In facilitating discussion on the disrupting factors facing the fashion industry, we aim to show how we are identifying opportunities to ease and expedite a transition from the now to the new in an understanding of fashion design education and practice. Exploring how an active integration of academia and industry at masters level can provide an alternative to an otherwise one-sided offering which only looks to support design talent to become sole practitioners. This research paper provides an analysis of a workshop developed by the authoring researchers Chelsea Franklin, Susan Postlethwaite and Kat Thiel, alongside their contextual findings. The workshop uses a tool for debate, Discourse, designed by Chelsea Franklin while she was an MA fashion student at the Royal College of Art. The tool was developed as a response to, and recognition of, the struggle of working as a siloed, sole-practitioner/ designer within education whilst understanding that the industry is built of complex supply chains and networks of individuals. The work has emerged from a new fashion pedagogic model that aims to produce a multidisciplinary fashion student/ researcher/ designer. We will share the first results of this on going research which is currently being developed in tandem with the RCA MA Fashion course, encouraging students’ to engage intellectually with their discipline and to question and hold to account new industrial models. This research is part of a larger body of work currently being developed through Future Fashion Factory: Digitally Enabled Design & Manufacture of Designer Products for Circular Economies AHRC funded research. Through this work RCA Fashion researchers propose to define a new methodological approach, Fashion Thinking that has three distinct strands - Fashion Thinking for Social Change, Fashion Thinking for Applied Speculation and Fashion Thinking through Advanced Manufacturing. Discourse engages with all three of these areas