Fashion Gardening Platform is a critical, experimental and creative learning space focused on systemic sustainability change within the fashion field targeted towards young fashion professionals and students from diverse backgrounds. The platform focuses on developing critical understanding of the growth logic paradigm in the fashion system and introducing and implementing Earth Logic (Fletcher, Tham, 2019) and Earth Logic Gardening (Fletcher, Tham, 2023) frameworks. Earth Logic envisions fashion connected with planetary boundaries and social justice, whereas Earth Logic Gardening guide uses the metaphor of gardening to start cultivating actual and flourishing change work.
Fashion Gardening Platform sets off from an observation that we need to provide understanding of root causes of the environmental and climate crisis in order to find pathways for meaningful, systemic and paradigmatic solutions instead of focusing on technological fixes.
Earth Logic introduces six landscapes, where to ground all actions, including:
1. LESS – fitting all activity within Earth’s limits
2. LOCAL – scaling and recentring action rooted in place and community
3. PLURAL – social justice and diversity of imagination
4. LEARNING (and unlearning) – how to educate, research and innovate
5. LANGUAGING – how to create mind shifts through words, imaginary and stories
6. GOVERNANCE – how to organize, negotiate and regulate
The platform has two levels: one focused on cultivating new visions for post-growth fashion systems and cultures, rooted in planetary boundaries and values of care, collaboration, and holistic sustainability. The other level involves actual gardening, where we engage in systems thinking through hands-on practice. The platform aims to provide skills, tools, community, support and hope for young professionals to become change-agents who are willing and able to further positive changes in the fashion field and beyond.
A key aspect of the platform is also to provide a space to collectively reflect on how livelihoods could be reimagined and implemented in the textile and fashion sectors: How fashion designers could use their skills differently, beyond traditional product design, and work towards ecological reconstruction by radically reinventing the fashion culture.
In the Platform theory and creative practices are combined to help the participants understanding and integrating new knowledge in a holistic way. The teaching consists of mini-lectures, theoretical and creative individual, pair and co-creation exercises, discussions and reflection as well as hands-on gardening. The variation of different working methods draws attention also to somatic perspectives, including the body as part of learning. Attention and care is put into facilitation of structures supporting safer space for learning and community building.
The first Fashion Gardening Platform took place 24.5 – 15.8.2024. The workload for the course was 5 ECTS, totaling 135 hours, of which 114 hours were live meetings. The participants included 8 people: master students, working and unemployed fashion professionals from diverse backgrounds including design, journalism and art.
For more information about Earth Logic please visit: https://earthlogic.info/
| Supported by: The Arts Promotion Centre Finland Supporting gardener: Kaisa Viding Contact info: fashiongardening@softislab.fi |
