Deep Supply Chains of Fast Fashion

What is the role of architecture and technology in today’s global supply chains?  How is the highly non-automatable paradigm of the garment industry a test-case for post-human labour future? How might we use technology to reverse, reveal or interrupt apparently frictionless modes of production.

Is the future of work… other people working?

The aim of the workshop is to consider, map and speculate about the realities of the global fashion industry through the lens of it’s infrastructural footprint and spatial organisation, exploring how the material realities of the hyper competitive model of contemporary consumer fashion, driven by trend forecasting, algorithmic profiling and supply chain automation in ever quicker cycles.

Collective Supply Chain Mapping. A group task examining the broad and complex range of factors affecting the global fashion industry from production through to delivery now and in the near future. The aim is to create a large wall-based map revealing the links between seemingly disparate actors, from the now hyper-accelerated trend cycles of fashion marketers and online retailers, to global distribution networks, capital flows and investment mechanism.