Emotional Conscience in Fashion Design: Exploring Beyond The Periphery Of Educational Language

The research paper aims to disseminate the need for fashion educators to accept responsibility for re-shaping the moral attitudes of our future fashion designers, specifically relating to issues of diversity, beauty, image and size.

Fashion and beauty are symbiotic components in a global and expanding industry. Permeating the consciousness of consumers worldwide, an unrelenting stream of visuals from television and film, to popular culture, arts and literature relay the current prognosis for supposed image and beauty ideals. Fashion, in its breadth of multifaceted components, serves as a hypercritical dictator of beauty and body ideals, communicating an unrepentant and often subliminal critique of the human form.

The fashion industry stands firm against criticism for its continual promotion of airbrushed teenage models, whose altered body proportions and plasticized skin clearly bypassed the design of natural evolution. Designers and fashion influencers continue to seek impacting marketing strategies through advertising campaigns and magazines where supposedly inspirational images of beautiful women are dependant on altered artifice and impossible youth.

The paper explores new territories of educational language, and will argue for the need for a global recognition and commitment to improving the self-esteem of consumers through emotionally considerate design, marketing and branding. Through creative projects and challenging academic research the aim is to promote and reinstate a healthier attitude towards diverse image and beauty. In uniting academics across the spectrum of fashion education, the anticipated re-shaping of student thinking will ultimately impact positively on the future of the fashion industry.