(Title image: Visitor looking at the display of Hannah's ‘Out of This World’ workshop set-up at The Lab E20, 2023. Image Credit: Alexa Pollman)

The Fashion Values Challenge, our creative call out to fashion changemakers, has now drawn to a close. Our six finalists’ projects were presented at the recent Fashion Values Showcase which took place at the 2024 Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen. During the Showcase, our Challenge winners Hannah Riley (Emergent) and Tina Wetshi (Professional) were revealed!

We recently caught up with Emergent winner Hannah, whose open-access toolkit Fashion Recipes for the Future impressed the judges with its unique and playful approach to inspiring individuals and communities to engage with fashion in a meaningful way. This creative toolkit takes the form of a cookbook, offering playful ‘recipes’ (activities) for people of all ages to explore alternative ways of experiencing fashion. Hannah places an important focus on education through play in her work, weaving various learning approaches such as experimental dress-up, creative writing and role-play storytelling to encourage communities to re-imagine the ordinary and consider the ‘what-ifs?’ in fashion.

(Image: Fashion Recipes for the Future Website)

Since winning, Hannah attended the Global Fashion Summit, has started one-to-one mentoring with industry leaders to evolve her project, and has joined this year’s Next Gen Assembly cohort. Let’s learn more about her experience of the Challenge and what she has planned for her work as she answers our burning questions!

“Fashion Values truly values the people who are trying to transform fashion for the better, and the ways they explore these transformations, foregrounding earth and equity.” - Hannah Riley, Emergent Winner

What drew you to the challenge and what made you apply?

I was drawn to apply to the Fashion Values (FV) Challenge because it recognises that fashion can be a force for vitality, joy and inclusion, rather than ill-treatment, destruction and exclusion.

Many sustainability initiatives are surface level and are designed to bolster business rather than the individuals taking part or the advocated causes. I wanted to apply because of the mentorship opportunity with industry leaders. While the FV awards aren’t monetary like many challenges, the experience, support, insight and recognition are indispensable as an emerging fashion practitioner.

As an Emergent applicant, I was particularly drawn to the potential for attending the Global Fashion Summit as it is quite cost prohibitive as an individual and attending as part of the Next Gen Assembly is invaluable because of the support and industry recognition.

I applied because I believe my project has significant potential for expanded use in formal and informal educational spaces, fostering co-creation, enhancing play and speculation and enabling transformative learning and fashion experiences that denote a shared respect for all of humanity and earth globally.

How does this year’s central theme of ‘cultures of wellbeing’ resonate with you?

The theme ‘cultures of wellbeing’ strongly resonates with me because it encapsulates the need for fashion to prioritise the decoupling of prosperity with financial and material wealth and growth, and instead value fashion ecosystems where all human and more-than-human beings can thrive, and earth equity is centred.

Likewise, I wholeheartedly advocate for fashion systems that value wellbeing for all cultures and communities involved, including the more-than-human. Fashion which places cultures of wellbeing at its heart is how fashion can and should operate. The theme particularly resonates with me as this is a value I hold strongly and a notion that has been ever-present in my work. My practice centres creative learning methods, play, imagination and speculative future thinking to enhance personal, societal and planetary wellbeing.

The theme speaks to the core issues of fashion; its exploitative and extractive colonial power structures and ways of being, which are irreversibly harming our finite planet. I believe that fashion can provide genuine wellbeing but is being undercut by the prevailing capitalist economic system and thinking that values fashion through material and financial wealth and growth. We need to shift our mindsets and Fashion Values aids in this process.

(Image: examples of 'recipe' explorations from Fashion Recipes for the Future)

What does being a Challenge winner mean to you?

I am absolutely delighted to have won the Emergent Fashion Values award. It is an invaluable opportunity to continue developing this project, which contributes towards a nascent research and education area, addressing the need for more and alternative sustainability engagement and learning.

This recognition highlights the importance of fashion education for sustainability and engagement that encourages shifts in values and behaviours, challenging relationships with clothing and consumption.

What do you want to see change in fashion as a result of your work? What’s next for you to achieve this change?

My aim is this toolkit will be collaboratively played with children, young people and adults globally, intending to shift our relationship with Fashion from valuing quantity to quality, material qualities and experience.

I hope to empower all, but especially children and young people, combining play and education with fashion to create beneficial wellbeing outcomes that foster shifts in consciousness rather than a solutions-based mindsets.

I aim to help people engage more imaginatively with their wardrobes and with fashion, to increase clothing utilisation and care, and to unearth empowering and invigorating fashion engagement.

I would like to see children and young people’s imagination and perspectives valued, respected and utilised in collaboratively dismantling and transforming Fashion into an ecosystem built on joy, revitalisation, inclusion and care. Children and young people are valuable critiques and should be active participants in shaping fashion’s future. I hope fashion design education for sustainability will be integrated into education across all ages, in curriculums and in all educational spaces, whether that be in classrooms, workshops or at home.

I am looking forward to gaining expert advice and insight from industry leaders to augment my project and transform it from working prototype to a fully-fledged project. I hope to host more workshops to develop and iterate the ‘recipes’. I am excited to develop my professional practice, evolving dialogic and participatory ways to explore play, dress-up, imagination and speculative future thinking in design pedagogy and practice.

Tell us about your experience at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen and being a member of the Next Gen Assembly

The knowledge, insight and experience gained already from attending the Global Fashion Summit and being a part of the Next Gen Assembly (NGA) has been indispensable to my personal and professional development. I have felt buoyed by the entire experience - working with my NGA peers , Global Fashion Agenda, Centre for Sustainable Fashion and with industry professionals. Being a NGA member has been an invaluable opportunity to extend not only my own learning, knowledge and capabilities, but to also explore ways we can collectively dismantle fashion’s dominant buy-sell narrative to centre wellbeing across the system.

The richness and strength of the NGA is enhanced by the coalescing of everyone’s distinctive personal, cultural and educational backgrounds. It has been an enriching personal and professional experience to deep dive into how fashion can value cultures of wellbeing and to collaboratively develop ways to create tangible action and shift. Peer-to-peer learning has strengthened our individual practices and us as a collective. I’m thrilled to continue working with them- we are only just getting started!

(Image: Hannah speaking at the 2024 Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen)

To find out more about Fashion Recipes for the Future and Hannah’s work, take a look at her website, where you can find more details about the pedagogic methods she employs in the project, the philosophy behind it and her ambitions for the future. You can explore the large catalogue of ‘recipes’ (activities) and find lots of useful tips on how to ‘play’ them. The recipes are designed to be played, interpreted and led by both adults and young people together- in classrooms, workshops or home spaces.

There is even a digital play space, where you can sign up to collaborate and share ideas and outcomes with other ‘cooks’ who are taking on the recipes. As the tagline of the website aptly expresses, the project encourages us to build a joyful future of fashion by throwing out the traditional rulebook and granting ourselves the space to unleash our inner child and imagination.

"An out-of-this-world approach to engaging in fashion!" - Fashion Recipes for the Future

We will be sharing more about our journey and the reflections from those who have engaged and collaborated with us along the way, so keep your eyes here and on the Fashion Values social channels for more exciting content!