Rags

This is something I wrote for a fashion company I worked for that made me wear.

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The future is a shaky present, a blowback to a past that is either forgotten accidentally or otherwise never digested fully. It’s a never-ending nowhere, a hope to put a flag onto a land that has no country. Or want to be one for that matter.

But the future of fashion can be figured out. It is not some patchwork of guesses or an ever-tightening cycle of previous trends (especially in neckties). Nor is it something that Oscar Wilde said was so disgusting that it requires reinvention every few decades. Rather, it is found in you. On you. By you.

The future of fashion is you.

At Shelfies, an outrageous clothing brand that is designed in Toronto to make you smile, this is clearly evident. In three years, we have seen unprecedented growth in creating clothes with our audience, rather than for them. There is no hierarchical disposition, some gentle tutelage of colours and ideas of niceties. The ugly is celebrated alongside the aesthetic. The horrendous among the happy. What is important is that judgments aren’t made by the judges, but the jury. The audience. The one’s who want, who wish, who will the products into existence.

This isn’t some warped demand of capitalism. Such possible personalization is a consequence of the internet of things. Where anything is available, fashion needs to be just as flexible. It must change. It must bend. It must have a picture of a fat, fluffy cat on an equally fat, dripping burger if necessary.

All of this is an extension of the oft-quoted user experience – a way in which to understand a person’s journey while also designing for it. Yet X, lead person in the maker industry, has sited the shift in consumers becoming producers. With ever disruptive capacities, the hold on power and decisions will dilute.

This is what Shelfies helps to do (without drinking all the kool-aid). It hands the seams, the idea, the very function of fashion back to those who may want it.  What we open up is the possibility one can build themselves as they themselves wish to be built.

This is the future, and it is less what where one reaps what they sew but instead, one sews what one reaps. Hopefully, with us, this will be fertile fashion.