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This short video showcases a collaboration between BA (Hons) Critical Practice in Fashion Media and The Great Imagining, highlighting the shared commitment to creative education and future-focused thinking at London College of Fashion’s School of Media and Communication.

The Great Imagining is a UK-wide initiative that invites people of all ages to envision and take action toward a greener, fairer and wiser future. Through workshops, assemblies, festivals, symposiums and a wide range of learning resources, they create spaces for collective imagination and practical change.

Working with this ethos, within their Spaces of Experience unit, students on the BA (Hons) Critical Practice in Fashion Media course engaged in interdisciplinary sessions that encouraged them to question existing systems and explore fashion media as a catalyst for social transformation. The unit invited students to imagine and design a conceptual exhibition for young people in Newham and the surrounding area, prompting them to consider how future audiences might engage with LCF’s presence in the borough. Central to this process was the belief that we should not simply imagine our audiences but understand them, collaborate with them and bring them into conversations about change. To support this, students visited Newham Sixth Form College, working with fashion and textiles students to exchange ideas, share creative practices and explore what a meaningful cultural experience for and with local young people could be. The video captures moments from this collaboration, showing how creative practice can intersect with climate literacy, community building and critical storytelling.

The Great Imagining’s mission provided an important framework for the project. Their approach, which brings ecological thinking together with social justice, encouraged students to consider the shifting skills, sensibilities and imaginative capacities needed to shape more sustainable and equitable futures.

Within this speculative context, students developed diverse experiential proposals: from meditative encounters to explorations of mourning dress as a way of processing grief, to activities designed to build empathy by reflecting on the things we value and fear losing. These varied approaches demonstrated a growing awareness of how emotional engagement, creativity and critical reflection can work together to support transformative thinking, deepening the course’s dedication to developing socially engaged practitioners who use fashion media and communication not only to communicate ideas, but to imagine better futures, and to help bring them into being.