Photography: Calvin Lom

Digital ecosystems are social and interactive and therefore potentially increase the way that people exert influence and power. My own success with it is a case in point. My experience is telling me that this is where the important conversations are taking place, where new notions of change may rise and occur. In this time of uncertainty and very fast movement in technology there are wide open spaces of the not yet known that one can wait and see what fills it or be the one who creates something that fills the gap, until the next one comes along. For me my interaction with environments and others occurs first in real time and then transforms into an idea or thought that i express in a digital conversation that may or may not involve words. So for me the mapping becomes what kinds of conversation is it important to have now and with whom should I be having them?

My question to you becomes:

What kinds of conversations would you like to have about and in the fashion ecosystem (using the broad definition)? 

After the heady days of campaign shoots, newspaper articles and traveling far and wide, life has once again settled into an easy rhythm. In the last two months I have been to China, London, Lisbon, London again and Madrid. In a recent post I spoke about my yearning and need for an interlude so that I might reflect. Perhaps most important is thinking about how to make this project not turn into a quick moment of fame but rather a  sustainable enterprise that fulfills my desire to express my creative self, allows me to influence and be influenced by fashion as a system and shares a framework for others that supports them in creating opportunity in any system if they wish to.

One of my first reflections is how collaboration with others and transacting with different environments in and of itself becomes self-organizing for me. This entire project has just been about me putting myself “in” a particular environment, in my case fashion, and seeing what happens. This makes me think about the word ecosystem. Ecosystems in the broadest definition is a community of interacting people and the physical environment they are interacting in. I am now situated in the fashion ecosystem.  I do not limit this conceptualization only to the impact of fashion on the physical world but also on the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of human beings.