IML RESEARCH MISSION

Research at IML will have a fundamental responsibility to inspire new communities of understanding and wellbeing for us all. Deeply meaningful and nurturing relationships must be paramount across all areas and aspects of our institution.

IML’s role as global ‘change maker’ can be significantly amplified through evolving studentship, staffing and progressive ideals of ingenuity, expertise, entrepreneurship, leadership, agility, community, respect and diversity. This is central to the creation of knowledge that will allow others ‘to do’.

All research practice within IML must have a default starting point of environmental responsibility, but otherwise we have exceptional justification to pursue a raft of other evolving research fields. Our creative futures will be found in ideas. We may choose to anticipate where fashion is going in specific areas, and leapfrog over the heads of other institutions and found research scenarios or curriculum at points far off in the future. Working backwards from there, We can connect new dots, new communities, new networks, new audiences, and new role models as we do so.

Ambitious, defiant, and forward-looking strategies will prove the key for IML to chart, both for ourselves and for a wider world, a unique set of roadmaps and blueprints that can determine distinct, dynamic, and divergent research landscapes, ideals, networks, and futures.

IML must evolve as a new type of cultural storyteller for fashion. We will need to develop vibrant educational narratives that will take fashion and its diversifying audiences on uncommon, yet compelling educational journeys. Our principal language may still be an engagement with clothing, but we should not necessarily look to prove that every tale we tell about fashion is true or even logical, but rather how we are making choices about the stories we tell, to whom, and why.

This may involve engagement with different disciplines, mindsets, philosophies, technologies and personnel. Some of these may prove relatively coherent and straightforward to orchestrate, others may prove more challenging or arduous, and some may prove entirely unsuccessful. We must be prepared to take risks, and we must be able to productively fail on occasion.

As the geo-political, social, educational and economic landscape continues to alter and shift, we will need to constantly review how we think, and how we engage with the world. Design colleges and institutions around the world may need to progressively re-configure, including how they teach, how they understand, how they use and apply research, and their obligation to ‘find’ futures rather than responding to them. Creative organisations may also need encouragement to ‘see’ themselves differently, so that their staff, students, and audiences see them differently.

This, in turn, can help us to broaden our diversity strategy, develop more imaginative initiatives for the under-represented, and identify new types of role model for fashion.

More adaptable and agile modes of fashion that evolve from formative commercial Research & Innovation practice may also support progressive ‘research lending’ schemes, cultures and economies. Research lending may allow us to strategically connect with ‘unexpected’ institutions, centres, labs, studios or commercial concerns and to centre on the pursuit and adoption of new technology and philosophy for fashion.

This all can remind us that despite a need for research processes and methods to be defined and rational where necessary, research should still be highly creative, innovative, intuitive, and playful. Research must always be adaptive and flexible, allowing individual researchers or teams to alter and evolve their research question as findings are revealed. As much as it is a procedure of finding things, research can also be about losing things. As well as new beginnings, we can also find new endings.

Whilst it does not need to be revolutionary, research should challenge and change some aspect of the world, and our understanding of it. The success of any body of investigation will also depend on its communication. This, tied to an identification of a target audience will help determine ‘impact’ – how findings have been shared within a community and what change of culture, logic, mindset and practice has been intended or accomplished.

As a procedure of question asking and problem-solving that can lead to recognised ‘new knowledge,’ research is something that most everyone at IML does routinely anyway. Whether in our own creative or professional practice, as part of our teaching roles, engagements with industry or the outside world, we all participate in varied processes of investigation.

So, the establishment of a formal research community at IML has tremendous scope to radically enhance how our institution is internally and externally perceived, and how we can collectively frame new opportunity for the advancement of global fashion, business, styling and design practices.