Fashion is one of the world’s most important creative industries and touches the lives of most people in the world, helping us to construct and communicate our identity as well as providing a livelihood for millions of people. However, its wasteful and environmentally polluting supply chain operations contribute to the climate crisis, all the more so due to the growth of fast fashion which relies on cheap manufacturing, frequent consumption and short-lived garment use before disposal. We desperately need an industry-wide shift to a slower and smaller fashion system to support efforts to meet net-zero targets as a way of mitigating the impacts of man-made global warming.

This project will facilitate collaboration between students from Multimedia Journalism and Fashion at Manchester Met and students from Fashion, Journalism and Digital Media at Pearl Academy in India. Participants will form transnational project teams to create international and local real-world outputs. The theme is slow fashion; slow media which focuses on sustainable fashion stories that can be told by richer, deeper, multimedia outputs that seek to scratch below the surface. Audiences are seeking more meaningful content – the anthesis of ‘the scroll’ – that aligns to the hunger for knowledge building storytelling.

Author Jennifer Rauch in her book “Slow is sustainable, satisfying and smart” states the Slow Movement applies principles like ‘humanism, localism, simplicity, self-reliance and fairness to use and production.’ Along similar lines, Slow Media promotes alternatives to global, corporate media that are often unresponsive to the situated needs of human communities and natural environments. Looking at the world around us, it’s the Slow Movement that humanity needs today in order to live a fuller life. This is not about time but about the relationship with time. It’s about a cultural shift that focuses on ‘quality over quantity’. Slow fashion seeks to extend the use times of garments, encourage considered purchases and emotional attachment to the clothes that we wear, and move away from the wasteful fast fashion business model. This project will attempt to answer questions such as:

– How slowing down the pace of life could open up spaces to consider new values and ideas about wellbeing?

– How can the Slow movement help support economic empowerment / gender equality / climate change and other urgent concerns?

– What are UK and India based designers, brands and activists working on in the slow fashion space?

You will explore UK and India-based ethical fashion brands who are interested in slow and circular solutions for their audiences. Student teams will align around a single story with teams working to produce separate outputs that, put together, tell the whole story.

We welcome contributions from all disciplines including fashion and textile practitioners to creative writers and journalists, from filmmakers and digital artists to social scientists and marketers. Students from diverse subject areas will enjoy a thought-provoking series of online masterclasses stimulating debate and precipitating the need for change.

This activity will run for eight weeks (including Easter break) from 11 March to 3 May. You will have 2 online masterclasses from UK based and India based experts, and a group meeting with your Mentor each week throughout the project and will be expected to develop your outcome through independent study and collaboration with your group. There will be an industry visit in Manchester during Easter break at a mutually convenient time and an online masterclass with sustainable fashion journalist Sophie Benson in the first week. At the end of the project, the longform multimedia output will be published on Shorthand. You will earn a 300 Rise Points on full completion of this project.

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