How fungi can detoxify the fashion industry and fashion education
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What do two seemingly unrelated subjects such as fungi and fashion have to do with each other? According to Chet Bugter, the new head of the master’s course Critical Fashion Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, a lot, actually! For him and Alia Mascia, a second-year master’s participant in the Critical Fashion Practices course, it is high time to reimagine the way the fashion industry operates. They discuss how a model drawing inspiration from fungi is essential to that revamping.
ArtEZ University of the Arts is a University of Applied Sciences with its headquarters in Arnhem, the Netherlands. With 800 students, the Academy of Art & Design Rietveld in Arnhem, where the Bachelor in Fashion Design is one of the programmes students can choose, is the largest academy at ArtEZ.
In the ArtEZ master course ‘Critical Fashion Practices’, students learn to explore alternative, ‘non-industrial modes and frameworks for making, doing, seeing and experiencing fashion and clothes’, the school website reads. www.artez.nl
Chet, along with his colleague Hanka van der Voet, co-authored ‘A Fruiting Body of Collective Labour: Working Towards a De-Hierarchised System for Fashion Education’. It is a manifesto and guide on the master’s course’s vision to detoxify the fashion education industry of its harmful pedagogical and structural mindset.
Fashion education as a supportive system
The idea behind the manifesto came from fungal networks, specifically mycorrhizal systems, which enable trees to communicate with and support each other in a forest. It is not communication that we recognise as humans, so through language, but communication through nutrient exchange. This exchange is only possible through the trees’ symbiotic relationships with fungi that wrap around the trees’ roots, and more broadly speaking, only possible through cooperation and collective thinking.
Chet: “We wanted the Critical Fashion Practices course to resemble this supportive system. In a fungal network, which usually runs so much deeper than we see with the naked eye, if one part gets sick, the other parts send it nutrients to recover. We saw a clear similarity in how we wanted our learning community to be. The usual structure in fashion education is rather hierarchical: there is one person who sort of ‘knows it all’ (for example: a star designer), everyone works in association with them and if they can’t be there, then everyone else is lost. Instead, our idea is that all the different participants in this school network have the same amount of power and responsibility to keep the learning environment thriving.”
These alumni have invented themselves. Joris and Tessa have been looking for something that suits them, but for which there is also clearly a place in the industry. Their work has clearly been picked up.
Mycorrhizal systems as a catalyst for positive growth
That kind of approach can be seen in every detail of the course, from the type of assignments given to a feedback-based evaluation system and to the language used to describe each other. In the course, students are called “participants,” not students to emphasise that everyone has insight to offer. “There are also regular opportunities for feedback,” Chet adds. “This is so that the lecturers don’t get stuck on curriculum ideas that we think will work well but don’t actually work for the participants.” Of course, there is always room for further growth. “But this is the beauty of this kind of system,” Chet reflects. “It compounds the positive growth it creates and extends the network even more.”
Fashion education as an open source database
What is this kind of structure like for a student? For Alia, it was a dream come true. “I come from a more traditional fashion education background, where you are mostly prepared to enter the fashion industry and perpetuate its extremely unsustainable pace, without many creative opportunities unless you become a star designer. According to her, the fungal approach makes it easier for her to tackle her research, as well as the research itself being enriched by so much peer collaboration. Alia: “It's like working with an open source database. It’s not competitive, it’s more human. You make a connection with someone, and they can help you find the missing aspects of what you’re researching, that you didn’t know you needed.”
”Of course it takes time, but I think changes are starting to happen in fashion education.”
Prompt change from the inside out
Alia’s future interests are also educational: promoting this kind of “mycorrhizal approach” not just in fashion education but also in everyday life. She says she wants to bring what she learned at ArtEZ to other educational environments and help those places adapt their programmes to this context. “Just coming to university and knowing you can rely on each other and get feedback, that makes our lessons focused on what matters: giving the best version of ourselves and our work intrinsically. I want to continue showing our field that this approach is possible and, in fact, necessary.”
Alia: “Being a working part of an educational institution can also be helpful for meaningful reform because you can prompt change from the inside out. Of course, it takes time, but I think changes are starting to happen in fashion education.”