Penelope Norman
Meet Penelope Norman, a fashion researcher, Senior Lecturer, and creative powerhouse driving digital innovation at Arts University Bournemouth. Penelope extended an invitation to Timo Peach to discover the university's Innovation Studio—a cutting-edge lab for creative technologies, boasting state-of-the-art digital and physical equipment for design and development.
If you’re a creative practitioner, you might not need to use the word “innovation” very often–you’re used to making things out of thin air every day. In business speak, however, that word has turned up a lot… but does anyone know what it really means for business? No, but really though, do you?
Penelope Norman knows, and it’s inspiring to see it in action.
Running Arts University Bournemouth’s MA in Digital Fashion Innovation and supporting BA students with their digital work, Penelope works at a fascinating intersection of leading edge creative practice, education and industry. Penelope wants to build a network of innovative fashion graduates that will make a significant impact on the whole sector.
In my role as the voice of creative research cast Unsee The Future, I have a big interest in the place of the arts in shaping better stories of tomorrow, something Penelope simply embodies.
“The Innovation Studio is a space where you can fail, risk-free. I think that’s really really important–if you stay in your safe space and you know what you’re going to do will succeed, that’s not innovation.”
Leaving a mark
A principle Penelope keeps close to her sense of purpose is that everyone can draw, everyone can be creative. This ties to something she says has carried her through her entire practice, an essence of fashion itself in her mind: “Making people feel good.”
Not something you might associate with the fashion industry, right? Not with the tyranny of the Size Zero ideal.
“You wouldn’t meet a woman in the 90s who hadn’t tried every single diet under the sun,” she says, “That’s just not realistic. What I’ve always liked is curves–draping fabric around the movement of the body. To me, the essence of fashion is making people feel amazing–working with the silhouette of the body to make it something really artistic.”
“Every single body should be admired and celebrated. Inclusivity is really important. “For a while I felt fashion wasn’t inclusive, and its important to note work still needs to be done in this area, we can always improve, and this is why it’s been very important to me to push into that area–to help everyone feel included and celebrated.”
It’s given her a tagline that was the title of her public talk in the autumn at Arts University Bournemouth: Shape not Size: Technology and Inclusivity in the Fashion Industry–a presentation addressing “how innovative technology can be used in the fashion industry to address inclusivity, fit, and sustainability.”
Penelope’s clear sense of a physical and emotional human reality has lots of implications for health and wellness, as does her direct love of kinetic, physical, traditional creative methods. So, how did she end up doing an MA in Fashion Technology?
“In my very first job, I got to work with some plus-sized women who’d never even worn a dress before because they felt so eliminated from being able to.”
The joy she saw exuding from those women felt very important to her, she shares, as she encouraged a new way of seeing themselves through clothes. Along the way, however, there was another not-so-feel-good factor about fashion that she hadn’t noticed.
“Sustainability was never something that was really considered.”
The global fashion industry’s carbon emissions alone are widely estimated to add up to almost 10% of total global carbon emissions. Flying swatches around the world, strike-offs and waste and so many chemical, material and social factors in manufacturing garments has been creating a simply nuts scale of negative impact on the planet. →
Penelope could see that technology can change this. Even the need for fast fashion, which isn’t going away. But in an industry famously slow to change, does she feel alone in thinking this way?
“No,” she says emphatically, “today there are a lot of people like me trying to make a difference. I think there are processes that can make the fast fashion industry a lot healthier and a lot better.”
Following a fusion line
Many advocate groups are reporting that some 80% of a fashion product’s impact is determined at the design stage.
“Which means,” Penelope says to her students, “that 80% of fashion’s part of the climate catastrophe is our responsibility. If we can do things in a better way, surely we should.”
Penelope’s secondment to Art University Bournemouth’s Innovation Studio has given her the opportunity to take her research and apply it to helping brands figure out how to follow the implications of the post-Covid shocks that saw tons of samples and stock physically stranded.
“Many of our graduates in those brands at the time said to their bosses, I can help you digitise that…” she says. There followed, she adds, a boom in not just seeing their graduates hired but training teams in different ways of doing things. It directly helped shake up the industry.
“It’s great because through the Innovation Studio, when people ask can you help with that, I can say yes!”
The Innovation Studio is a place to help creative minds get their heads around this. A test lab, a networking hub, a creative space, it’s a remarkable collection of facilities and skilled technicians that deliberately puts different experiences, technologies and techniques together. Its residency programme helps startups figure things out with access to everything, its associate programme helps businesses raise their game and the cutting edge creative technologies help researchers develop new industry practices. All together, it’s one fizzing vibe of possibilities.
And all, I point out, crucially in the context of an art school. A place where creative thinking is the substrate of all practice.
“For true innovation, you need to have failures,” she says. “You need to have things that don’t work, you need to be able to test things. And you need a team–people that know how to use different bits of kit and are prepared to ask: What happens if we put these things together?”
Putting things together that aren’t usually, using tools for things they weren’t designed for, trying stuff without fear–it’s a fundamental part of creativity, and of being in the safe space of arts education. Which gives you not just a very connected view of resources and possibilities but also exposure to lots of different skills.
“We need to be multidisciplinary,” Penelope agrees. “We can solve problems when we work collaboratively and are open to learn from other disciplines. We’ve got VR, we’ve got 3D printers, what can we do by combining creative technology to approach problems differently? This is something the Innovation Studio dose really well, for students, for start-ups, for very established businesses alike."
Following the trends across wider manufacturing, creating much more workable virtual models of garments helps test things before committing to materials. As tools also shape thinking, the practice can unlock new ways of even thinking about form as designers, working in three dimensions from the beginning. Having a digital twin of new or existing designs also has implications for IP (Intellectual Property). To say nothing of pushing the usefulness of Virtual Try-On for customers and the growth of digital-only products as we spend increasing time in gaming spaces.
“When you consider that 60% of the jobs that GenAlpha are going to do when they’re my age don’t exist at the moment, a lot of those jobs are going to sit in that “phygital” space translating between online experiences and physical.”
What an art school context can do for people is equip them with a skill that is key to the future of work generally, in fashion and far beyond–adaptability. And the creative confidence to challenge things and try things.
Fashion can link us to different aspects of more positive futures all at once, including placemaking, body confidence, storytelling and sustainable manufacturing. That Penelope has used it to demonstrate how to use the Innovation Studio also speaks to her values of creativity and inclusion. It also shows how inspired vision can become a golden thread tying together lots of possibilities, people and technologies at once.
Penelope Norman is exactly that. And that’s exactly how you fashion innovation.
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Penelope Norman
Kristian Østvik
