Possibility in Fashion Design Education—A Manifesto

This manifesto presents starting points for educators to reconsider fashion as a system of satisfiers for fundamental human needs. The manifesto calls for strategic adoption of design for micro-utopias in the fashion system. The challenges facing humanity are approached as opportunities for systems renewal. Fashion design must move beyond a disciplinary model of design to facilitate deliberate societal change over time. The manifesto frames the economy as a design problem and calls for fashion design to collaborate with economists and others on designing the sociomaterial systems in which fashion is produced, used, and discarded. How does fashion repress, tolerate, or stimulate opportunities for people to fulfill their fundamental needs? How can fashion design actively facilitate satisfying fundamental human needs? The manifesto concludes with a call for design educators to be guardians of the possibility of possibility. Design needs to design design itself while concurrently designing the world at large.