Timeout: Why We Need to Re-think The Narrative of Fashion | Benjamin Wild | TEDxRoyal Holloway

Fashion Industry's Stories and Societal Change

• The fashion industry has faced calls for significant change during the COVID-19 pandemic, but progress has been insufficient.
• The industry's narratives about time, progress, and modernity have perpetuated inequalities related to age, gender, race, and sexuality.
• Fashion acts as a meme, shaping social interactions and identities, making it challenging to transform the industry without broader societal change.

Fashion as a Storytelling Medium

• Fashion is a significant storytelling medium that plays a crucial role in our lives and relationships.
• It can convey ideas and become embedded in our minds, spreading across time, cultures, and geographies.
• Narratologists should consider fashion as a vital storytelling medium due to its profound impact on our lives.

Overcoming Essentialist Binaries in Fashion

• Fashion can be seen as a conveyor of human stories that maintain essentialist binaries linked to age, gender, race, and sexuality.
• To drive meaningful change, we can use fashion to transmit new stories that reflect the complexity and diversity of our lives.
• Overwriting the narrative that fashion is focused on linear advancement and understanding its creative force will be challenging but necessary.

The Role of Storytelling in Fashion Education

• Former Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele criticized the industry's reckless actions and loss of heart, harmony, care, connection, and belonging.
• Effective change in the fashion industry and fashion education requires understanding the role of stories in consolidating and critiquing essentialist binaries.
• Focusing on storytelling has the potential to transform the fashion industry and bring about a radical reset.