this is the dusk of 2015.

Picture the fashion system as a mountainous landscape. Select designers wave their summit flags from breezy peaks and may have done so for a good while now. Others have stepped down for reasons which leave the industry with new questions:

What is speed today? What demands do we face in fashion production, and what space is offered to genuine creativity, as we test thinning air?

__________

Zoom into the picture: there is a valley with a riverbed, people washing cloth. In the distance, somebody is walking up a winding path towards another peak. We carry on adorning ourselves within a variety of rhythms and systems. We may plant, spin, weave, dye, embellish or buy, according to patterns we either chose freely, or let dictate our ways. Traditions are passed on or lost; the machine is at our service.

This weblog is dedicated to the interconnections of pathways within the fashion system. Most of the time, its focus is on the extremes: the original craft, and its sibling, the art of fashion design within a highly efficient, profit-driven market. 8848 serves as an open-source research compendium of an anthropological MA thesis, offering an overview of the various efforts undertaken to integrate ‘artisanship’ into high-end, luxury fashion systems.

The figure 8848 points to the highest mountain peak there is. And as much as that is a relative truth, an overview is but a particular perspective at a given place in time.