NEWNESS & KNEWNESS

Numerous clichés run amok when thinking about leadership today. Leading the race is unprecedented. This term has had a vainglorious outing in the past five years, encapsulating collective shock towards the various conundrums we have had to endure. What surfaced during 2025 are instances that both cement and defy normative and conditioned notions of leadership. What emerged has been knew as well as new. The former speaks to familiar and bygone notions, practices, and examples of leadership. The latter – new ones – have generated consternation as well as inspiration. Declaring this simplistic binary is admittedly opportunistic and intentional. By design, it offers a provocative way to think and attempt a set of subjective observations on the state of things. Etymologically speaking, leadership has kind of lost its way. The term, born to condense notions of guidance, load-bearing, and unspoken benevolence, has mutated. Not that this is unreasonable for a term that emanates from the 14th century. Today’s form seems to be everything but. Load-bearing has shifted to burden imposition. Stylistically, scapegoating, excessive living, and narcissism distinguish the crop of leaders in leadership positions. Loyalty above all is compulsory, and fragile egos need constant placating. The result: a paralysis of action and thinking. This has all led to the cementing of egotistic hierarchy in ways that have become laughable.

What destabilises, normative notions of leadership are recent turns towards the lateral. Growing in number, examples that evidence this shift include Black Lives Matter, Nepalese Gen Z protesters, similar groups in Kenya (#May2025), and swarm tactics that draw from both nature and engineering. Undoing traditional hierarchies, culty-natured, historically imposed leadership runs the risk of being subsumed. Current models of leadership have sashayed into egotism, resulting in the making of megalomaniacal demigods. The oxygen of attention, administered sycophantically, dissipates. In its place, polyvocality, as an alternative, invites chorus of concern, interest, and then action. This, and these, stand against the ubiquitous notion that a single entity knows best. These lateralities are strategically diminishing the core of monolithic structures by offering a newness that is kinda wonderful. What is necessary to think with and about this is our imagination. As such, the distinction between knew and new is vital. Vocally delivered, the distinction is not so clear. In its written form, the difference is stark. What current systems of leadership rely on is the former – trading on and with narrowly construed and manipulated historiographies to confirm grandiose pertinence – often declaring pastness as singularly utopic. Its purchase, however, becomes confoundingly shallow in relation to what riches emerge by looking deeper and beyond those well-worn terrains these systems want to condition: hyper-local, nature-informed, fungal-inspired, rhizomatic, and indigenous systems that are finding attention and practice. This is the new to knew, I argue. Dabbling speculatively into practices of leading requires exercising our imaginations. This exposes stale notions and practices of leadership. Today’s dominant leaders, drunk on bullish arrogance and ignorance, are stimulating surprising shifts in the landscape of how the human species can and does choose to organise itself.

Knewnesses give way to newness. The concept of devolution has been bandied about, like other broad-ranging, seemingly world-transforming concepts, somewhat superficially in practice. Were it to be true to its proposition, it could resemble that which is blatantly necessary: a return to civic agency that celebrates group-think and collective doings, since the leadership project as we know it, born out of patriarchal and political frameworks of top-down control, has run its course. ‘Leaders’, as we have them currently, seem shamefully unable to attend to the growing layers of mess and chaos drowning communities. In response to this, springs of hope arise – making evident the lateralising of interventions that can actually attend to civic concern, and in doing so destabilise pointless central control structures to smaller, more achievable, and dynamic actions. The Power goes bonkers. Could this signal end days for dictatorial behemoths? Are they drawing their last gasps? If multitudes begin to simply turn away, applying their attention to what is necessary, could these hulking, mostly useless impositions be starved of the oxygen – attention – that they have relied on for centuries? Let’s try something now: to think about emerging practices of abstracted lead- ership through fashion. This ideological shift, that veers towards leaderful processes, evidences multiplicity over increasingly problematic instances of leadershipness that still rely on singular figureheads. This conceptual turn to fashion, as a means to think through this change, embeds itself within the realm of experiment. The focus: Comme des Garçons’ Spring 2025 as- semblage, Uncertain Future. Twenty-three creations articulate Uncertain Future. These propositions, garment-like sculptures, collectively trouble the normative strictures of fit. Decisively anti-fashion in form, they maintain a resemblance to the function of clothing that is undeniable. This dichotomy pro- duces a useful tension to think with. The common denominator, nonetheless, is bewilderment – and a deft handling of the knew/new dichotomy presented earlier. Elementally familiar, perhaps in terms of texture and form, each piece stretches conceptions of fit and fashion enough to confound. Comme des Garçons has, for decades, been widely recognised as the seminal thought-leader in fashion. Through successive presentations of what is termed fashion, the house repeatedly obliterates preset boundaries through sustained ontological disruption, manifesting newness unapologetically.

Articulating this tension, Jeremy Lewis observes, “What makes these clothes radical is that although they are not always recognisable as clothes, they were meant to be worn.” This insistence on wearability, which looks past consistent critiques of use-value, confirms the necessity of abstraction. The label’s determined anti-fashion stance, confirmed through iterative and non-linear experimentation, offers a complex and compelling reading of anti-hierarchical and process-focused intervention. By contrast, leadership performances still trade on useless bluster. On the other hand, leaderful processes, like the Nepal Gen-Z movement, like the quietly determined work of Comme des Garçons, go to work intricately, at alternative scales – extraordinarily. Stepping over the need to associate explicitly, as has been the practice of Comme des Garçons, there is a connection to be made here regarding a deft handling of the new and the knew simultaneously. Seen through this proposition, emerging turns in collective action that have been directing society beyond politically imposed stagnancy, that are not configured with age-old authoritative and sometimes punitive means, are a necessary intervention. Thinking, then, on how Comme des Garçons’ bi-annual presentations, in the realm of fashion, through the form of collection, simultaneously perform ritual while also provocatively side-stepping the intricacies of required conformities. So here we land: journeying from leadership to leaderful, acknowledging shifts and turns. Ways in which newer practices that are leaderful eschew cultish clichés, manoeuvring rhizomatically, fusing nature-based tactics with strategic anonymities. What stands stronger and with more power is the collective, made up of teams that can attend to design and intervention through multiplicities, engaging in rigorous processes of inquiry and experiment, melding the new with elements of the knew.

Dr. heeten bhagat is a pracademic, designing experimental collaborations between academia and real-life systems. Methodologically, he brings pragmatic and provocative programming in support of decolonial and transdisciplinary interventions.