EVENTS
We believe that we work best when we are openly sharing and discussing ideas together. As such, we aim to champion research events and initiatives that will provide opportunity for everyone within and without IML to share ideas, however formative or developed these may be.
We believe this is the way to nourish innovative research agendas, with uncommon academic and industry partnerships for unlimited betterment of the fashion industry. This openness will allow us the means to ‘find’ futures for ourselves rather than merely responding to widely endorsed templates of the future conducted elsewhere.
Listening for the Echoes: heritage knowledges to shape fashion and design futures
AN ONLINE, INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM HOSTED BY ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON
1st MAY 2025
The Listening for the Echoes: heritage knowledges to shape fashion and design futures online symposium offers a vital space in which to reflect upon a pluriverse of local knowledges and traditions, to gain insights into the ways that humanity has walked (and in some places continues to walk) more lightly on the Earth to create the clothing, products and artefacts that we need, sustainably. These approaches offer a stimulus to learn, dream, experiment and reimagine how, why and for whom we design and make, holding the potential to reconnect us to a natural world and to a distant past whose echoes we must listen for urgently.
The symposium will raise philosophical and practical questions about the value of local and global cultural wisdom to creative possibility-finding – while respecting cultural, intellectual property and avoiding cynical extraction. It will reflect on the contemporary importance of traditional ecological knowledge: TEK rather than Tech. With six out of nine planetary boundaries already crossed and global warming on course to exceed agreed limits, it is vital to break away from the logic of growth and scale fed by neoliberalism and to revisit those very human technologies that may previously have been dismissed as primitive but which are in fact highly sophisticated.
Presenters from all over the world will share their research, case studies, projects and calls to action that foster resourcefulness and creativity, are framed by notions of sufficiency, use-value rather than exchange-value, and formed through care for people and planet.
Keywords: heritage, indigenous, TEK, regenerative fashion and design futures, sustainability, craft, community, making, place making, decolonised practices
Final submission date for abstracts: 15th February, 2025
FULL CALL HERE
IM PROVOCATIONS
The first in a series of student-led Provocation evenings took place on 11th November, 2024. Each Provocation evening provides an informal space for students and tutors to hear from an expert on a topic that sparks critical thinking and has the potential to inform research.
A guest speaker talks for 20 minutes, then attendees work together in groups to discuss what they have heard ins elation to certain questions raised, and to develop their own questions in response.
Our first speaker was Sara Arnold, a founder member of activist groups Extinction Rebellion Fashion, Fashion Act Now and who has just set up the Our Common.Market platform.
A brilliant evening organised by Student Governor Kim Jacqueline Boisseau.
The Future of Fashion Education:
Speculation, Experience and Collaboration
Edited by Dr Kirsten Scott, Prof. Barry Curtis and Dr Claire Pajaczkowska
A NEW BOOK, GROWING OUT OF OUR IML FUTURE OF
INTERNATIONAL FASHION AND DESIGN EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM
THAT TOOK PLACE IN 2022, AND PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE.
Seventeen essays by cosmopolitan thinkers, academics, activists and designers exploring new challenges and potentials for fashion education.
They constitute an interrelated array of short manifestos, case studies and lengthier and more sustained overviews of the imminent crises and prospective challenges that face fashion practitioners and educators.
The opening address by Bel Jacobs demands a responsible fashion practice, the papers that follow offer a multiple, but consensual dedication to responding to a shared global challenge.
We are delighted that The Future of Fashion Education: Speculation, Experience and Collaboration has been included as part Routledge’s Responsible Fashion Series. It is the 3rd publication in this important series of books that explore the ways that fashion is evolving from the frivolous and ephemeral to become a potent force for change and sustainable innovation.
Previous publications in this series are:
Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can Fashion Save the World? edited by Annicke Schramme and Nathalie Verboven
Technology, Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can Fashion Save the World? edited by Annicke Schramme and Nathalie Verboven
Upcoming in this series is:
Decentering Fashion on the Silk Roads. Craft and Responsible Fashion Dynamics in Central Asia. Edited by Stefanie Mallon, Galina Mihaleva
Untangling Design Purpose
AN ONLINE SYMPOSIUM HOSTED BY
ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON AND MACROMEDIA MUNICH
WEDNESDAY 17th APRIL, 2024, 11.00 - 17.00 CET
REGENERATING fASHION?
A HALF-DAY SYMPOSIUM AT ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON
WEDNESDAY 6TH MARCH, 2024, 10.00 - 14.30 GMT - Fully booked!
The Future of International Fashion & Design Education
ONLINE EVENT HOSTED BY ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON
29 SEPTEMBER 2022
The world is changing. While fashion and design education has always equipped students with the skills and knowledge they will need to join industry, we now know these industries require significant change.
Fashion and design education must respond to potentially catastrophic climate change, environmental degradation, protecting the Earth’s finite resources, North-South asymmetry, and social and racial inequalities. It must acknowledge and address the ways in which Western cultures have colonised indigenous global cultures.
This one-day online symposium brought together academics from all over the world to consider the new skills, knowledge and values that fashion and design graduates might need for a future that may be unrecognisable from the past or from present, and which may require new pedagogical approaches.
Keywords:
International; Fashion and Design Education; Decolonization; Global Citizens; Responsibility; New Paradigms; Holistic Thinking; Ethics; Digital Technologies; Critical Thinking; Collaboration; Futuring.
Conference Talks and Videos
Responsible Fashion: How do we make our ideas a reality?
A SYMPOSIUM HOSTED BY ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON
NOVEMBER 2021
Long before Covid-19, it was clear that the fashion industry had to change significantly: we know that we have less than a decade to prevent irreversible climate damage (UN, 2019). Our soil, our waters and even our food chain have become contaminated with fashion waste; human rights abuses abound within the fashion industry, including modern day slavery, child labour, pitiful wages and unsafe working conditions; some leading brands have even used Covid as an excuse not to pay their workers for the work they have done. Green-washing abounds and the term ’sustainability’ has lost its meaning, appropriated by marketing departments to paper over business as usual. Western designers plunder the cultural heritage of global communities for inspiration without sensitivity or conscience. The fashion system is broken, in urgent need of rebuilding. The pandemic has provided space to step back and to reflect, to ask questions about the meaning, value and potential of fashion in a post-Covid world. How can the industry move forward in a responsible way?
Aim
We need to consider what it is about fashion that we actually want to sustain and what new approaches must be introduced, starting with a blank sheet of paper.
This one-day, online symposium offers an opportunity to explore solutions together: a space to propose radical new ways to envisage fashion design and creation, and to reimagine the systems in which we source, produce, communicate, sell, purchase, wear, live with and dispose of fashion. A holistic approach is crucial, therefore we welcome contributions from diverse perspectives and disciplines, as we consider how to navigate a responsible way forward, how to make our ideas a reality, and the role of fashion education in equipping students to meet these challenges.