Transition and Transformation in Fashion Education for Sustainability

Abstract

Contemporary practices in many educational and business establishments in Europe, the US and elsewhere, build on an industrialized context set in motion in the mid 19th century, multiplied through digital and technological discovery and related business actions. This context has enabled the creation of incredible advances across a plethora of life’s activities, giving freedom and opportunity to millions, whilst creating irreparable damage, loss of life and an increasingly imbalanced world for its inhabitants. Education and related artistic and business facets of fashion exemplify changing lives across the world due to the individual nature of fashion as a marker of identity, and a mirror to culture and attitudes, as well as its global impact (25+ million employees and vast resource use). There is a critical need for current models of fashion education and business to be viewed against our abilities to live well without jeopardizing our futures and our fellows.

The emergent properties of our changing world require skills and aptitudes that are quite different from those previously acquired by (fashion) practitioners (Sennett 2013). This is a means to bring together stakeholders from business, research and university teaching in a dialogue to explore cultures of sustainability through ESD. By its nature, sustainability is interactive, experienced, co-created, connected and diverse; this chapter explores some of the exchanges between a range of actors from academia, industry, government, society and nature drawing on an emerging body of ESD research (Sterling 2001; Orr 1992; Blewitt 2004) that might offer narratives on ESD that rest inside and outside of an eco-modernist and radical ecological paradigm (Chick 2013). The traversing of these domains is vital in ensuring that, as educators, we nurture our students in creating visions and actions of the future, whilst enabling them to join and contribute positively to the present. This chapter offers a narrative on some of the bridges that link knowledge in use and knowledge in creation. Insights are drawn from an immersive dialogue and deep, shared commitment between world leading brand, Kering, whose portfolio of luxury and lifestyle fashion businesses includes Gucci, Stella McCartney, and Puma, and London College of Fashion (LCF) at University of the Arts, London (UAL). The conveyor of this partnership is the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, (CSF) a research centre at UAL where fashion is explored as a means to create, support and recognise better lives through sustainability, the principle investigator in this research being the centre’s director and the author of this chapter.

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