Fashioning Tomorrow
A participatory journey exploring the futures of fashion through speculative design and foresight at MOMus, Thessaloniki
On Monday, April 14, 2025, the MOMus–Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki hosted a thought-provoking event under the Eye of Europe project: the second pilot of Fashion Futuring, a workshop designed and facilitated by Clarice Garcia, lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney. Organized by Helenos Consulting in the context of the EU funded "Eyes of Europe” project, this in-person workshop brought together domain experts in foresight, fashion, and design to collaboratively imagine and prototype sustainable futures for fashion.
At the core of the workshop was Garcia’s Fashion Futuring method—a seven-stage participatory approach that blends speculative design, systems thinking, and embodied reflection. Rather than focusing on trends or economic predictions, this method encourages participants to examine the symbolic, cultural, and systemic layers that influence how we wear, produce, and perceive fashion. It draws on the idea that imagining speculative futures through fashion can help societies critically reflect on values, identities, and environmental concerns. Each step of the workshop invites participants to reframe their relationship with fashion—not as consumers, but as agents of change within interconnected systems of meaning and materiality.
During the Thessaloniki pilot, participants moved through the full cycle of the method. We began with personal reflections (Fashion ID), mapping emotional responses and values connected to clothing and self-expression by thinking about a garment that held personal significance for us. Soon after, we collectively mapped the evolution of fashion across time (Fashion Evolution), placing fashion-related images, concepts, and keywords along a visual timeline spanning past, present, and future, with both upsides and downsides. We used these to explore collective assumptions and beliefs about the cultural role fashion has played as a system in society.
From there, we explored broader social and ecological systems (Impossible Worlds). We stretched our imaginations to embrace uncertainty and the unknown as forces for creativity and let go of our assumptions to dive into fiction. Through collaborative storytelling based on a photo picked from a deck of cards on context, we explored snapshots of the future, imagery-driven fictional worlds where fashion had evolved in response to new values. We asked ourselves what we saw in that image, what emotions it evoked, and what the future looked like based on it.
Shortly after, these imagined futures took form through drawing fictional fashion items (Wearing Fiction) by picking from decks of cards on fashion artefacts, technology, and materials—artefacts not merely of style, but of imagined societies imbued with cultural and symbolic significance. The process facilitated reflection on the values and meanings behind the fictional objects proposed in relation to those Fashion Futures, and helped us identify the potential cultural roles fashion might assume in society and in the future.
The following Fashion Futuring Wheel, an original way to redefine the classic Futures Wheel, helped us ground the values identified in the previous step within a systemic backcasting tool and discuss, from future to present, what actions should be taken to enable a values-driven transformation across different sectors: manufacturing and distribution, material science and technology, design principles and communication, consumption and trends, education and politics, arts and philosophy, and environmental, social, and governance dimensions.
In conclusion, we collectively reflected on and evaluated our impressions of the process, including an assessment of our fictional future by positioning it along intersecting past–future and fiction–reality axes. This prompted us to reconsider what was possible and what was not, given the present, and helped us interpret what these creations revealed about our current anxieties, aspirations, and possible pathways toward more desirable futures.
The energy in the room was palpable, as ideas flowed freely, anchored by meaningful conversations and visual prototyping. We weren’t just discussing change—we were enacting it through imagination, creativity, and empathy. I confess that my group was quite dystopian, with my sci-fi background somehow taking charge. We envisioned a divided society suspended between hyper-technological advancement and environmental nostalgia. In this snapshot, joy, generosity, and playfulness coexist with fear, inequality, and a sense of overwhelm. While some communities thrive in abundance, others remain excluded—often within virtual realms—longing for a nature that only exists as a curated, simulated experience. In this future, food has become the ultimate form of wealth, surpassing fashion in importance, and the most luxurious lifestyles are attainable only in virtual environments. The big contradiction is that we have many solutions, but only a few people can afford them.
Against this backdrop, we designed a speculative fashion artefact: a hybrid, gender-neutral swimsuit that responds dynamically to its environment. Crafted from nanoscale materials, it can adapt its shape—transforming into a wave or shell depending on the situation—and can even emit protective sounds underwater. It doubles as a functional tool, collecting materials or aiding survival, and includes embedded technology that enhances adaptability and protection, such as regulating temperature or shielding from the sun. The garment is distributed equitably in its basic version—you can tell that we tried to add some positivity here—but premium, customizable editions remain accessible only to the privileged, subtly echoing the broader inequalities of this imagined world. This artefact embodies the contradictions of its time: designed for collective resilience and equality, yet inevitably shaped by the same forces of exclusivity and hierarchy that define its societal context.
The broader system surrounding the artefact reflects a world where advanced nanomaterials give rise to smart textiles, which gradually evolve into adaptable, sustainable garments. The swimsuit emerges from a landscape where design shifts from uniform and accessible forms to expressive and individualized versions, with sustainability guiding material choices. Communication centers on empathy and environmental consciousness, encapsulated in a collective mantra: it's not the suit that suits you, but the fabric—“Gaia”—endorsed by the planet itself. Social trends lean toward minimalism, limited consumption, and a heightened sense of individuality, shaped by an urgent need for protection in the face of global catastrophes. Education and politics reinforce the tension between uniformity for safety and the freedom of personal expression. Manufacturing and distribution rely on blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI), ensuring material efficiency and traceability—revealing how even the most forward-thinking designs are intertwined with evolving systems of governance, technology, and ideology.
While our group explored a dystopian future marked by technological extremes and environmental nostalgia, other groups presented alternative visions, each offering unique perspectives on the intersection of nature, technology, and human values. One such vision depicts a future where nature is governed by AI, with freedom as a core value and people prioritizing the soul over what is material. In this future, the big contradiction lies in the fact that AI prioritizes the image of nature over human beings. Here, Mother Earth is sacred, and what’s unexpected is the sense that all can become one—and the invisible, visible. Fashion is all about connection and the fashion artefact representing this future is an empathic air shoe which enables the connection among human beings, nature, and AI.
Another group envisioned a dystopian future where daily life is governed by the need for flexibility and emotional safety. Their fashion artefact, a multifunctional backpack with various features and alternatives, embodies adaptability and comfort, expressing a desire for a “fluffy” existence in the midst of uncertainty. It seems that the backpack isn't just practical—it becomes a symbol of psychological and physical cushioning in a world that feels increasingly unstable.
Another perspective came from a group who emphasized the value of protection, specifically of privacy and identity, in a highly digitalized world. This future includes a raincoat—only one over a lifetime—that not only shields the body for privacy but also allows the wearer to project multiple identities. In this narrative, fashion seems to become a tool for both safeguarding data and exploring fluidity in self-representation.
Yet another group envisioned a divided world again, where privilege is marked by access to AI-integrated smart fabrics, while the less privileged rely on natural materials. Here, survival takes center stage as the core value. The group picked the raincoat card again, and they imagined it enhanced with sensors—reflecting the necessity of technology for those who can afford it, in contrast with the resilience of those grounded in nature-based solutions.
As Clarice Garcia noted in the final reflections, these divergent yet overlapping visions reveal shared anxieties of our time. The recurring presence of protection—from environmental threats, digital exposure, or societal division—demonstrates how current fears shape our speculations about the future. Through technological artefacts or symbolic garments, each group unpacked values like safety, identity, connection, and survival in multifaceted ways, offering a tapestry of fashion as a language for future-making.
Despite the deep focus required and the occasional anxiety that surfaced while reflecting on these uncertain futures, the workshop was an enjoyable and enriching experience. Although I believe there are still some gaps to bridge between the workshop and its potential influence on real-world decision-making processes, introducing a clearer time horizon could strengthen the connection between speculation and strategy. Likewise, making the underlying values—such as sustainability, equity, and collective responsibility—more explicit from the outset might help participants ground their creative explorations in principles that support actionable, long-term visions. In this sense, the method’s power lies not only in what it imagines, but in how it might begin to shape the way we think, plan, and decide together—well beyond the context of the workshop itself.
The event provided us with a space not only for strategic thinking but also for emotional and creative engagement, prompting us to rethink how we consider the objects of our daily lives. The framework challenged us to see clothing not just as a product but as a process—a relational object through which society makes sense of itself. And in a time of environmental breakdown, social fragmentation, and technological acceleration, this reorientation may prove not only necessary but also insightful.
The venue itself, MOMus–Museum of Modern Art, played a key role in shaping the day. As a space dedicated to celebrating modern visual culture, its architecture and curatorial vision enhanced the speculative atmosphere. There was something profoundly poetic about discussing fashion futures amidst exhibitions that themselves challenged traditional perceptions and aesthetic norms. We found ourselves surrounded by Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory, a powerful exhibition bridging textile heritage with contemporary artistic interpretation, and the evocative energy of the Russian Avant-Garde collection, which provided a compelling journey through revolutionary visual languages and philosophical inquiry. These exhibitions created an immersive environment harmonizing perfectly with the themes of imagination, transformation, and cultural reflection central to the Fashion Futuring workshop, reinforcing an open dialogue between past, present, and future possibilities.
Heartfelt thanks to the organizers and fellow participants. The thoughtful facilitation by Clarice Garcia, the insightful contributions of Epaminondas Christophilopoulos—UNESCO Chair in Futures Research and MOMus President—as well as those of Stavros Mantzanakis and Eliza Savvopoulou from Helenos Consulting, along with the warmth of all the invited experts and the Thessaloniki community, created a rare kind of gathering: intellectually stimulating, emotionally meaningful, and deeply human.
As this pilot feeds into the broader Eye of Europe project, it contributes to a growing body of knowledge about how we might collectively design for desirable futures—not just in fashion, but across all systems of human and planetary interactions.
Let this be just the beginning.