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.

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