Can fashion increase personal and social responsibility?

Last week, I attended my first infrared sound healing class. I listen to podcasts to help me sleep, some with ASMR sounds, so I was curious what the class would involve and keen to acquire new relaxation techniques. 

Several days have passed and I continue to debate if a second class is a good idea – which probably means it’s not. Sound healing may not have provided me with new routes to relaxation, but it has had one unexpected outcome. It has reframed my thinking about the importance of responsibility and storytelling in driving behavioural change within the fashion industry. 

Projecting, terribly

As I waited for the class to start, I was surprised that my soon-to-be classmates were all hunched over their smart phones, cocooning themselves in solitary electronic bubbles. I thought this was sad, and deeply ironic. I had not expected infrared sound healing seekers to be luddites, but I had expected them to be outwardly sociable. 

Surely they wouldn’t need a healing class that promised calmness and inner connectivity if they spent less time in a digital world and longer in their own? Surely the class would be more effective if they weren’t wired before going into it? Surely any benefits from the class would be short-lived if people immediately resumed their pre-class behaviours upon leaving it? 

My thoughts were doubly ironic, and on at least one level deeply inappropriate, because they were formulated whilst I peered from behind my smartphone. As I chastised myself for being judgemental, I reflected on people’s tendency – including my own – to seek solutions for personal and global problems beyond themselves, as opposed to starting the scrutiny from within. 

The behaviour of participants before the class seemed so at odds with its stated aims and suggested outcomes that involvement was likely to be a zero-sum game. My position was particularly tangled because whilst I claimed to see the dilemma for everyone around me, I did not see it for myself, despite behaving in the same way. What would have probably been obvious to any onlooker was oblivious to us all: our enrolment was a superficial concession to problem-solving rather than a serious commitment to undertake it. In relinquishing at least some responsibility of the causal factors that made the class appeal––even necessary––to us, we were unlikely to participate fully within it and derive much benefit from it afterwards.

This mundane vignette has implications for my research that seeks to harness the universality of stories to drive behavioural change in the face of ecological overshoot and the diminishment of planetary wellbeing. The inclination of people to outsource problem-solving for very personal issues prompted me to reflect that behavioural changes linked to global issues will only occur if the R-word is understood and embraced: Responsibility.

Distorting Mirrors  

My thoughts about the sound class quickly turned to responsibility because I had spent the week reading The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Philosophy department at the University of Edinburgh. The link between sound healing, AI, fashion and responsibility may not be readily apparent, so let me explain.

 A central premise of her thesis is that the promise of AI will not be fulfilled if we continue to use it to reflect ourselves. The scope of AI in most of its current applications is limited by humankind’s past and recent present because this forms the data and frames the structures of its decision-making. This means AI solutions are often illusory, disappointing, and on some occasions fateful, because they ‘are literally built to conserve the patterns of the past and extend them into our futures’ (Vallor 2024: 57). 

Vallor expresses concern about AI advice and admonishments becoming more widely accepted in society because this will cause ‘the gradual erosion of human moral and political confidence in ourselves and one another. In the coming years, we will hear the same song again and again: that humans are slower, weaker, less reliable, more biased, less rational, less capable, less valuable than our AI mirrors’ (Ibid.: 200). The threat posed is especially grave because it does not come from without, but from within, as we ‘devalue’ and demean ourselves by placing greater trust in AI tools than our own thinking, experiences and collective stories (Ibid.: 3, 55, 142). To counter this threat, Vallor mounts a compelling case for us to embrace the R-word^[i] (Ibid.: 7) if we are to ‘rethink our dominant values and habits––even the character traits we are used to thinking as virtues’ (Ibid.: 162). 

Autofabrication through Practical Wisdom

To ask people to question and ultimately turn away from ingrained behavioural traits is no easy task. My sound healing class goes some way to demonstrate this point. Vallor suggests there is a way forwards through practical wisdom, a translation of the Greek term phrónēsis, which was used by Aristotle. She defines practical wisdom as ‘the virtue that unites, refines, and intelligently steers our other virtues, calibrating their expression in appropriate ways at a given place and time’ (Ibid.: 68). Like the backward-tilted mirror held by Prudence,^[ii]which emphasises the importance of the past in steering future action, practical wisdom clarifies the choice, and responsibility, that people have to be whom they want. 

The task of ‘making ourselves’ is called autofabrication (Ibid.: 12). The ability to learn and unlearn from past and present experience, our own and that of others, is a characteristically human trait. It is also something that requires confidence and courage to understand, and responsibility to pursue. As Vallor asserts, ‘[w]e choose every day whether to remain as we are or become something different’ (Ibid.: 201). This is a responsibility that we have to ourselves, as much to our human and non-human world. Her book provides prompts that can help to catalyse this human-centred turn, but she is clear there is no panacea. We have to embody the change we want to see, rather than seek superficial 50-minute salves, akin to an infrared sound healing class on a weekday evening. 

(Re)-Fashioning Responsibility

The big challenge is that the attempt to overcome the responsibility dilemma assumes people will be willing to prioritise truth over fitness. As I explained in my previous post, which discusses David R. Samson’s book Our Tribal Future, humans have adapted to do the opposite; that is, to place fitness (ie. their survival) above truth. Samson explains that people experience the world through perception rather than practical wisdom. They will only accept greater personal and social responsibilities if they perceive alignment with their current practices. This means these responsibilities must align with the values of their tribe. This is not an issue that Vallor directly tackles, but it is fundamental. For responsibility to take hold, it needs to be perceived as something immediately attractive.

                  This is where the fashion connection comes in. Clothing and dress – even the virtual kind – do not feature in The AI Mirror, which is unsurprising. However, Vallor does refer to storytelling, and in this our clothing and dress does play a significant role. She acknowledges the importance of storytelling as a human characteristic, which reflects our species’ innate capacity for creativity, socialibility and self-reflection; all things that are not possessed by AI. Stories galvanise dominant values and habits, but as she explains her final chapter, they can facilitate the expression of ‘newer voices’ with a ‘fresh ethos’ and ‘vision’ (Ibid.:219-222). The stories Vallor has in mind are those shared orally and through writing, and chiefly through the science fiction genre. 

Considering the scale of the problem that her book confronts, of which current AI conceptualisation and usage is really a symptom, I would emphasise the importance of the stories people narrate daily about self and society through their choice of clothing and dress to help bring about change. This is not the stretch it might initially seem because The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook, issued last year by the UN, makes clear that ‘[i]n possessing one of the most powerful marketing engines on earth, fashion shapes the very notion of desire and aspiration, in turn impacting wider cultural norms and expectations’ (Arthur 2023: 5). People’s worn stories, which are widely told, highly visible, deeply felt, convey their propensity to conform or confront dominant values and behaviours. Fundamentally, these are stories through which we clarify our humanness and relationship with others. Consequently, there is no reason why they cannot also emphasise our personal and communal responsibilities through autofabrication, the choice to make ourselves anew. Afterall, autofabrication has long been the driver for fashion marketing, albeit in a more individualistic and less altruistic way.

The UN’s Playbook suggests there is an opportunity ‘[w]hen it comes to storytelling within fashion’ because the industry’s marketing engine ‘can play a significant role in exploring, explaining and celebrating the positive ecological, cultural and social values of the fashion sector’ (Ibid.). In short, fashion is one of the few industries with the means and influence to create compelling stories. These stories can appeal to people’s tribe drive. They also emphasize the importance and desirability of responsibility. My experience of sound healing and reading Vallor’s book highlighted a key take-home: Fashion storytelling requires responsibility incentivisation and tribe drive harmonisation to effectively drive and sustain behavioural change.  

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^[i] The R-word appears 14 times in Vallor’s book.

^[ii] Prudence is another translation of the word phrónēsis.