Stories of Change: The past, present and future of energy

Stories of Change Team Library item 16 Aug 2017

Interview with Dilys Williams

Dilys Williams

Dilys Williams

"Saving energy is in fashion - Sustainable Fashion" - Dilys Williams talks at Tipping point about sustainable fashion and energy.

DILYS WILLIAMS from Stories of Change on Vimeo.

TippingPoint

Stories of Change Project

Why fashion and energy?

I’m Dylis Williams, I run the Centre for Sustainable Fashion which is based at the University of the Arts in London. What has brought me here, people wonder why I talk about fashion and energy, what has brought me here is this idea of fashion being a great social energy. It’s something that involves each of us, our own personal space, and also it’s a ubiquitous thing around the world. The ideas of fashion and energy have been very dominated by talk about materials and the embedded energy in materials and artefacts, but what brings me here is this idea of the energy of the actions and the relationships involved, and being with these people obviously creates different kinds of relationships and actions. What I’m working on now related to energy It’s been really interesting in the last couple of days to hear some of the stories, some of the ideas that people have been having, about whether our starting point is climate change or whether our starting point is thinking about a values system that can bring us together to have a shared consciousness. I think that those two things together are so vital and important, so the things that I’m doing here are thinking about how I can go back and use fashion as a means for us to think very personally about what we value but also think about our own practices towards understanding climate change.

How I see my work progressing My interest in understanding more about different disciplines will really inform my practice. Finding out about being on the grid, off the grid; finding out what autonomy and the ability to act really means. I’m also really interested in the discussions around cities and about the fact that cities are growing so fast and what does that mean about our habits of behaviour. I think fashion has a really important part to play in culture in cities.

How I’m going to make this happen For my work to progress, first of all it’s about collaboration, it’s about bringing different kinds of people together and being able to bring together people around the understanding of our move towards city living and our thinking about the ways that we create the relationships of fashion. So I think some of the people here that have been from organisations looking at urban growth, some of the people that are looking at how the infrastructure of our lives changes through looking at energy infrastructures and autonomy. I think the autonomy that we may have through fashion and our own practices and having the ability to create our sense of meaning and sense of self and that in the relation to the wider, ubiquitous nature of fashion and the ubiquitous nature of climate change, means bringing together these different disciplines. Having a focus on city making and fashion making brought together, I think, is a very interesting idea to pursue.

Asking the educators I’d like to ask the question around Einstein’s quote that says we’re not going to solve the problems that we have today by using the same kind of thinking that we used to create them. So my question is: how do we make a new kind of thinking as much part of our consciousness as something as iconic as the image of Einstein and his hair, that is part of a narrative, whether it’s from primary school programmes right through to professorial lectures? So I would like to ask educators, through from primary school tutors to university professors, about having a narrative around creative consciousness.

The future of Planet Earth: Optimist or pessimist? Am I an optimist or a pessimist looking forward? I am a cautious optimist. There’s a side to me that is very concerned about the fact that we’re hurtling in the wrong direction still in our practices. However, I think that our ability as human beings to connect to each other, as evidenced in the last couple of days – I’ve met people who I’d never met before and had all sorts of very personal conversations with them, so I think that we have incredible agency, but I’m really concerned that we need to act very quickly and in quite dramatic ways.

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