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 a university-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 as well as 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.