Transition to transformation in fashion education for sustainability

Abstract

Contemporary practices in many educational and business establishments in Europe, the US, and elsewhere are built on an industrialized context set in motion in the mid 19th century, and further the accelerating digital and technological discoveries of the past century have been used to compound and multiply this perspective. 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. The business and education of fashion exemplify this global changing of lives, and do so in a number of ways quite spectacularly as a sector, due to the singular nature of fashion; universal in society as a marker of identity and a mirror to culture and attitudes. Fashion also reaches into lives through its huge global impact (25+ million employees and vast resource use). Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) offers an apt location for the critique of current models of fashion education and business to be set against our ability 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 in Together: the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Penguin, London, 2013), thus creating an imperative and an opportunity to bring together stakeholders from business, research and university teaching in a dialogue through ESD. Education offers an opportunity to foster new ideas that can take us beyond what already exists, with an emerging body of research (Sterling, Orr, Blewitt, Wals, Creigton) highlighting the need for systemic change in how and what we teach and learn. This chapter discusses the engagement of stakeholders in fashion ESD and introduces a co-created curriculum between world leading company Kering, whose portfolio of fashion brands includes Gucci, Stella McCartney and Puma, in partnership with globally reaching educator, London College of Fashion (LCF) at University of the Arts, London (UAL). The convenor of this partnership is the research centre, Centre for Sustainable Fashion, (CSF) where fashion is explored as a means to better lives through sustainability, and the principle investigator in researching this partnership is the centre’s director and author of this chapter.