This paper shares research being developed through an Art and Humanities Research Council, Creative Industries Cluster funded 5-year project, the aim of which is to transform the competitiveness, agility and creative output of the UK’s fashion industry. Its focus is to develop innovative , multidisciplinary STEAM+D based fashion designers, industry facing training, and education for post graduates fashion students, breaking down traditional fashion and technology silos.

Through their work a group of researchers at the Royal College of Art attached to the Future Fashion Factory Project (FFF) propose fashion thinking as a new rational for fashion education that has three distinct strands – fashion thinking for social- change, fashion thinking for applied specialisation and fashion thinking through advanced manufacturing. Fashion thinking through advanced manufacturing is discussed here highlighting Discourse ,a tool developed to enable investigation into current pedagogic models, and revealing the importance of developing new language competencies for fashion.

The conference was due to take place in June 2020 but was postponed.