Edgar Morin’s vision and the fashion design education. Part II—“Human Understanding: Understanding Each Other” as an approach to cultural sustainability

Abstract

Based on the article published in 2022, “The 7 Complex Lessons from Edgar Morin Applied in Fashion Design Education for Sustainability”, and with the aim of looking at local cultural processes (instead of global ones) associated with Fashion Design education, we seek to develop the theme proposed around Edgar Morin’s sixth lesson, called “Human understanding: understanding each other”. In this way, we propose a reflection around the author’s assumption, the urgency of a collective look, endowed with understanding of the other, related to local cultural processes, mainly those associated with the traditional cultural knowledge of each region, as a way of enriching the curricula of Fashion Design. In this way, we discuss approaches that provide future designers with access to cultural knowledge that dialogue directly with creativity and constitute in this relationship, designers and local cultures, not only the perpetuation of ancestral knowledge, but innovation in products imbued with emotional, cultural and historical values. In a reflection, arising from personal experiences in the classroom and from contact with the academic environment, we realized that when we look at local cultures, it is possible to develop sustainable products through fashion design that respond to the expectations of a certain public, providing thus, consumers of their own identities, beyond globalized trends.