Community Repair Project: Strategic Social Skill Mobilization For Sustainable Fashion

As an effort towards sustainability, fashion needs to embrace repair as a designed feature for everyday clothes. Normally we think of repair as merely fixing a broken object, making it functional again. But repair can be so much more. It can be an update of function, an improvement of style, a sign of compassion, or even rebuilding of community. If sustainable fashion takes repair seriously, designers might be able to reengage communities in strategic collaborations for repair; using the broken object to mend the social fabric scattered by the status anxiety of fashion

Made in GB ‐ manufacturing and fashion provenance.

The UK fashion industry is distinctive for its idiosyncrasy, practicality, resourcefulness and voice from an eclectic nation. Its creative capital spans design, make, styling, journalism, showmanship, retail and entrepreneurship at scales large and small. This is manifest at two extremes – the crafting of cloth holding centuries of refinement and the honing of skills in bespoke tailoring through to the honing of the prevalent business model of production and consumption at a speed and volume that amazes the world and these connections to our cultural identities and our use of technology are vehicles for fashion as a social connector, offering each of us the ability to identify ourselves and get feedback from others. Fashion affects the attitude of most people towards themselves and others. This is a vital consideration to each of us as social animals, to the cohesion of our communities and to our collective state and governance. It is how we act that determines our destiny. It is what we value that determines how we act. About the event: The UK fashion industry contributes £21bn to the economy and directly employs more than 800,000 people. But what about the future for growth, skills and nurturing new generations of talent? Bringing together policymakers and representatives from across the UK fashion industry - including retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and designers - this seminar examined the emerging challenges and opportunities for the industry. Sessions focused on domestic clothing manufacturing and options for capitalising on product provenance, and further emerging opportunities for industry and government to collaborate to promote UK fashion and design internationally. The event is part of a series of events being organised by the Westminster Media Forum looking at the UK's creative industries

Volume 4.0: Centre for Sustainable Fashion: Green Collar Graduates for the Fashion Industry

UK Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) play a unique and important role in the education of ‘green collar’ fashion graduates, to equip them with the tools to create a more sustainable fashion industry. Focusing on the links between employability and sustainability, this research will examine the needs and expectations of fashion industry employers in relation to education in sustainability within fashion related courses. It is intended that the results of this research will provide HEI courses with the information needed to develop curriculum on fashion related courses, as well as informing curriculum development on other art and design courses. Phase one of the research focused on an online survey aimed at fashion led businesses within the UK. The results of this survey facilitated the identification of key themes for the telephone interviews of key fashion industry members, which followed as part of phase two. The survey results and notes from the telephone interviews can be found in the appendices one and two

Fashioning the Future Awards 2011

Established in 2008, Fashioning the Future aims to inspire curiosity, encourage the testing of ideas and create a platform for emerging thinkers, doers, designers and innovators. It facilitates interactions between people in education and business, steering a course towards a better future. The Fashioning the Future Awards were conceived by Dilys Williams as a means for CSF to share and exchange knowledge, skills and experience with others. So far, CSF has connected over 3000 students from a host of fashion institutions worldwide with global businesses and NGOs. Resources, developed from Dilys’ and CSF’s expertise, act as a guide to participants and outcomes are showcased through exhibition, catwalk and digital mediums. For the third edition of the Fashioning the Future Awards, and as part of the decade of biodiversity and partnering with UNCTAD, finalists were selected to be featured in an experimental multimedia exhibition and catwalk show supported by Canary Wharf and held in the imposing East Winter Gardens

Fashion Education in Sustainability: Change Through Experiential Crossings

Sustainability is distinguished by its multidimensional, messy, big and small transformational change processes that impact the world on all scales and timelines that are both short and long. This is, whilst challenging, full of diverse possibilities. To be path makers and navigators through this complexity requires us to teach and learn skills, knowledge and understanding of our relationships with each other and with our natural world. It requires us to hone our skills of imagination as well as our practical skills of creation and communication. Education for sustainability offers us a means to unlock the current fashion educational paradigm, which has become, in many cases, a service led model of educational provision for current business functions. It offers the means to change towards education that is based on a nurturing of culture, creativity and critical thinking, so that we are capable of responding to global and local contexts to contribute towards thriving societies, cultures and economies. The places, players, and their roles in this process differ substantially from traditional fashion education hierarchical models. This paper explores this changing paradigm through a case study at London College of Fashion, guided by Dilys Williams, Director Centre for Sustainable Fashion. The project worked with thirty undergraduate students across disciplines in fashion design and communication, their tutors, and a world leading sportswear brand’s design, communication and education teams. The author has developed an experiential and reflexive learning process through a number of iterations to explore design for sustainability (DfS) through teaching and learning methods that visualize our interdependence, support a mutual learning environment, and begin to explore cause and effect of our actions and interactions. This project engages this approach to explore ways in which the business could de-couple success from the throughput of material goods through this project based in the UK and the US

The Making of a Social Object: Collaboration between Nike and Centre for Sustainable Fashion

Introduction: The Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) is a group of researchers, designers and communicators, brought together through shared ambitions around the possibility of fashion: a means to connect us to each other and with nature, and a means to make real our adaptability to time and place. It seeks ways for osmosis between human, ecological and technological elements to create a mixture that makes for better balance and a life well lived, as applied through fashion’s personal and collective practices. The centre’s work is situated in the cross referencing of research projects (often working with others outside of fashion), the development of innovative commercial practices (with large and small businesses), and the teaching and learning of design for sustainability (with undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students). We seek ways and places to connect and be adaptable as individuals, evolving a unique sense of who we are in the world, as communities, whether location or interest based, and in our governance and political identities and actions. For this reason, we find ourselves sometimes in the House of Lords, at other times in remote villages, and always looking for space to be reflexive in our work. Sustainability can be distinguished by its multidimensional, non-conformist, not readily acceptable range of change processes and practices. It can lead us to consider fundamental qualities and characteristics of life and challenge our current habits and practices in their respect. It can question us as individuals, communities, and organisations, and can seek in us the qualities of imagination, interaction and sensitivity, along with practical skills of creation and communication. Sustainability is about who we are and what we do and make. This framing means a radical shift in how we experience life, quite different from many of the more easily palatable forms of sustainability within current practices, where efficiencies in existing systems form the visible changes that take place. Designers are well placed to explore these questions and habits, especially when placed in the cross-frame of research, education and current practice. What might be deemed risk in one area can become experimentation opportunity in another. Just such a stretching was tested when Nike’s Sustainable Business Innovation team approached us with a question, charged with possibility, whilst challenged by current infrastructures of global business. ..

Sustainable Futures - In Conversation with Dilys Williams

Part of the London College of Fashion (University of the Arts London), the Centre for Sustainable Fashion has been run by Dilys Williams since it was founded in 2007. A designer herself, Dilys is fully aware of the hurdles confronting people working within the industry. Well Made magazine sat down with her to discuss some of the ways in which she feels those challenges are being met and the ways in which the Centre for Sustainable Fashion is helping facilitate change within the fashion industry

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, 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, 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 course’s 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; bridging of epistemological differences at an institutional level; new roles for designers working within a framework of sustainability; and emerging ways to visualize the process and practice of sustainability

Shared talent: an exploration of the potential of the 'Shared Talent' collaborative and hands on educational experience for enhanced learning around sustainability in fashion practice

Shared Talent is a fashion for sustainability framework, developed by Dilys Williams to facilitate a means for fashion designers to exchange expertise with other protagonists across the supply chain, transcending traditional divisions, be they linguistic, geographic, or discipline based. In 2009, Shared Talent India brought together a diverse group of like-minded designers to share their ideas about fashion, challenge their motivations as designers, and question how they create collections. Equipped with research carried out through Shared Talent 1 and 2, and geographically specific research in a number of locations across India, their collaborative concepts were realised with beautiful results. Through partnership between Defra’s led Sustainable Clothing Roadmap and the Indian Government under the UK:India Sustainable Development Dialogue, Shared Talent India explored and shared knowledge on sustainable design practice with established and emerging designers, makers and NGOs. Participants included twelve designers, based both in the UK and India, suppliers and communities of Indian textile producers, buyers and undergraduates from London College of Fashion, Pearl Academy of Fashion Delhi, and Amsterdam Fashion Institute. The research outcomes aim to innovate towards improved ecological, ethical and cultural criteria in selecting and creating collections, and a means to connect designers and buyers to more sustainable textiles in India. Outputs are available as an open-source online resource to help fashion designers, researchers, students, entrepreneurs and businesses to establish strategies for sourcing sustainability from India; the resource is a culmination of the collaboration and includes contribution by key project team members, project managed by Alex McIntosh and led by Dilys Williams

DEFRA Clothing Action Plan

As part of Defra’s Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) programme, a voluntary clothing industry initiative was co-ordinated by Defra with the aim to improve the environmental and ethical performance of clothing. The Sustainable Clothing Roadmap aims to improve the environmental and social performance of clothing, building on existing initiatives and by co-ordinating action by key clothing supply chain stakeholders. Although organisations in the clothing supply chain have already taken significant steps to reduce adverse environmental and social impacts, further industry-wide co-operation and agreed commitments will enable that process to accelerate. That is the rationale behind the collaborative nature of the roadmap. The DEFRA initiative is now a WRAP (Waste Resources Action Plan) initiative. Centre for Sustainable Fashion participate on the WRAP steering group and the sub groups on design and recycling. Dilys Williams advised this report's lead author