Speculative Thinking and Fashion’s Future.
The future of fashion is often imagined in six-month trend cycles dictated by fast-moving consumer preferences and reactive industry shifts. But what if we abandoned the obsession with immediate trends and instead speculated on long-term systemic transformations? At Source Fashion in London, Geraldine Wharry challenged us to do exactly that in her session, Designing Tomorrow: Is Speculative Thinking the Key to Fashion Retail’s Future?
To provide some context, it is helpful to learn about Geraldine Wharry. Geraldine Wharry is a fashion futurist, strategic advisor, and educator whose work goes far beyond conventional trend forecasting. With over two decades in the industry, she has become a leading voice in futures literacy, advocating for systemic change in fashion, technology, and sustainability. Through Trend Atelier, her educational platform, she nurtures a global community dedicated to rethinking fashion’s role in a rapidly changing world.
A Departure from the Predictable
The premise of the session was simple and profound: suspend disbelief. For an hour, we were asked to step out of our present-day knowledge of fashion’s limitations — whether economic, cultural, or technological — and enter speculative scenarios designed to provoke thought, discussion, and, perhaps, unease. Wharry framed the exercise as an essential methodology, one used in strategic foresight, design fiction, and future studies to prepare industries for radical change. Citing Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s Speculative Everything as foundational reading, she emphasised that this was not about forecasting but rather about world-building — crafting narratives that help us interrogate the choices we make today.
She also referenced Clare Press’s Wardrobe Crisis and We Are Next: Fashioning the Future, which explore industry transformations through a sustainability lens, as well as the MIT Technology Review, highlighting how speculative approaches are shaping various industries, from bioengineering to climate policy. In this way, the session positioned speculative design as a necessary tool to navigate the shifting paradigms of fashion’s role in a world increasingly defined by planetary limits and technological acceleration.
Four Futures: Fashion in 2035
The heart of the session revolved around four speculative scenarios, each presenting a vastly different future for fashion retail in the year 2035. The scenarios ranged from profound sustainability shifts to hyper-automation, each reflecting plausible consequences of social, economic, and technological forces already in motion today.
Scenario 1: Conscious Constraints
In this future, a major climate event is the catalyst for a systemic transformation in fashion. No longer a fast-moving, trend-driven industry, fashion has adapted to strict planetary boundaries. The World Health Organization introduces “right to rest” laws, treating overwork and burnout as public health crises, while governments implement strict digital detox policies to combat screen addiction and cognitive fatigue. Fashion, once synonymous with excess, becomes deeply local, reviving regional micro-production hubs and heritage-based design.
Mindless shopping fades, replaced by intentional consumption, where garments are valued for their longevity and cultural significance rather than their trendiness. What was once an enforced limitation becomes a conscious choice, demonstrating how radical shifts in policy and culture can recalibrate consumer expectations and industry standards.
Scenario 2: Optimised Everything
Here, the need for instant gratification triumphs, but in an optimised, supposedly sustainable form. Smart fabrics, AI-generated design, and quantum computing allow for on-demand garment production through local micro-factories. In this hyper-personalised world, AI-style algorithms predict what you want before you know it, seamlessly integrating digital wardrobes with real-time production. Virtual try-ons become more accurate than physical fittings, and fast fashion no longer means wasteful. Every piece is made to order, eliminating overstock and landfills.
Convenience in this scenario is reframed as both personal and planetary. Nothing sits unsold in warehouses, and production is fully adaptive to consumer demand. Yet, the underlying question remains: does optimising fashion to such an extreme erase the creative, human, and tactile elements that make it meaningful?
Scenario 3: Machine Mastery
This scenario envisions a world where AI surpasses human designers and artisans. Sentient design systems create collections that understand human emotion and cultural context, rendering traditional craftsmanship obsolete. Automated ateliers run 24/7, with craft-specialised robots perfecting techniques no longer known to human hands. The luxury industry no longer revolves around star designers but rather on algorithmic sophistication, with neural networks analysing centuries of fashion history to generate novel interpretations of heritage brands.
Boutiques shift from retail spaces to AI-driven experience hubs, where AI stylists curate wardrobes better than any human could. The debate over “authentic creativity” fades into irrelevance, as human-AI collaboration becomes the standard. In this world, craftsmanship survives only as a luxury niche experience, while mass production reaches unprecedented levels of technical perfection through full automation. Humans must now compete solely on imagination, as almost nothing is made by human hands anymore.
Scenario 4: Zero New Normal
This scenario presents the most extreme environmental response: a government-mandated five-year halt on all new clothing production from virgin materials to enforce a circular economy. Initially met with industry resistance, the shift thrives as consumers embrace scarcity-driven exclusivity. Blockchain-tracked “clothing passports” become mandatory, ensuring every garment remains in circulation. Textiles are redirected into other industries, like construction, where waste is repurposed into building materials.
Once reliant on perpetual newness, retailers find new profit models in special edition releases and fully closed-loop production. By the time new clothing production resumes, the system is fully optimised for sustainability. This scenario highlights the possibility of radical intervention, raising the question: how much regulation would it take to shift consumer culture toward factual circularity?
Reflections on Speculative Design in Fashion
This exercise posed fundamental questions about fashion’s trajectory. What trade-offs are we willing to accept? What futures seem inevitable versus preventable? And perhaps most importantly, what role should designers, brands, and policymakers play in shaping these trajectories rather than being passively shaped by them?
One of the most striking aspects of the session was the realisation that none of these futures felt implausible. Each scenario extrapolated existing technologies, trends, and socio-economic tensions to their logical extremes. Machine mastery is already emerging in AI-driven fashion, from AI-generated designs to robotic garment production. Optimised Everything mirrors today’s fast-growing personalisation economy, driven by on-demand manufacturing and digital wardrobes. Conscious Constraints reflects the growing anti-consumption movement, while Zero New Normal embodies the regulatory pressures that sustainability advocates are pushing for.
By engaging with speculative design, we are forced to confront our own assumptions and biases. If we find a future unsettling, is it because we fear it is inevitable? Or because we haven’t yet developed the strategies to challenge it? As Geraldine Wharry emphasised, the best way to prepare for the future is not to predict it, but to prototype it, critique it, and actively participate in shaping it.
“What if? That’s really the key.”
Geraldine Wharry
Speculative thinking isn’t a luxury for futurists — it’s an urgent necessity for anyone in fashion who seeks to move beyond short-termism and contribute to an innovative and sustainable industry. The challenge now is to go beyond the imagination of these futures and decide which ones we are working towards and which ones we are fighting to prevent?
