Centre for Sustainable Fashion

Dilys Williams, Director

Dilys is a fashion designer, collaborator and facilitator of change.  Dilys is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, established to provoke, challenge and question the fashion status quo through collaboration, designing transforming solutions that balance ecology, society and culture. Since 2007, Dilys has been instrumental in the set up and development of the centre and its interrelated activities.

Her academic interests focus on curriculum with sustainability at its heart, working with undergraduate courses and writing and developing the course structure and content for the groundbreaking MA Fashion and the Environment.

Her enterprise interests focus on her professional background and her desire for beautiful, desirable fashion that can sustain us. This draws on her work with both luxury and high street brands, including ten years designing collections with Katharine Hamnett using organically produced materials and promoting awareness of issues surrounding ethical and ecological design and production methods. She believes that there are myriad ways in which we can engage human ingenuity towards a world in which we can all prosper and thrive.

Alex McIntosh, Enterprise and Consultancy Manager

Alex is the Enterprise and Consultancy Manager at the CSF; he began his career in film and then moved in to marketing and brand development for creative businesses, with a specific focus on fashion and sustainability. He has worked with companies large and small across the UK fashion sector developing sustainability focused projects and related product concepts. Alex developed the Make Your Mark in Fashion campaign supported by the UK government and set up the New Entrepreneurs programme and the Innovation award for the Ethical Fashion Forum. Most recently through the CSF he has delivered a two and a half year business development programme London Style offering workshops, training and one to one mentoring on everything from innovative sales and marketing strategies to the implementation of sustainable design and production practice. Alex has personally mentored more than a hundred start-up fashion businesses. Alex has been instrumental in setting up an All Party Parliamentary Group in the UK focusing on addressing issues related to sustainability and ethics in fashion. Alex is an inspirational speaker and has facilitated numerous group workshops and delivered key note speeches everywhere from UN conferences in Geneva to universities in India; he is also a regular contributor to a variety of key fashion publications and is currently working on a year long project with i-D magazine.

Nina Stevenson, Project Coordinator

Nina is a founding member of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, having collaborated closely with Dilys Williams since 2007 on understanding, debating and strategising for sustainability in fashion. Nina is responsible for coordinating student projects within the CSF, developing a culture of sustainability literacy both within London College of Fashion and beyond through international networks. Nina is currently managing a Higher Education Academy funded project to introduce sustainability literacy skills into undergraduate courses at LCF, and is also responsible for developing and driving Fashioning the Future – the international student awards for sustainability in fashion, now in its third year. Nina manages and co-authors the CSF’s regular publications along with coordinating a team of people in the know to bring you this website.

Prior to this role, Nina led student focused marketing and events programs at London College of Fashion, following a client management role at an independent marketing agency. Nina holds a BA Hons French & Spanish and MA Transnational Studies from Southampton University.

Professor Sandy Black, Professor of Fashion and Textile Design and Technology

Professor Sandy Black has extensive experience in both the fashion industry and academia. As designer and director of the Sandy Black fashion knitwear designer label, she sold to fashion stores internationally, then developed the successful Sandy Black knitting yarns and kits.  She then went into education and became director of undergraduate and postgraduate fashion and textiles programmes at University of Brighton and London College of Fashion, where she developed  the MA programme in Fashion Studies.

Sandy focuses on inter-disciplinary design-led research, in the context of sustainability. She developed the Interrogating Fashion research group in 2005, (a Designing for the 21^st Century EPSRC/AHRC funded initiative), and leads the Considerate Design project which aims to assist designers in developing sustainable fashion products to ultimately reduce fashion consumption but increase consumer delight. She publishes widely on fashion, textiles and knitwear design and sustainability, and their intersection with science and technology. She is currently editing a second book on sustainable fashion.

Recent books include:
Eco Chic: the Fashion Paradox (Black Dog Publishing 2008,)
Fashioning Fabrics: contemporary textiles in fashion, (Black Dog 2006)
Knitwear in Fashion (Thames and Hudson 2002, 2005)

Dr Kate Fletcher, Researcher, Author and Design Activist

Urban by birth with an ecological spirit, Kate Fletcher’s work is both rooted in nature’s principles and engaged with the cultural and creative forces of fashion and design. Over the last 15 years, her original thinking and progressive outlook has shaped the field of fashion, textiles and sustainability and come to define it. Kate is one of the founders of the ‘slow fashion’ movement and instigator of directional sustainability projects, including Local Wisdom which has engaged hundreds of people worldwide with the ‘Craft of Use’ and ‘post-growth’ fashion and was shortlisted for the Observer Ethical Awards in 2010. She is also founder of the design for sustainability consultancy slowfashion.org where she works with companies, educational establishments and non‐governmental organizations to foster change towards sustainability. She is also a recognized and inspirational speaker.

Kate has over 50 scholarly and popular publications in the field. She is author of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (2008). Readers call it “inspiring,” “beautifully written,” “the foundation for a radical new perspective” and “a must read” and it is in active use in commercial design studios and is the principle text in academic seminar rooms around the world. She is also co-author of the forth-coming Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (2012).

Kate is Reader in Sustainable Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion where she has a broad remit spanning enterprise, education and research. Her strategic leadership permeates the Centre’s activities, including its role as co-secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion at the House of Lords, where she has guided its agenda towards the role of the user, local production and education and skills.

Professor Helen Storey, Professor of Fashion and Science

Professor Helen Storey is an artist and designer living and working in London. She graduated in Fashion from Kingston Polytechnic in 1981, then worked with Valentino and Lancetti in Rome. She returned to London and worked with Belville Sassoon before launching her own label in 1983 with Caroline Coates. Storey’s late ‘80s and early ‘90s collections were noted for their questioning of traditional notions of glamour, expense and women’s image, including the launch of her 2nd Life range of clothes in 1992. In 1991, Storey won Most Innovative Designer Of The Year and was nominated for British Designer Of The Year by The British Fashion Council.
Storey was awarded Honorary Professorships at Heriot Watt University and King’s College London in 2001 and 2003 respectively and became a Visiting Professor of Material Chemistry at Sheffield University in 2008.

Helen is currently Professor of Fashion and Science at The London College of Fashion. Her pioneering work over the last decade has brought the worlds of art and science together, producing hybrid projects, and products that have broken new and award winning ground, she was awarded an MBE for ‘Services to Arts’ in 2010.

Dr Danka Tamburic, Reader in Cosmetic Science and Programme Director Science

Dr Slobodanka (Danka) Tamburic is a Reader in Cosmetic Science and a Programme Director Science at London College of Fashion.

She has a background in Pharmacy, with an MSc in Pharmaceutical Technology and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr Tamburic has started the first graduate course in the UK solely devoted to the cosmetic industry – BSc (Hons) Cosmetic Science at London College of Fashion. She currently leads the development of an integrated MSc Cosmetic Science, with a planned start in 2012. Her current research encompasses the following strands:

• Exploring the efficacy of cosmetic products using skin bio-engineering methods (non-invasive in vivo testing)
• Evaluating internal structure of semisolid systems for cosmetic and pharmaceutical application and its effect on product efficacy
• Exploring the use of novel technology (e.g. nanotechnology, biotechnology) in cosmetics
• Using a multidisciplinary approach to the study of ageing

Zoe Beck, Research Assistant

Zoe has been working closely with Prof Sandy Black and Prof Helen Storey since 2008, on projects such as Considerate Design and Catalytic Clothing providing administration and research support, including coordinating and supporting varies research events.  She now supports all the Centres research staff with their research activity.

Zoe has both a BA and MA in Textile Design and has been active as a Textile Designer with her own studio creating interior products since completing her MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2005.

Camilla Palestra, Curatorial Research Assistant

Camilla has been working closely with Prof. Lucy Orta since 2007. She is coordinating Prof. Orta’s variety of projects providing administrative and research support and planning an international curatorial strategy for dissemination of the research through exhibitions, publications and events.

Prior to her role at the London College of Fashion, Camilla has been working for a long-term period as a public programme assistant curator at Mart, Museum of Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto (Italy). Camilla holds an MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art London.

Anna Fitzpatrick, Our girl in Brazil

Anna first worked with the CSF team back in 2007 during the Green is the New Black festival at London College of Fashion. She joined the team full time in 2009 and for a period was instrumental in the smooth running of the centre. In December 2009, Anna relocated to Sao Paulo, Brazil and where she is busily networking with South American designers, producers and support organisations. Anna’s background lies in politics and the politics of fashion, having completed the MA History & Culture of Fashion at London College of Fashion, and has had extensive experience working with NGOs such as the Environmental Justice Foundation and Oxfam. Keep your eyes peeled on The Bulletin for her regular postings.