Fashion Futures as Design Scenarios for the Triple Transition Framework

This article explores how fashion, as a culture-intensive industry, can act as a testbed for ecosystem-centred sustainability transitions. Building on debates on the Triple Transition (green, digital, resilience) and the four pillars of sustainability (environmental, social, economic, cultural), the study addresses a theoretical and methodological gap: while transition agendas and sustainability frameworks are well developed at policy and conceptual levels, there is limited empirical integration of these frameworks into design-oriented methods capable of guiding situated organisational decisions in fashion and cultural and creative industries. It proposes a design- and futures-driven methodology that combines intuitive-logics scenario building, horizon scanning and a customised three-axis Polar Map. The Polar Map translates the Triple Transition into three composite orientations: Bios, Techné and Resilience, used to structure four narrative scenarios applied to the fashion ecosystem: Trailblazing Agency, Other-than-Human Agency, Constructive Agency and Normative Agency. Each scenario assembles concepts, weak signals and case examples into plausible configurations of the fashion value chain and its ecosystem. The results show how these scenarios act as meta-narratives, orienting devices and boundary objects that support futures literacy, make the cultural and intangible consequences of design decisions explicit and reveal interdependencies across value chains. Conceptually, the work operationalises combined transitions and the four pillars of sustainability in a flagship CCI; methodologically, it advances a design-oriented adaptation of scenario practices; and practically, it offers organisations narrative tools to rehearse ecosystem-centred innovation pathways. The conclusion reflects on structural constraints and methodological directions for further hybridisation within foresight methods.