Mahatma Gandhi and the model of fashion education, activism and system(s) in India

Abstract

Abstract Prominent fashion educators, namely Lidewij Edelkoort and Jose Teunissen, have time and again pointed towards the crisis of a fast-fashion system marked by the rapid and excessive production–consumption patterns that manifest a throwaway society within the vast cultural wastelands. As Edelkoort has pointed out in her manifesto ‘Anti_Fashion’ (2015), it may sound quite ironic but we still educate our young people to become catwalk designers and unique individuals. However, our society demands exchange, new economy and working together in teams as well as groups. Pedagogy, in this precise sense apropos to the fast-fashion system, is indeed based upon a flat ontological ground or singular identity, which resembles a vast agricultural field protected by the scarecrow in order to harvest only a particular type of crop. What is required is a type of wilderness – an ecosystem; an interdependent as well as symbiotic relationship among the heterogeneous groups of individuals to realize life’s capacity to flourish and maximize its true potential. Here, the question is this: in what ways does fashion education play an active role in inculcating the values of cooperative, collaborative, correlative and collective modes of production–consumption within contemporary fashion system(s)? This article argues that the Gandhian model has great potential in articulating possibilities that are quite timely and crucial in relation to the present discourse on fashion system(s). The Gandhian model encompasses Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of ecology, work, crafts, education and fashion. The article suggests that the Gandhian model is subversive in nature and does inculcate the values of cooperative, collaborative, correlative and collective modes of production–consumption whilst facilitating a spirit of activism in order to imagine fashion outside the purview of industrial and post-industrial capitalism. Here, the dialectics of the life (praxis) versus mechanization (techne) appear to be an obvious trap, which the article avoids by developing a kind of dialogical framework – a relationship to the environment quite radically different than that of humanism and anthropocentrism.