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RJTA Vol. 17 No. 2 2013
81
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 (0)207 514 8470
E-mail address: k.t.fletcher@fashion.arts.ac.uk (Kate Fletcher)
Fashion Education in Sustainability in Practice
Kate Fletcher
1
* and Dilys Williams
Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London,
United Kingdom, k.t.fletcher@fashion.arts.ac.uk and d.williams@fashion.arts.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
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 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; 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.
Keywords:
Sustainability, Fashion, Education, Design, Participative, Paradigm
1. Introduction
‘What would sustainability have us do?’
This question, posed by American scholar David
Orr (2009), is as radical and challenging as it is
disarmingly simple. For in six words, Orr breathes
life into at an emerging world of thought and
practice that is conceived of from within the goals
and dynamics of sustainability itself. Orr invokes
sustainability as both purpose and process, and in
doing so, marks out an epistemological position
that is palpably different to that moulding
prevailing knowledge and action today. His
starting point – and that for this paper – is not the
‘bolt-ons’ that any particular industry, government
or educational establishment could or should be
introducing in order to make existing practices
‘greener’ or more ethical, but rather an expansive
and creative imagining of the actions needed to
create sustainability without being first side
tracked by the bottom line, existing industrial
frameworks or educational targets. These broad
actions are the cornerstones of a growing body of
work in fashion and sustainability which are
emerging from an ecological and participatory
paradigm of thought and practice (see for example,
the Local Wisdom project:
http://www.localwisdom.info). Among them is a
young Masters (MA) level course that explores
fashion and sustainability at London College of
Fashion, UK. In this paper, we will introduce and
critically reflect on the first three years of this
post-graduate course, MA Fashion and
Environment, and describe some of the challenges
and opportunities that we have faced in working
within an ecological framework in fashion
education.
2. Fashion and Sustainability
For many commentators on sustainability,
‘fashion’, so closely allied with changing trends
and premature product replacement, is seen as
hostile to ecological values (Stahel, 2010). Indeed,
the fashion sector is widely seen as indivisible
from consumer capitalism and the capitalist logic
of perpetual growth based on increasing
throughput of materials. The stimulus of the
growth imperative feeds increasing speed of
production and consumption of fabric and garment
RJTA Vol. 17 No. 2 2013
82
and the tools of psychological marketing and trend
forecasting, honed to such perfection in fashion,
trigger further growth (Fletcher, 2010). The
resource implications of this are colossal. The
water resources alone that are required to be
flowing in order to grow and process enough
cotton for a single T-shirt is around 600 litres
(Turley et al., 2009). This is in a period in which
humans are facing ‘water bankruptcy’ (UNESCO,
2009) and where demand for water is increasing
while the prospect of the supply of clean water is
reduced, because growing levels of pollution are
limiting potential water use. Yet the water
resources embodied in a T-shirt are barely utilised:
statistics now show that people in industrialised
countries are buying more than ever, regardless of
need (Allwood et al., 2006). It is for all of these
reasons – consumerism, perpetual growth,
astonishing levels and rates of resource throughput
– and more, that a critical and broad-based
educational engagement with sustainability issues
in fashion takes place not within the status quo,
but within a new paradigm or framework of
analysis and understanding. For without it, the
responses to a critique of the existing fashion
industry model would be confined by ideas and
established behaviours of that model and mimic a
familiar set of outcomes. Indeed, this is a common
finding of complex systems analysis which
recognises that by pursuing improvements in the
‘same old’ places, we build the ‘same old’ ways of
thinking into our behaviours, and in so doing,
radically limit the potential effects of our actions
(Meadows, 2009); when in fact, what is needed is
to create big change over the long term.
Thus, in sustainability education in fashion – as in
many other subjects or sectors that are heavily
influenced by consumerist material culture – it is
vital that an alternative framework of questioning
or analysis is evoked; this is in order to respond to
the deep challenge posed by sustainability to such
sectors with deep solutions. For us, this meant the
framing up of an MA course in Fashion and
Environment, within an ecological paradigm that
recognises the interdependence between nature
and individual and societal well-being, and the
challenges of the growing breakdown of natural
systems: planetary boundaries on climate,
biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle have already
been exceeded and the limits of many others are
being rapidly approached (Rockström et al.,
2009).
Furthermore, to an ecological framework, we have
also sought to bring a broader view of fashion than
is often understood when seen through an
environmental resource-based or ethical lens alone.
While the dynamics of a global industry
accurately describe one part of what ‘fashion’ is, it
is also something more. Cultural theorist Joanne
Finkelstein (1996) describes fashion as, ‘a hybrid
phenomenon, located at the interstices between
economics and art, psychology and commerce,
creativity and banality… as a social, economic and
aesthetic force and more often than not, all three at
the same time.’ This is put another way by
sociologist Juliet Schor (2002) who depicts
fashion as ‘a vital part of the human experience’.
Viewed in this way, the challenge for fashion
education in sustainability is to explore the (vast)
territory at the connection between human
experience and ecological values as understood
through garments. Certainly the first thing that
becomes apparent when framing up such an area
of study is that a ‘focused’ specialism in fashion
and sustainability involves a widening (not
narrowing) view. It is, in effect, like looking
through a telescope in order to understand more
about a constituent part (in our case, fashion).
Typically, it involves understanding how the
whole functions in order to work out the dynamics
and details of a component part. This is the
opposite experience of many who engage in
further academic study, where the world is
scrutinised by understanding how discrete areas
operate when taken separately. The prevailing
mechanistic view is typified by segregation of
areas of study into ever-narrower ‘silos’ and which
contributes to whole system sustainability by
default rather than by design.
In contrast to a conventional educational approach
which favours analysis based on ‘taking things
apart’, education in sustainability places central
importance on the paradigm of holism and
synthesis and ‘putting things together’. As part of
this shift, Jones et al. (2010a) argued for a
‘progressive broadening’ of work in order to
contextualise and better understand its place in the
complex, uncertain, real world with unsustainable
patterns of social and economic life. This
broadening mandate is seen to embrace, ‘aesthetic,
cultural, ecological, economic, environmental,
ethical, philosophical, political, scientific, social,
spiritual and technological’ dimensions (Selby as
cited by Jones et al., 2010b), and it brings a key
RJTA Vol. 17 No. 2 2013
83
challenge for learners to make a valuable
contribution to society by thinking and acting in
novel, frontier-dissolving ways: ‘going beyond
mental and disciplinary boundaries, structural
barriers and physical borders, as well as by
influencing the systems in which competence is
developed’ (Wals and Blewitt, 2010). This, like so
much within education in sustainability, contains
an open challenge to the educational status quo.
Here, to overhaul the prevailing system of
classification of ideas and disciplinary structure,
necessary because sustainability necessitates work
that spans multiple disciplines, spaces and
timeframes.
3. MA Fashion and Environment
The MA Fashion and Environment course at
London College of Fashion (LCF), part of the
University of the Arts London, was established in
2008 as a key element of the growing commitment
of LCF to sustainability. For a number of years
prior to the inception of the MA, lectures and
symposia had sought to engage LCF staff and
students in a dialogue around sustainability, both
as part of formal taught projects and also less
formally, by connecting interested students with
staff who held expertise in this area. In April 2008,
LCF consolidated this activity by establishing a
Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) where the
fashion-sustainability space could be more deeply
and visibly explored and applied in research,
enterprise and wider curriculum activities. The
MA that is the subject of this paper was a
constituent part of this work.
We would like to acknowledge that from the
outset, LCF has been exceptionally progressive in
its preparedness to engage with sustainability as
an important field of work in fashion. Yet
notwithstanding this fact, the development of the
MA raises some very challenging questions for
both LCF and more broadly, higher education.
Perhaps the most basic of these is the fundamental
incongruity between the ecological, participatory
educational models called into being by a full and
deep engagement with sustainability and the
largely mechanistic and reductionist ones that
prevail in most higher education institutions today.
In essence, the setting up of an MA course like
Fashion and Environment starts in training a
process of scrutiny and ultimately, the
transformation of educational models that many
who are working in higher education neither
foresee nor are ready for when they meet initial
ambitions to set up a course in this area. Yet,
according to Stephen Sterling, such transformation
is unavoidable because of the incompatibility of
the majority view of education and sustainability:
‘Within the [overall educational] paradigm, most
mainstream education sustains unsustainability –
through uncritically reproducing norms, by
fragmenting understanding… by an inability to
explore alternatives, by rewarding dependency and
conformity, and by servicing the needs of the
consumerist machine’ (2001) (emphasis in
original). Thus the argument follows that to
educate in a way that sustains sustainability, new
educational paradigms need to be introduced. This
in turn, has deep implications for a college or
university across the board as it raises questions
about the greater purpose of an institution, its
policies and practices, and whether the changed
educational paradigm established within, say, an
MA is reproduced elsewhere, or drowned out by
the larger, conventional (fashion) education
system, the political missives handed down to the
higher education sector from government
departments or the increasing market-led
commercialisation of education.
4. Educational Approach
Our ambition for the MA Fashion and
Environment was to create a course that
contributed to long-term change towards
sustainability in the fashion sector. As described
earlier, we attempted to do this by working from
within a holistic, participatory paradigm; one that
is concerned with the active, transformatory
potential of sustainability for fashion, rather than
just the passive transmission of information about
environmental and ethical issues (Sterling, 2001).
Thus, within the MA, onus was placed on building
experiential and practical understanding of
sustainability, and the setting up of an educational
approach that would enable learners to actively
participate in change in the fashion sector in a
range of ways.
In MA Fashion and Environment, this
participative and practical engagement with
change was delivered through a broad intellectual
framework of design thinking and practice. Much
has been written about the potential of design
thinking to contribute to sustainability both in
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84
small increments and step change improvements
(e.g. Brezet, 1997; Manzini, 1994). Indeed the
iterative, affirmative, reflective, practical and
visioning skills of design as well as its position at
the interface of producer and consumer and
technology and society, seem to make it
particularly well suited to the complex,
multifaceted and unbounded shape of so many
sustainability issues. What is more, to reflect the
variety of skills necessary for the diversity of
sustainability challenges, we actively decided to
recruit students to the MA from both
practice-based and theoretical backgrounds in
order to engage them in a creative learning process
that involves participants with a host of different
experiences.
Most of the decisions we took in first devising and
then delivering the MA effectively expanded the
context and application of fashion education;
embracing whole systems analysis, insights drawn
from social science, psychology, environmental
resource analysis, ecology as well as the more
traditional design subjects and garment making.
The reality of navigating and working with this
growing volume of information can be
overwhelming for many learners, teachers and
institutions alike, who battle to fit this broad and
deep knowledge building into everything from a
university timetable and fixed staff budget for
teaching on the one hand and a clearly articulated
and focused student project proposal on the other.
Our struggle with this is evidenced by the fact that
after three years of accompanying three separate
groups of students through this process, one of our
most persistent ongoing challenges is how to
encourage students to segue from a broad,
expansive perspective down to the level of detail
in order to visualise, materialise and communicate
this thinking in practice. To bridge this gap in
student empowerment and ability and support
them to switch between different perspectives and
contexts, we have tried to implement a number of
pedagogical approaches, many of which still need
much work and finessing. One of these involves
encouraging students to establish learning
communities between themselves in order to
support each other in a process of continual and
collaborative development in their studies. In the
case of the MA, this has seen the development of a
new relationship emerging between teachers and
learners and finding novel ways to learn across
geographical, cultural, and generational
boundaries. Another approach has been to educate
students in the tools of sustainability education,
and most notably, in critical thinking, so as to
better examine the assumptions that underpin the
information the students learn about and to
question the world as they know it. This in turn,
encourages students to become more active in
reinforcing their learning, and to foster the
‘willingness to accept responsibility, to acquire
knowledge and to develop the capacity to make
informed choices’ (Springett, 2010).
Throughout the three years of the MA Fashion and
Environment course, we have been painfully
aware of the holes in our own understanding of the
implications of an ecological paradigm for fashion
education in practice. We have been learning ‘on
the job’ and scrutinising our decisions and the
broader educational structures within which we
work. Optimistically, we set a goal of building
capacity and fulfilment through design where
students can use design thinking to create products,
processes, services or systems and use them to
change the behaviour of individuals, communities,
corporations or institutions. However, we realise
that our articulation of the course is inelegant and
immature, even three years on. As part of our
reflection, we have begun to build a tool kit of
approaches that we have found appropriate for
study in this way. These range from the
epistemological to the pedagogical and include
among others:
• holistic thinking;
• critical thinking;
• creative thinking and practice;
• fostering of a reflective, patient state (happy
with long term realisation of ideas, rather
than quick fixes which are usual practice in
fashion education and business);
• participative educational tools and
techniques;
• experiential educational practices;
• practical experiences of change and action;
• the fostering of mutual or collaborative
learning; and
• confidence to do unprecedented things and
break the mould.
5. Four Examples of Student Work
To bring the holistic, participatory approach of
MA Fashion and Environment to life, we offer
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85
four vignettes of student work that begin to
exemplify the ecological paradigm in practice.
These are all examples of practice-based work by
students and are presented here not to the
exclusion of the theoretical work, but because
these projects have all thrown up particularly
searching issues related to the nature of fashion
and fashion education in an era of sustainability.
5.1 Left to Be Found
Left to Be Found explored ways of promoting
garment value through the sharing of fashion
garments. It involved the making of a menswear
collection that was then distributed in a novel way:
by the ‘gifting’ of garments to strangers who
would come across them in public spaces. For the
student – an experienced fashion designer – this
work took her into new realms that explored
notions of value as encapsulated in Einstein’s
words: ‘everything that can be counted does not
necessarily count; everything that counts cannot
necessarily be counted.’
5.2 ReMade in Leeds
ReMade in Leeds was a co-design project
established as a commercial business in an urban
area in the North of England and shaped by the
needs, skills and cultural identities within the
community. It developed a business model
predicated on mindful resource use and reuse,
fulfilment for participants and economic support
for a range of people who offer their skills, which
has since become a blueprint for other
communities. Remade in Leeds makes use of
locally available human resources and waste
textile material and so becomes location and skills
specific, linking the production and consumption
of fashion to both people and place.
5.3 Diary of Our Daily Threads
The roots of Diary of Our Daily Threads were fed
by observations of the markers of time and
wellbeing in nature, explored through the study of
lichens and mosses. The project went on to seek
an understanding of the markers for human
memory and their tactile triggers through clothing
and its relationship to present and past ‘holders.’
Video ethnography explored the ability of pieces
of clothing to retain and evoke memory were
documented and offered as examples of the
preciousness of the pieces and increasing value
over their lives and time as opposed to decreasing
value and disregard in commercial terms.
5.4 Energy Water Fashion
Energy Water Fashion utilised extended consumer
research around laundering habits and their
relation to shape, colour and material to inform the
design and functionality of clothes that have lower
‘in use’ impacts. By starting from technically
driven Life Cycle Assessment data, this project
developed design responses that went beyond
efficiencies in current ways or wearing, washing
and drying our clothes, to explore new ways to
shape the aesthetic, fit (in body, function and
resource terms) and wearer considerations around
cleanliness to the overall impacts of a garment.
6. Reflections on Student Work
Emerging From an Ecological
Paradigm
The four projects introduced above raise many
important and testing issues for both educational
practices around fashion and more generally, the
commercial fashion sector. In the paragraphs that
follow, we offer our reflections on some of these
themes.
In projects like Left to Be Found and Remade in
Leeds, the work emphasises process and
experience over outcome; sometimes with little or
no physical work to show at the end of the
student’s period of study. Indeed, in both of these
cases, the traditional role of the designer as creator
and ‘maker of things’ gave way to a new role as
facilitator as the projects progressed. In both of
these projects, a less teleologically-distinct way of
designing emerged where the designer-protagonist
let go of some of the control and power that she
held over the work. Here, the students moved from
being a shaper of their project to being a shaper
within their project; a design approach which has
been called a ‘non-plan’ (Barker as cited in
Dunlop, 2010). Yet for a fashion education system
that is accustomed to framing students as the sole
originator of work, where that work is validated
through presentation on a catwalk or exhibition,
and also for an (industry and media) audience that
seeks ‘recognisable traits’ of fashion in garment
form as marks of quality or success, this is a
challenging situation, for much of this ‘non-plan’
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86
work is not made manifest in garment form.
Furthermore, one that we are still wrestling with,
for while careful documentation of process is
appropriate to successfully pass assessment
procedures for the University; to the world outside
the academy, so habituated to ‘understanding’
fashion on the basis of quick aesthetic judgements
alone, the invisibility of this work is perplexing.
This confusion about the appearance of
sustainability work in fashion seems to confirm
the view of Stephen Sterling in that the prevailing
educational paradigm, ‘conforms to the
philosophy and perceived needs of the market’
(2001), churning out students each year who
reinforce the existing values and ways of working
in the industry. Indeed, herein lies another tension
that has emerged time and again with students
over the last three years: how to form a bridge
between the values and approaches of
collaborative, ecological fashion practice and the
expectations of the mainstream, market-based
fashion industry. This need to bridge is often a
pragmatic one; for students need to make a living
(often in this industry) upon graduation. Yet to
emphasise the ‘end result’ (employability) over
experience poorly reflects our ambition for this
course, although once again exposes the
epistemological differences between
sustainability- and conventional- education. For us,
the MA has not been about ticking a box, giving
the correct answer or producing the right
credentials, but rather a learning and teaching
experience that furnishes students with new skills,
understanding and confidence to start out on the
‘beginning’ of their own journeys in this sector.
This experience does not privilege the commercial
agenda, but offers industry application and in
doing so, directs and challenges commercial,
market-led fashion.
This journey in the case of the work Diary of Our
Daily Threads, saw the development of a subtle
set of design skills based on empathy. Here, the
designer, by using ethnographic methods, became
imaginative about and for others as a key part of
her process and outcome. The sensitivity shown
by the student to the texture, shape and form of the
pieces that were created was unlike any previously
witnessed through years of working with students
and design teams in commercial fashion
businesses. Furthermore, the presentation of the
work expanded traditional views of suitable
formats of collections or exhibitions and employed
highly effective communication techniques
through text, 3D work, photography and film
brought together by interactive communication
devices, designed and made as part of the project
to specifically enable the audience to view, hear
and feel the work. In this work, new knowledge
was directly generated from a participative and
reflective paradigm.
In the case of Energy Water Fashion, the student
traversed across disciplinary boundaries and
product sectors often seen as outside the scope of
fashion design. Here, the student engaged with
ecological systems, consumer behaviour analysis,
lifecycle assessment and the sociology of
technology and moved between the world of
garment creation and production, the home –
where most domestic laundry takes place, and
detergent and washing machine development and
manufacture. The outcome, an eight piece garment
collection, is a visual manifestation of a fresh
ideation process that makes a tangible, desirable
‘route in’ to the ideas described. Just as fashion
takes an artistic form that is intuitive in concept,
technical in application and ensures its viability
due to its commercial standing, so this broad work
uses a similar approach but ensures its feasibility
through its practical and participatory engagement
with sustainability issues.
7. Reflective Insights
Over the last three years, our understanding of
fashion education in sustainability in practice has
grown enormously. There have been many high
points on our journey and much excitement at the
creation of new possibilities for the subject area.
Furthermore, fresh insights have been generated in
both the opportunities and challenges of working
in fashion education with ideas and actions that
emerge from a different paradigm, and how these
often have a sense of being out of place or out of
time when compared with today’s sector and
dominant educational models.
As mentioned earlier, even though the MA is
situated in a progressive and supportive College,
we have periodically struggled to find a place for
its approaches and viewpoints within institutional
structures and expectations, which tend, implicitly,
to favour the status quo. Sensitivity to the bigger
structural and educational implications of
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87
initiating a programme of study in sustainability is
recommended so as to ably navigate the bigger
systems which set the rules and goals for
individual courses. Yet at the same, the power of
the ecological paradigm to critique education, and
ask most fundamentally, ‘what is education for?’
should be harnessed to transform learning and
teaching in a way that is meaningful, engaging and
participative.
In the midst of what we had thought of as a
meaningful and engaging educational experience,
we have witnessed a phenomenon that is emerging
in some students akin to the paralysis of practice.
These students, who take on the enormity of
global sustainability issues and then become
beleaguered by their complexity and unbounded
nature, ultimately become unable to act. Here,
growing exposure to the breadth of fashion and
sustainability information coupled with a desire to
work in the most ‘perfect’, ‘ethical’ way possibly
leads to an almost inevitable cessation of practice.
Yet through a process of supporting students to
develop understanding of the interdependencies
that underpin every action, and with that their
growing ease or comfort with the complexity of
real issues and experiences, students emerge
changed. Over time, we have come to recognise
that when a student falters, it is because his/her
‘practice’ tends to be concerned with outcomes
and solutions, rather than process. Moreover, by
encouraging a shift in emphasis, this often makes
action possible again.
We strongly feel that it is the case that visualising
and making ‘real’ the holistic and collaborative
model of fashion provides a vital way to bridge
different paradigms and contexts and to the
fashion world as it is today. Indeed this has to be
done in ways that inspire and entice an audience,
whilst also being true to and unapologetic for its
participatory, ecological nature. Yet, as we have
witnessed, students often feel a ‘heaviness’ or
burden when dealing with sustainability issues, a
weight that seeps into and colours this
visualisation in a way rarely featured in the visual
work of students in conventional fashion courses.
One explanation for this discrepancy is that
mainstream fashion education trains students to
appear in a world that is ‘essentially groundless’
and a ‘world of ideas’ (Farrell 2008, unpaginated).
In this imaginary and emotional world, almost
anything is possible – students are ‘light’ and free
– there are few limits. Yet this is surely an
outdated view: our planet clearly does have limits
and the physical manifestation of fashion, as both
a garment and a global industry, is as subject to
them as everything else. Yet the point needs to be
made that these students are the product of a
teaching system that takes a mechanistic,
instrumental view of education and thus reflects
and reinforces the view of mainstream industry,
where environmental and social costs are
externalized as common practice. This brings us
back full circle to the world evoked by David
Orr’s paradigm-shifting question with which we
opened this paper: what would sustainability have
(fashion) do? The tentative response we offer,
after our work on the MA, is that it would have us
creatively re-imagine fashion education from a
different starting place and to peacefully and
powerfully make it happen.
8. Conclusion
This paper has set out our experiences of
establishing and teaching a Masters level course in
fashion devised within a framework of
sustainability. The ecological, participatory and
collaborative values that shape this framework and
this Masters course have ushered in not only a
‘progressive broadening’ of educational content,
but also different models of learning and teaching
as compared with conventional post-graduate
education pedagogy and a differently organised
learning environment. These different
requirements have thrown up many important and
testing questions for fashion education in
particular and more generally, the fashion sector.
The critical reflections we offer in this paper flag
some of these emerging issues and describe the
ways in which we have sought to understand and
transform them into opportunities for learning in
the future.
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