HIBERNATION
Fashion & Textiles
Autumn/Winter 2024—25
The fear of an escalating war and inflation, coupled with generalised social unrest and threatening political conflict, influences people to invent alternative ways to survive winters by keeping temperatures lower, wearing clothing in layers, embracing knitwear and adopting blankets at home. We cook one-pan meals to save gas, we huddle together as a group to keep warm and we cuddle up with loved ones to stay cosy. We swaddle our new-borns and imitate the gesture for our own wellness at any age. We learn how to underdress, to double dress, and we protect ourselves with heavier outer garments. Scarves and gloves are back, as are knitted socks, caps, cowls and balaclavas. Worn with fur-lined slippers and boots. Even with clement winter weather, the preparations are laborious and bring in a new vision of fashions that are solution-driven but also innovative and of another, more absolute order.
These multiple, protective behaviour patterns resemble the way some animals get ready to hibernate and that is why this forecasting volume is dedicated to, and inspired by, the various ways of enduring winter, by lowering thermostats, digging in processes, nesting and burrowing, and the transformations of colour and camouflage. Whereas some mammals go into a deep sleep for most of winter, others find solace in drying, freezing, shivering or even the inactive state of torpor. With hoarding and gathering together are other survivalist instincts. These variations are manifold and fascinating as fashion fantasies! We people have a lot to learn from the solutions animals and even plants and trees have found to beat the weather at its own game, surviving and thriving almost because of its severeness.
— Lidewij Edelkoort
PREVIOUS FORECAST
THE GREAT DISRUPTION
Spring / Summer 2024 Fashion & Textiles
In the wake of the pandemic, the Great Disruption is on its way to thoroughly change society to its core, transforming all aspects of life and design in its wake, rejuvenating culture from a most radical point of view. People are migrating from urban to rural housing and resigning from their jobs to become autonomous, leading to clothes that are comfortable and constructed at the same time. Choosing craft as their pastime, fashion embraces the made by hand and celebrates life to the fullest, indulging in antique and embellished textiles. Collecting beauty as a form of therapy, people might live in isolation and need places that heal, introducing healthwear as a new category. With the current disruption of trade, the public starts to understand that it has to become more independent and that local and regional sources should be coveted. People realise that autarchy is a future requirement and that the skill of improvisation will be vital for our survival. A junior generation will have to work hard at saving what can be preserved, establishing climate justice and adopting a lifestyle that takes care of all sentient beings, including people and animals, soil and water, plants and planet. The need for change is so great that some will even disappear down the rabbit hole called the internet, hiding in a world of spellbinding imagination where dreams are animated and outfits captivating. — L.E.
ARCHAEOLOGY:
fragments of past & future
autumn / winter 2023—24
Fashion & Textile Forecast
Pivotal trends are excavated from the earliest of times to the latest of futures and will bring a sense of awe, from the human ability to design itself into being to how people design themselves out of the realm of reality. Humankind has managed to invent pigments, materials, metals, tools, textiles, food recipes and culture, and continues to invent colour sources, recycle materials, hybridise metals, tackle tools, weave new fibre, design exceptional foods and write, sculpt, paint, photograph and dance. People are genius and it is good to recall this in terrible troubled times, when aggression and separatism, negligence and racism, as well as blatant patriotism, risk taking over. Somehow, to understand the primitive human is to grasp our basic instinct for survival over the barbarian practices of today, and this helps us remain connected by our capacity for invention and improvisation. If humans have always been that resourceful, we cannot be that bad after all?