This blog is part of a month-long focus around sustainable fashion across HuffPost UK Style and Lifestyle. Here we aim to champion some of the emerging names in fashion and shine a light on the truth about the impact our appetite for fast fashion has around the world.
Fashion can provoke both incredible wonder and great outrage, it is a vital element our society and culture and can provoke heartfelt, on the spot calls for protest, action, regulation or legislation at local and global scales. The response to an atrocity in fashion, such as the devastating Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh, can be powerful, reverberating outwards to significantly amplify a push towards change. Through working hand in hand with partners in industry and business and through education how can we ensure this much needed change becomes embedded?
When I started as a designer at Katharine Hamnett I quickly realized that the decisions I made had potentially huge consequences. Working with cotton poplin and habotai silk as mainstays, I questioned my decisions about the materials, not just in terms of aesthetics and the look of the collection, but the impact orders would have on farmers in India and human rights in China. Thanks to Katharine, a Pandora's box was opened and I started to reach out for the knowledge that could help me and others unravel the complicated process of design from crop to shop.
The ability to make informed decisions and to critically consider design through a wider lens, demands a greater level of collaboration - only through sharing the little I knew with others did we improve design practice together. Nearly 20 years down the line, this is still a work in progress, but with a greatly extended network of incredible people and a dedication that can be seen across businesses large and small. In establishing the Centre for Sustainable Fashion we created a space which sets out a commitment to this exploratory way of working, over time we have identified three main parameters; 'Living within Ecological Limits,' 'Better Lives' and 'Transformational Design' which help guide our thinking and methodology and help focus our practice. As a University research centre, based at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, we are able to develop new courses for students, such as MA Fashion Futures, to co-create curriculum with world leading businesses such as Kering and devise new design methods with teams as diverse as the United Nations. By transforming curriculum we can change the course of the industry and our future by providing graduates with the right skills to interrogate and disrupt the status quo.
The CSF also mentors and supports a myriad of small to medium sized enterprises - so far over 100 businesses have come through our doors to develop distinction through design for sustainability; there are companies who are producing new kinds of collections, working in innovative studio spaces and using new business models using skills not necessarily associated with fashion. They are innovators and change makers who will change the face of this industry. They are not radical 'greenies' but serious business people looking for a way to sustain our precarious industry.
As researchers, we work with social and climate scientists, anthropologists and public audiences and as campaigners, we work with governments and specifically with Baroness Lola Young on an All Party Parliamentary Group in the House of Lords to raise awareness and debate in UK politics to champion and endorse change on a national level. Only by working hand in hand with industry and government will we see the scale of change that is required.
As the 21st century unfolds, we have become acutely aware of environmental destruction and social injustice. Climate Change, resource depletion, the loss of human dignity and an increasing disconnection between how we live and what keeps the world in balance are becoming issues for all businesses across all sectors.There are no easy solutions and it's not always clear which paths to follow. So, what can those of us who are engaged in fashion do? And just to clarify that's pretty much all of us, unless you go naked (which is a very visible fashion statement in itself) or unless you do not have any control over what you wear, which is a reality for some. We should take strength in numbers - we all have the ability to influence the system whether we are designers, makers or consumers - what we buy and discard is just as important as who made our clothes. But that doesn't make it easy. 97% of scientists agree that Climate Change is happening because of us, naming our era the Anthropocene, the era of human impact on nature. This is not however, matched by social consensus on how to move on, unsurprisingly human nature is not good at acting now to head off future problems.
Fashion though, is about defying and questioning, it's about change. With climate change offering the biggest critique that fashion has ever faced it gives an urgent mandate for this change. We have two main things to do - to change both the making of fashion's 'matter', its contents, materials and practices and also its meaning, its creation of social acceptability of resourcefulness, care and a social rejection of wastefulness and disconnection. In short fashion needs a new movement.
If the early 20th century was given distinction through the Bauhaus movement which crossed disciplines and mixed academia with industry, then here and now in the 21st century we need a postindustrial movement that unites nature's energy with social energy, its primary focus being the connections between things.
The push of knowledge informing our ideas and the pull of possibility that this wider lens offers, depends on our abilities to look around us and to look ahead and realize that a stitch in time saves nine. If we can do this, then the fashion industry might just leave a legacy that we can be proud of, if we can't, then we'll be having to save a hell of a lot more than the proverbial nine lives to stay anywhere near to a world that we can all live well in.
Professor Dilys Williams is the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion, UAL. She was recently named in the Evening Standard's Progress 1000 list highlighting London's most influential people for her work as a campaigner for sustainable fashion
HuffPost UK Lifestyle is running a special series around Sustainable Fashion for the month of September. Livia Firth is creative director of Eco-Age and founder of The Green Carpet Challenge, and will be guest editing on 18 September. If you'd like to blog or get involved, please email us.
Fashion can provoke both incredible wonder and great outrage, it is a vital element our society and culture and can provoke heartfelt, on the spot calls for protest, action, regulation or legislation at local and global scales. The response to an atrocity in fashion, such as the devastating Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh, can be powerful, reverberating outwards to significantly amplify a push towards change. Through working hand in hand with partners in industry and business and through education how can we ensure this much needed change becomes embedded?
When I started as a designer at Katharine Hamnett I quickly realized that the decisions I made had potentially huge consequences. Working with cotton poplin and habotai silk as mainstays, I questioned my decisions about the materials, not just in terms of aesthetics and the look of the collection, but the impact orders would have on farmers in India and human rights in China. Thanks to Katharine, a Pandora's box was opened and I started to reach out for the knowledge that could help me and others unravel the complicated process of design from crop to shop.
The ability to make informed decisions and to critically consider design through a wider lens, demands a greater level of collaboration - only through sharing the little I knew with others did we improve design practice together. Nearly 20 years down the line, this is still a work in progress, but with a greatly extended network of incredible people and a dedication that can be seen across businesses large and small. In establishing the Centre for Sustainable Fashion we created a space which sets out a commitment to this exploratory way of working, over time we have identified three main parameters; 'Living within Ecological Limits,' 'Better Lives' and 'Transformational Design' which help guide our thinking and methodology and help focus our practice. As a University research centre, based at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, we are able to develop new courses for students, such as MA Fashion Futures, to co-create curriculum with world leading businesses such as Kering and devise new design methods with teams as diverse as the United Nations. By transforming curriculum we can change the course of the industry and our future by providing graduates with the right skills to interrogate and disrupt the status quo.
The CSF also mentors and supports a myriad of small to medium sized enterprises - so far over 100 businesses have come through our doors to develop distinction through design for sustainability; there are companies who are producing new kinds of collections, working in innovative studio spaces and using new business models using skills not necessarily associated with fashion. They are innovators and change makers who will change the face of this industry. They are not radical 'greenies' but serious business people looking for a way to sustain our precarious industry.
As researchers, we work with social and climate scientists, anthropologists and public audiences and as campaigners, we work with governments and specifically with Baroness Lola Young on an All Party Parliamentary Group in the House of Lords to raise awareness and debate in UK politics to champion and endorse change on a national level. Only by working hand in hand with industry and government will we see the scale of change that is required.
As the 21st century unfolds, we have become acutely aware of environmental destruction and social injustice. Climate Change, resource depletion, the loss of human dignity and an increasing disconnection between how we live and what keeps the world in balance are becoming issues for all businesses across all sectors.There are no easy solutions and it's not always clear which paths to follow. So, what can those of us who are engaged in fashion do? And just to clarify that's pretty much all of us, unless you go naked (which is a very visible fashion statement in itself) or unless you do not have any control over what you wear, which is a reality for some. We should take strength in numbers - we all have the ability to influence the system whether we are designers, makers or consumers - what we buy and discard is just as important as who made our clothes. But that doesn't make it easy. 97% of scientists agree that Climate Change is happening because of us, naming our era the Anthropocene, the era of human impact on nature. This is not however, matched by social consensus on how to move on, unsurprisingly human nature is not good at acting now to head off future problems.
Fashion though, is about defying and questioning, it's about change. With climate change offering the biggest critique that fashion has ever faced it gives an urgent mandate for this change. We have two main things to do - to change both the making of fashion's 'matter', its contents, materials and practices and also its meaning, its creation of social acceptability of resourcefulness, care and a social rejection of wastefulness and disconnection. In short fashion needs a new movement.
If the early 20th century was given distinction through the Bauhaus movement which crossed disciplines and mixed academia with industry, then here and now in the 21st century we need a postindustrial movement that unites nature's energy with social energy, its primary focus being the connections between things.
The push of knowledge informing our ideas and the pull of possibility that this wider lens offers, depends on our abilities to look around us and to look ahead and realize that a stitch in time saves nine. If we can do this, then the fashion industry might just leave a legacy that we can be proud of, if we can't, then we'll be having to save a hell of a lot more than the proverbial nine lives to stay anywhere near to a world that we can all live well in.
Professor Dilys Williams is the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion, UAL. She was recently named in the Evening Standard's Progress 1000 list highlighting London's most influential people for her work as a campaigner for sustainable fashion
HuffPost UK Lifestyle is running a special series around Sustainable Fashion for the month of September. Livia Firth is creative director of Eco-Age and founder of The Green Carpet Challenge, and will be guest editing on 18 September. If you'd like to blog or get involved, please email us.
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