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Imagining Possibilities
Inviting ideas of the way things might be, based on the core value of living well together in a more than human world.
“Creativity is never a solo endeavour, it involves the living world, the air we breathe, the earth we tread and our fellow beings."
Prof Dilys Williams | Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion
November 2023 marked fifteen years of our work across fashion and sustainability. To celebrate this milestone, we embarked on a year of Imagining Possibilities, creating a living lab where demonstrations of our interdependencies can be experienced. We continue to explore this work today, asking, what might the future of fashion be if we place earth and equity at the heart?
Imagining Possibilities Events 2026
Led by Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), London College of Fashion (LCF), UAL, the ‘Imagining Possibilities’ project aims to radically imagine what fashion sustainability and an education for all might look like in tomorrow’s world.
This series of six events in London across June and July, led by CSF researchers, explores co-imagining in a variety of contexts, formats and practices.
Wednesday 24 June
Work and photo by Dr Mila Burcikova.
Co-imagining Fashion with Nature-based Teaching and Learning – with Dr Mila Burcikova
Wednesday 24 June, 2:15 - 3:15pm
London College of Fashion, Room 421
Interactive natural dyeing workshop:
Explore the colours and plants around East Bank that can be used as a dye stuff. This workshop provides an introduction to extracting colour from natural matter; plants, fruits and vegetables.
Create two to three physical dye baths to create painting inks. Work alongside the LCF textiles team as they develop their new dye gardens across the balconies and get inspiration for your own school/college/community setting.
Designed for East London educators working with primary and secondary-aged children and young people. This workshop is part of East Ed Summer Conference, held at LCF.
Work by Lucy Orta. Photo by Jonty Wilde
Co-imagining Cultural Heritage Futures – with Professor Lucy Orta
Wednesday 24 June, 12:00pm - 2:00pm
London College of Fashion, Room 722
Conversation & cultural exchange:
A gathering space inspired by Professor Lucy Orta's research into textile dwelling throughout Saudi Arabia, and the tradition of the Majlis, a place of community gathering, conviviality and storytelling, open to all.
A place to sit, share and be heard. All students and staff from all cultures and heritages are warmly invited.
Friday 26 June
Photo by Prof Helen Storey.
Co-imagining Possibilities: On Peace & Making – with Professor Helen Storey
11:00am - 2:00pm
London College of Fashion, Room G09
The workshop ends at 13.00, followed by a complementary light lunch until 14.00.
Collaborative and experiential session
Through scent, film, sound and making, Professor Helen Storey will share her practice and journey of working with makers from Zaatari and Dzaleka Refugee Camps. She will show how material conversations and deep collaboration over 30 years now guide the co-creation of a new curriculum.
Helen will be joined by the MA Fashion, Textiles Technologies community, who together seek to better the lives of refugees, whilst providing unique life experience for students. The workshop will also have an interactive component, that quietly brings alive the experience of peace through making.
Photo by Lalitha Alwan.
Co-imagining Possibilities: On Courage & Restoration – with Dr Francesco Mazzarella
Friday 26 June, 1:00pm - 4:00pm
London College of Fashion, Room G09
The session starts at 13.00 with a complementary light lunch, and the workshop itself starts at 14.00.
Facilitated engagement with artefacts, participatory and speculative design activities
Dr Francesco Mazzarella will facilitate the session with the aim of exploring how fashion can act as a vehicle for social change, by centring the lived experience of displaced individuals who are often marginalised in dominant creative practice.
Holding a restorative Circle of Courage, we will embody an ethics of care, engaging with artefacts, participatory and speculative design activities, mediated by card decks that support socially just relations and fashion practices. Throughout the afternoon, you will co-imagine what skills, mindsets, and methods future creatives should develop to facilitate spaces of welcome and socially just futures.
Wednesday 1 July
Monday 20 July
Photo by Aleks Faust.
Co-imagining Inclusive Prosperity and Entrepreneurship in Alternative Fashion Economies – with Professor Sandy Black
Wednesday 1 July, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
British Council
Conversation
This event brings together fashion businesses and support organisations to reflect and map out their current practices and envisage the evolving ecosystem needed to nurture emerging fashion entrepreneurs. It will reflect on the mindsets, skills and qualities required to foster thriving and resilient businesses, and contemplate what might need to be done differently. Guest speakers include:
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Christopher Raeburn of Raeburn Design, upcycled, repurposed and responsible design for menswear, womenswear and accessories.
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Kae Katz from Fibrelab, a textile upcycling business start-up based in East London, turning textile waste from the fashion and hospitality sectors into valuable recycled fibres for new products.
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Emily Taylor of SAGES, a natural dyes company, making sustainable dyes from food waste.
We will also be joined by Lauren Junestrand, Innovation and Sustainability Network Manager from UKFT, Helen Lax, Director of Fashion District business support organisation, and Sally Denton from FTTI (Fashion Textiles and Technology Institute at LCF/UAL).
Photo by Dr Seher Mirza.
Co-imagining Futures with Indigenous Communities and the More-than-Human – with Dr Seher Mirza
Monday 20 July, 12:00pm-1:30pm, 2:30pm-4:00pm
British Council
The unfinished receptacle and its strands: connection, collaboration, collective making
Join us in exploring our collective futures, amidst original work by students and by Brazil’s Kaingang Indigenous community, in response to themes of water and nature as climate and social justice provocations.
A digital artefact will narrate this live story, going on to weave in your contributions. Through the unfinished Kaingang basket as a physical and metaphoric receptacle, we explore its strands and webs of interconnected humans, the living world and our practices. Spaces of encounter, and community-led learnings will steer co-imagination - animated by senses and spirit.
Dr Seher Mirza will lead a participatory three-part activity, centering our body, hands and perspectives. These responses will be added to the digital artefact through recordings including your own short sound or video vignettes, contributing to the sense of the circle or spiral as an evolving container for our collective futures. Finally, we will weave our responses into the Kaingang basket.
Imagining Possibilities: On Hope
Field Day 2025
On 26 June 2025, Centre for Sustainable Fashion hosted the Field Day ‘Imagining Possibilities: On Hope’.
We created a convivial space where curious minds came together to explore ways we can use hopeful practice to imagine better possibilities for living well together in a more-than-human world, in and through fashion.
Programme Activities
Hope(ful) Meditation and Hope(ful) Cards
The Hope(ful) Meditation and Cards are designed to create a critical, empathetic, reflexive, reflective and thoughtful dialogue around hope, personally and conceptually. Amidst deep ecological, climate and humanitarian crises, these Hope(ful) practices are intended to challenge our preconceived ideas of hope and encourage new ways of thinking about hope to catalyse ourselves and communities into action. The Hope(ful) Card practice draws from Ella Saltmarshes' ‘The Long Time Dialogue’ methodology, in which participants in pairs engage in free-associating dialogue and empathetic listening.
Workshopping a New Fashion System
This workshop reimagines fashion through justice-focused, speculative design. It challenges current systems, drawing on Donna Haraway’s work and encouraging participants to build their own value-led fashion futures. Through collaborative exercises and creative exploration, the session cultivates hopeful, imaginative approaches to reshaping the fashion sector.
A Walking Conversation: Embracing Hope and Uncertainty
Engage in walking as a critical practice with CSF educators at LCF’s East Bank campus, traversing the surrounding area. This workshop explores relationships between bodies, spaces, and environments using pocket prompts on hope and imagination. Walking becomes a research method to foster empathy, connection, and creative conversations in a shared landscape.
Voices of Hope for Sanctuary: I Migrated – Pockets of Love – Lifeline
Through storytelling and collaborative making, this series spotlighted migrant and refugee experiences. It featured creative projects from LCF MA students and Dzaleka Refugee Camp makers, encouraging compassion and connection through shared testimony, artistic expression, and lived experience. Lifeline invites participatory engagement with objects, a zine and embroidered testimonies, challenging negative mainstream narratives.
Staying with the Trouble Conversations
A space for open dialogue on sustainability, inspired by the Staying with the Trouble manifesto. We will share texts, artworks, videos, or ideas centred on sustainability themes and discuss together. The session encourages critical thinking, curiosity, and collective reflection - deepening our understanding of sustainability and cultivating hope through communal exchange.
Collective Hope for Social Innovation – Meet the UAL DESIS Lab
Meet UAL DESIS Lab members in this workshop focused on design for social innovation. Connect with others, share experiences, and explore ideas for collaborative projects. The session creates space for hopeful, creative approaches to sustainable and socially impactful design.
Fashion Legacies – A Creative Quartet with Unlimited Hope
This experimental co-design workshop invites participants to reimagine fashion’s global future through spectacle, performance, and imaginative action. The creative process embraces the idea of ‘imagining otherwise,’ offering limitless, hopeful possibilities for transforming fashion into a more inclusive and expressive system. Facilitated by CSF and John Wood.
Imagining Possibilities Festival 2024
From 17th to 20th April 2024, Centre for Sustainable Fashion hosted the inaugural LCF Fashion Undressed: Imagining Possibilities Festival.
The festival expanded possibilities to live well together in a more than human world, in and through fashion, shifting the narrative of emergency, to a narrative of emergence into new ways of living.
London College of Fashion (LCF) and The Lab E20 were activated by captivating performers, poets, practitioners, designers, dancers, and writers, creating spaces for radical, active imagining, reflexive thinking and forward visioning.
The festival provided an opportunity for critical reflection, collaboration and questioning existing logic and assumptions, to spark ideas for radical action as we envision fashion’s role in creating a future where all can thrive.
The Lab E20 Partnership
We have partnered with The Lab E20 to explore the Future of Fashion through a programme of reciprocity between ourselves, RÆBURN and Get Living.
The partnership involves a generative, emergent and possibility-expanding experimentation that is place-shaping and sense-making.
We seek to put aside the logic that confines us, working together through creativity. How might we contribute to social and cultural distinctions and connections through fashion?
Sustainability Social 2024
On 28th Feb 2024, we celebrated fifteen years of changemaking in and through fashion, together with alumni from MA Fashion Futures and MA Fashion and the Environment. This inaugural gathering highlighted Centre for Sustainable Fashion's (CSF) global reach, showcasing CSF’s impact across industries, generations, cultures and communities.
Insightful conversations were led by Professor Dilys Williams, envisioning hopeful future scenarios for fashion, joined by our special guest Clare Press – sustainability communicator, filmmaker, author, and presenter - who launched her latest book, Wear Next.
Joining Dilys and Clare on the panel were Julia Crew - Course Leader for MA Fashion Futures and one of the very first graduates from the 2008 cohort; and recent graduate Kaja Grujic - a film-maker, creative storyteller and member of the CSF x Global Fashion Agenda 2023 Next Gen Assembly.
Designed for Life 2023-2024
From Nov 2023 - Jan 2024 we took part in the Designed for Life (DfL) exhibition, celebrating London College of Fashion's decades-long dedication to using fashion and design as a force for positive change.
CSF projects featured in the exhibition included Decolonising Fashion and Textiles, Dress for Our Time and Traces: Stories of Migration.
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