Fashion as Sustainability in Action: Teaching sustainable prosperity in culture, society, environment, and economy

Since 2018, we have been working with micro and small fashion businesses who have proven that fashion can be a reciprocal, mutually supportive process whose core foci are people, empathy, and well-being of all, within the environmental limits of our planet. This collaborative research project, underpinned by 100 in-depth interviews with UK creatives and support organizations has been translated into an interactive guide, Fashion as Sustainability in Action. The guide introduces the concept of sustainable prosperity in fashion, with examples of best practice from the designers that we have been working with.

This contribution presents the guide and the workshop format developed to stimulate discussion and reflection on prosperity across its cultural, social, environmental, and economic dimensions. These methods can be used in teaching and they are also adaptable to a range of non-academic audiences to facilitate a better understanding of the interconnected nature of sustainability in fashion and beyond.

Transformative Fashion Pedagogies responds to recent calls to action (see Timmo, 2017; Barry, 2021; Cheang, 2020 and Stevenson, 2022) for educators to radically rethink the role of fashion education in relation to industry and wider debates around positionality, power and social and climate justice. While the fashion industry continues along a damaging path of exploitative environmental and social practices, there is a renewed pressure on fashion education to challenge the status quo and equip a new generation of students with the practical and intellectual skills to create lasting change.

This symposium offers an intimate and supportive space for fashion educators from London College of Fashion and Parsons School of Fashion to share the progressive and inclusive pedagogies we are implementing in our courses and institutions across business, product, design, textiles, media, concept, history and theory. The symposium will foreground fashion pedagogy as critical research, asserting the interconnectedness of research, teaching and industry and/or community organizations and the role we play as educators in enacting impactful social and political change with our students.