Governance for Tomorrow: rethinking how luxury fashion makes decisions

Taking place during Sustainable Fashion Week, the event marked the midpoint of Governance for Tomorrow, a three-year research programme exploring how new approaches to governance could reshape decision-making within luxury fashion.

Drawing on the programme’s first 18 months of research and collaboration, the evening transformed its emerging thinking into an immersive experience. Guests were invited not only to encounter the research, but to question, respond and contribute their perspectives to help inform the programme’s next phase.

From education to governance

Governance for Tomorrow builds on a long-term partnership between CSF and Kering, which began in 2014 and has evolved across education, research and industry engagement.

Early work focused on supporting students, graduates and emerging creative innovation, before expanding into open-access education on sustainability and luxury fashion. As the partnership developed, attention increasingly turned towards a more fundamental question: how and where decisions are made within fashion.

Introducing the evening, Dilys Williams, Professor Emerita in Fashion Design for Earth and Equity at UAL and founding Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, reflected on how this evolution led the partnership to explore governance and the structures influencing how fashion behaves:

“It became irresistible and indisputable that we had to think about governance in fashion – the decision makers and decision making – and to think about this idea of companies as beings, and how they could behave differently.”

Governance for Tomorrow takes this exploration into the boardroom, asking how a wider range of voices, perspectives and forms of knowledge could be represented where decisions are made.

Central to the programme is a focus on three perspectives of justice – intergenerational, intragenerational and interspecies. Together, these encourage decision-makers to look beyond the immediate present: considering past and future generations; different cultures, places and ways of knowing; and the more-than-human living systems on which fashion depends.

Bringing the research to life

At the Barbican, the research moved beyond the boardroom and into a shared experience, inviting guests to explore and contribute to the ideas being developed through Governance for Tomorrow.

Conceptualising luxury fashion companies as living ‘beings’ – shaped by their relationships with people, places, cultures and the natural world – guests navigated three interconnected thematic zones.

Future Beings explored how the voices of past, present and future generations could inform decision-making and encourage longer-term practices of care and stewardship. Cultural Beings considered the cultures, knowledge and relationships that shape decisions, while More-than-human Beings asked how nature and living systems might be represented within governance, perhaps even through emerging technologies such as AI.

Through immersive environments, interactive encounters, games, films and multisensory installations, guests were encouraged to question established approaches to decision-making and collectively imagine new forms of governance, behaviour and value in luxury fashion.

The experience culminated in a reflective boardroom, where participants responded to provocations and questions informed by the research to date and co-created with Middlesex University.

Reflecting on the participatory nature of the evening, Dilys said: “This evening was really about us sharing with you what’s happened so far, but also us understanding from you how we might move forward.”

Listening to different voices

Speaking on behalf of Kering, Marion Carpio-Anglars, Chief of Staff, Sustainability and Institutional Affairs, reflected on the many people, communities, skills and natural systems behind fashion that may not always be visible within conventional decision-making.

“Fashion is made of all of these voices, the visible and the invisible, and listening to them is what makes it strong. Governance for Tomorrow helps us listen more closely, and tonight it invites us to imagine the luxury company as a living being, and to see its choices through the eyes of future generations, of different cultures and ways of knowing, and of nature – the more-than-human life that keeps us all alive.”

Her reflections built on the partnership’s longstanding focus on education and the next generation, while highlighting Governance for Tomorrow’s ambition to create space for a wider range of voices where decisions are made.

Looking ahead

Being and Beings in Luxury Fashion marked an important moment in the continuing development of Governance for Tomorrow.

Over its first 18 months, the programme has brought together research, creative practice and contributions from its prototype Stewardship Board, Advisory Board, students, academics and collaborators to explore different approaches to governance and stewardship.

The perspectives gathered through the event will now help inform the next 12 months of the programme as the team continues to develop and test new thinking around governance in luxury fashion.

Find out more about Governance for Tomorrow and the people involved in the programme on the CSF website.