Empathy in the fashion industry.

I have chosen to blog about the empathy lecture as it’s the one that stood out to me the most, the lecture opened with the question “what is empathy?” breaking this question down was interesting as we found out that it is defined in the dictionary as “stepping in the shoes of the other person and understanding their feelings and perspectives” there are two components of empathy; the first being an emotional response which means feeling and identifying. The second component is about coming from an understanding place which means imagining how it might be to go through what someone else is going through and imagining things from their perspective.

Understanding the meaning of empathy in more depth made me realise how important it is for artists, designers and creatives to be empathetic when we create things; Some of the world’s top brands including IBM, Apple, and Google have embraced the designing with empathy mindset in an effort to guess less and design products and experiences that truly resonate with their user base. Unlike decades prior, the one-size-fits-all, mass production approach is no longer enough to succeed and thrive and in my opinion the fashion industry is behind with doing this, it is important for us as the “future of fashion” to bring this change into the industry as currently it feels as though brands are only empathetic if there is profit to be made when really empathy should be normalized even if there’s no profit. 

We could choose to incorporate “Empathy things” as they could be mobilised to help design for empathy e.g using clothing “props” like walking sticks and glasses in photoshoots. You have to have empathy to be inclusive, otherwise you’ll be catering to only one crowd all the time, we need to think of people more marginalized than us when creating we need to practise empathy and choose ideas that help us all.