We’ve painted the world with words, but are we forgetting how it’s done?
Monday, 22 June 2026
James Bush is a womenswear designer and regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: Words are magnificent things. Well-structured sentences and artfully crafted paragraphs have changed the course of history. Words inspire, require us to interpret meaning and allow us to create our own realm of imagination where ideas have a life of their own.
It was not that long ago that much of the world was illiterate. However, by the 17th and 18th centuries, growing literacy fuelled the age of the scandal sheet across Europe. Much like in hit Netflix series Bridgerton, these licentious and often anonymous pamphlets were usually focused on sexual scandal, political intrigue and financial misdeeds.
Their affordability and mass availability democratised gossip, in a way that threatened the social hierarchy. Words, and their interpretation in the imagination of the public, had dangerous effects.
At the same time the word of God was interpreted and dictated from the pulpit, fuelling wild developments in art and architecture. Architects of the most fabulous baroque churches like the Wieskirche (Pilgrimage Church of Wies), Bavaria, interpreted the presence of God through billowing clouds in plaster or paint and divine rays of light, often coated in gold leaf.
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Going back further to the 15th century, wildly different interpretations of the divine word were being produced in the Low Countries by Hieronymus Bosch. His demonic and twisted creatures show a more unexpected reading of the Bible.
In both cases extraordinary visual work was produced through the process of interpreting the written word through the media of image making and architecture.
Fast forward to 2026 and we live in a very different age. The World Bank now pins literacy at 87% of the globe. However, the pinnacle of reading as a cultural practice and cognitive habit may already be behind us.
I was recently part of an educational outreach program with the British Fashion Council. At dinner the night before I found myself (I think accidentally) sitting next to the chief critic for Vogue, Sarah Mower. At a certain point the conversation turned to student design portfolios, and how they increasingly look identical. This is not necessarily the specific opinion of those at that dinner, but rather an increasingly loud opinion coming from recruiters, university admission teams and design studios worldwide.
At risk to my professional reputation, I boldly suggested that the problem was not necessarily the students, but the way we are teaching them to interpret ideas.
Within the design world, particularly fashion, it is now common for visual inspiration to form the beginning, middle and end of a creative process. Instead of starting with an idea or a philosophy that is first given form through words, we increasingly start from a reference image, or a vibe that does not require the same translation process.
It is the process of translation from the written word to the image (or the image to the written word) that has, historically, created the most incredible art. If our education system teaches students and designers to skip this stage, how can we expect them to produce new work?
At dinner, I mentioned that I always read Ms Mower’s reviews for Vogue, before looking at the images of a collection. Her poetic and sophisticated turn of phrase describes collections of intense and unexpected depth, however I’m often a little disappointed when I look at the actual clothes. This is not because the collections are in any way lacking, but because my interpretation of her words is very different to what is in front of me.
This observation elicited a shocked silence from many of my dining partners, however Ms Mower let out a deep laugh and heartily agreed with me. Thank god for that.
The slow slide into a world of image-to-image creation has been happening for years, yet the advancements of AI have no doubt accelerated it. We can now generate images from images and text from text, at a scale and speed that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
However, the machine cannot do what Bosch or the architects of the Wieskirche did. It cannot take a word, an idea or a philosophy and create something nobody has seen before by transforming it into an entirely different medium. The act of translation from the written and the visual, is where genuine, human invention lives.
In the countless conversations around the future of work in an AI age, we are overly focused on what will be automated and what will survive.
But, I'd suggest we start paying closer attention to the in-between spaces that facilitate the interpretive leaps and the moments of creative translation. Those spaces are where the great work appears.
If we are training a generation of designers to skip that stage entirely, we should not be surprised when everything starts to look the same.
Words, are not only magnificent, they are irreplaceable.