CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY: THE FUTURE OF FASHION FORECASTING

Textile and Fashion

“When you are in the futurology business there are three problems that you run into. First of all, you're wrong. Second of all, you get the timing wrong even when you're right. And third of all, when you're right you're never believed” -Woudhuysen, 1992. Sustainability has been an important topic in many disciplines for over two decades now, and its urgency keeps rising. At the same time, conceptual understanding of sustainability remains quite vague and often too context-specific, which poses a challenge for sustainability research. Among the four dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, social, and cultural), it is the latter aspect that is least examined. However, understanding how culture contributes to the long-term sustainability of communities and societies is one key to a holistic understanding of sustainability itself, and how it can impact the future of fashion forecasting. This paper argues that the ethic of long-term sustainability can be informed by fashion forecasters in their embodied, institutionalized form. The resilience potential of fashion forecasters is important for configuring the long-term impact of cultural aesthetics and its place for future generations. As fashion forecasters struggle with addressing the consequences of economic issues and finding new models of conducting their temporal business, their very existence and preservation contribute to the long-term sustainability of communities and societies as a whole. This paper suggests two avenues for further research: first, the values and ideals embedded in strategic priorities of fashion forecast and promoted through their reports and programmes contribute to society and fashion industry and serve as the foundation of long-term institutional survival; second, by fulfilling their missions through both short and long-term forecast and acting ‘culturally sustainable,’ to ensure its endurance, thus vouching for safe interests of future generations along with advanced innovations. Further, the paper focuses on giving a reasonable solution supporting both the stances.

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