MA Fashion & the Environment

MA Fashion & the Environment

The Course at a Glance

MA Fashion and the Environment introduces the concepts of sustainability and sustainable fashion design and development at a postgraduate level. By twinning fashion and the environment, London College of Fashion aims to take postgraduate students on unique interdisciplinary journeys.

The design process is explored, along with the fashion lifecycle and major environmental, cultural and social impacts associated with fashion. Through the course, students are encouraged to engage with innovative and radical ways to approach sustainable fashion solutions employing different perspectives on sustainability and different fashion business models.

The course challenges current practice through design intervention to change the landscape of the fashion industry, pushing boundaries in the way that fashion is identified through an innovative and proactive approach to the issues of sustainable creative development. The course is directed towards the current and future needs of the fashion industry as it undergoes significant changes in practice enabled by opportunity and necessity. It educates fashion industry professionals who will be capable of interpreting the ecological, social and cultural considerations of their discipline within the context of the complexities of the fashion industry, and realised through both practical and theoretical concepts.

Dilys Williams

 

MA Featured Projects

Fashion Futures

Levi Strauss & Co. and sustainable development innovators Forum for the Future call for the fashion industry to work together to create a sustainable world in a new report that explores the future of the trillion dollar sector.

Fashion Futures presents four vivid scenarios of the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry, helping companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable business.

The scenarios take account of the key factors that are already affecting the industry and will bring profound change over the next 15 years. They are designed as a tool to challenge companies’ strategies, inspire them with new opportunities and help them plan for the future.

Forum for the Future also designed and led a module based on the scenarios with students from our very own MA Fashion and the Environment. The report contains student illustrations of fashion product and service solutions that would flourish in 2025.

  • Read more about the Fashion Future projects and download the full report and a set of four animations based on the scenarios.

Neighbourhoodies

The Neighbourhoodies is a project at the intersection of fashion design and cultural studies that attempts to visualize belonging and questions of habitus in contemporary street-wear cultures, emanating from the today highly contested hoodie garment, considered intimidating by authorities.

The Neighburhoodies expands on a practice-based endeavour where fashion students from
MA Fashion and the Environment at London College of Fashion reflected on their glocal London identities through the design of a special hoodie – a Neighbourhoodie.

The project, instigated by visiting research fellow Otto von Busch, examines how the hoodie, today a highly contested garment, considered intimidating by authorities, can be a representation of local pride instead of representing stigmatization or provoking fear.

DesignCamp 2010 – New Ways of Transportation

Kolding School of Design hosts DesignCamp 2010 where students from around the world were invited to come to Denmark for two weeks and work in the design camp.

MA Fashion and the Environment students participated in talks, workshops and not least design transport solutions across specialities and nationalities. The students designed sustainable and user-friendly transport solutions under the headline “New Ways of Transportation”.

‘I think the best part of the camp itself was having so many different people from different design and cultural backgrounds there that made you look at things from a different way but also allowed you to create things you couldn’t on your own. I mean, we had fashion designers working with industrial designers, interaction designers, interior designers, architects, and more’.

- Danielle Testa, Student MA Fashion & Environment, London College of Fashion

Connect Sri Lanka

As part of the British Fashion Council funded Student Connect Project in July 2010,
MA Fashion and the Environment students visited Sri Lanka with the brief to learn about the Sri Lankan fashion industry and gain an understanding of the sustainability challenges and opportunities within it. During the 30 day Project, the students conducted comprehensive research which would go on to inform their Masters Projects; discovering first-hand the contrast between small cottage industry and large-scale factory manufacturing, interrogating traditional craft techniques and gaining a valuable insight into worker’s experiences of co-operative enterprise and factory environments within the country. The project was run by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion in collaboration University of Moratuwa.