Dilys Williams

Fashioning the Future

The Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), set up at London College of Fashion (LCF) in 2008, sets out to explore Education for Sustainability (ESD) practices, create design for sustainability (DfS) research, and form a discourse between academia and industry for sustainable design in practice. In establishing the Centre, I foregrounded the work we were embarking on by gathering over 250 designers, educators, researchers, industry practitioners, and political experts together for a “summit” questioning fashion’s role beyond consumption. As part of this discourse, it was vital to demonstrate newly emerging manifestations of fashion in a contemporary context. So I framed a call to invite any student, from any degree course, anywhere in the world, to respond to fashion’s relevance to place and time. Named as Fashioning the Future Awards (FFA), aligned to the college’s ethos of preparing its students for a future world, FFA was established as a means to share practices in ESD from around the world, a platform to celebrate student work beyond its usual conventions, to offer employers and others a range of ideas, starting from a reframing of fashion through sustainability thinking. Since its first round in 2008, there have been three further phases of FFA to date, each relating to specified imperatives of our time and, to date, we have generated responses from over thirty-two countries and 3,000 students. Submissions suggest a narrative of design for sustainability that gives greater diversity for fashion, and contributes to expanding educational practices and, potentially, a way to review fashion and its meaning in our lives. ......

Fashion Education In Sustainability In Practice

This paper sets out the experiences of and critical reflections on devising and delivering a Masters level fashion education course in sustainability at London College of Fashion, UK. The course, first established in 2008, has been created from a collaborative, participatory and ecological paradigm, and draws on an approach to fashion education that is oriented towards process, action and creative participation in all aspects of the transition to sustainability: social, environmental and economic. This stands in contrast to conventional educational models that concentrate on product or outcome and the preparation of students for economic life. The paper describes the Masters courses broad disciplinary approach and its theoretical framework, drawn from design for sustainability. Through reference to student work, the paper goes on to set out some of the opportunities and challenges that working in this way has presented, including among others; the bridging of epistemological differences at an institutional level; new roles for designers who are working within a framework of sustainability; and emerging ways to visualize the process and practice of sustainability.

The Will and the Skill in Education for Sustainability

Sustainability is possibly the biggest critique that fashion education has ever known. By its nature connecting a vast range of disciplines, fashion explores technical, philosophical, artistic and economic parameters within and beyond its material dimensions and might therefore challenge a broad range of societal practices. Design education more broadly, as with industry, is steadily taking on bold language around sustainability, but this is not always matched with deep change in disciplinary practice. Whilst new skills for sustainability are increasingly being endorsed as crucial for graduate employability by business and governmental agendas, those needed to shape a radically new kind of future are often poorly defined. This paper outlines research into ways in which the educational space might negotiate the needs of the present with the future using evidence from an academia-business collaboration. It explores fashion’s potential to inform sustainability practice in relation to and beyond fashion education using analysis of participant interviews, curriculum creation and participant feedback to navigate relevant knowledge and values and their recognition in academic terms. It involves actors from a diverse student body, teaching staff and business practitioners. It will be of value to those interested in the transformation of education through sustainability, referencing a range of change levels identified through the research.

Fashion, the City, and the Spectacle

Many of us are familiar with the conventional role of designer within an urban or fashion context. Through Fashion Design for Sustainability there is the potential for a more expansive role, as alchemist and agent for change. This chapter explores the interplay between citizen, designer and city to create spectacles of fashion as crucibles for the fermentation and distillation of values and practices congruent with sustainability in a city.

Fashion Design and Sustainability

In this chapter, I approach sustainability in relation to fashion’s meaning, processes, relationships and its matter. This involves the creation, extension or loss of value in a multitude of resources. The social resources involved in one of the world’s major industries, and possibly the most personal whilst ubiquitous methods of identity forming, is also the resource that affects all others: nature and our collective futures. To contextualise fashion design and sustainability in our times it is important to reference some of its historical, traditional, and future contexts in business and educational settings. Through my work as a designer and researcher, I have established the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, the first research centre in fashion and sustainability, at the University of the Arts, London, where I along with a team of researchers and students develop and apply design methods for relationship forming, product forming and societal prosperity. I share some of these methods here to offer an overview of my own work practices for consideration by others who make design decisions, whether through sketching, analyzing, selecting, product developing or through other facets of fashion’s discourse. As a long practiced designer and researcher, working at various scales and market levels, I bring to this chapter a discussion that starts within a practice of fashion design, to look at the role of designer in fashion’s contribution as a vital reference point in our individual identities and cultures in our shared habitat in nature. About the book: Sustainability is an issue that increasingly concerns all those involved in the apparel industry, including textile manufacturers, apparel designers, retailers and consumers. This important book covers recent advances and novel technologies in the key areas of production, processing and recycling of apparel. Part One addresses sustainable finishing and dyeing processes for textiles. The first two chapters concentrate on the environmental impact of fabric finishing, including water consumption, emissions and waste management. Further chapters focus on plasma and enzymatic treatments for sustainable textile processing, and the potential for improving the sustainability of dyeing technologies. Part Two covers issues of design, retail and recycling, and includes discussions of public attitudes towards sustainability in fashion, methods of measuring apparel sustainability and social trends in the re-use of apparel.