This project seeks to explore ways to educate the consumer about the sustainability, craftsmanship, heritage and value of traditional fashion and textile products, using a variety of mediums such as film and immersive technologies, leading to the following questions: 1. How can new developments in Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (MR) and Mixed Reality (MR) be used to communicate the human involvement, heritage, provenance, sustainability and therefore value of traditional fashion and textile products to consumers? 2. How can new developments in AR, VR and MR be used to preserve the history and heritage of traditional fashion and textile products? 3. What support is required for creative industries (fashion and textile design, fashion advertisers and marketers, museums and galleries) to access and use immersive technologies to engage with a wider range of consumers, across different cultures, and ensure that value and heritage is fully understood? Fashion has embraced computer technology, with online sales continuing to grow and fashion film increasingly being used to market creative designs. This presents an opportunity to redress the balance by using technology to educate and shape an alternative and sustainable future for the fashion design of traditional textiles. The UK and Chinese research - industry teams will establish and enhance a long-term collaboration to discuss the challenges and threats to creative fashion and textiles and ideas on how immersive experience and techniques could be used to represent and preserve the history and heritage of traditional fashion and textile products, and transfer them into modern-style design to meet the current and future fashion trends will be explored in facilitated workshops designed to determine how developments in AR, VR and MR and can provide opportunities to capture, develop, disseminate and promote provenance, heritage, craftsmanship and the value of slow fashion and textile products in contemporary society.

The project aims to determine how immersive interactions can be used to communicate the experience and value of creative, artisan fashion and textile products, with a focus on culture, provenance, heritage, the human hand and sustainable clothing consumption. The novelty of this research lies in the interdisciplinary approach and UK-China cross-cultural knowledge exchange employed across fashion and textiles and computing science with both industry and academia. The focus of the research will be within two key project themes: 1) cultural heritage preservation in fashion and textiles towards revaluing craftsmanship; 2) people and planet preservation towards sustainable methods of design, production, consumption and disposal of fashion and textile products. Fashion and textiles has embraced computer technology, with online sales and fashion film increasingly being used to market creative designs. However digital technologies within this sector have been used primarily to drive consumer demand for fast fashion, often involving narratives and experiences around performance and spectacle for pushing sales. This research project investigates the opportunities that technology offers to redress the balance by using digital methods to inform and shape an alternative and sustainable future for the international fashion and textile industry based on different economic and societal models. There is now a new agenda for digital innovations focusing on an authentic and meaningful application that is far more relevant to today's complex world which focuses on sustainability, provenance and the inherent value of human processes that reconnect people and products in an empathetic and deeper way. The pressure to move towards a more sustainable global fashion and textile industry is now paramount where traditional methods of textile and clothing manufacture, using natural renewable sources that are inherently long-lasting offer a 'slow' fashion alternative.