Curriculum Projects
Briefs & Outcomes
In order to promote a participatory and collaborative culture of working, you will find in this area a selection of project briefs and outcomes used in both undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum at London College of Fashion. All have either been developed by or in consultation with the Centre for Sustainable Fashion and encourage students to develop sustainability values, such as:
- Democracy
- Participation
- Co-Evolution
- Collaboration
- Reflection
- Integration
- Connection
- Adaptability
- Creativity
- Holism
- Synergy
- Transformation
- Purpose
- Epistemology
Taken from Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning & Change, Stephen Sterling 2001
We are always keen to collaborate with others and to find ways of working across disciplines, organisations, languages and territories. If you are inspired by our projects, we encourage you to get in touch with us to share your outcomes and experiences. Alternatively, if you have your own projects that you would like to share, please let us know.
Chemical Catwalk
Bringing the designers of the ‘invisible’ together with the designers and thinkers of the scaled world, this brief invited MA Fashion & the Environment students at London College of Fashion to develop a ‘Manifesto for Materials’ – a proposal which details the specifications required to fulfil a future fashion concept. This project encourages students to consider the conceptual requirements to enable fashion to thrive in an ever changing world.
Fashioning the Future Awards 2011
The leading international platform for cross-disciplinary platform for celebrating innovative initiatives towards fashion design for sustainability, its development and communication. The 2011 Awards invited students and graduates to provoke and nurture ‘Unique’ responses to our collective desire for a thriving world. The 2011 awards are a showcase for exceptional work that celebrates ‘Unique’ ways to create our futures. Fashioning the Future is conceived, designed and delivered by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion.
Shared Talent
Shared Talent is a people-centred learning process, inspired by sustainability thinking and values and applied to fashion design and development. The focus is placed on how we learn and how we consider the impacts of our work as part of the development into what we produce. This collaborative approach to design and make has been developed by CSF Director Dilys Williams, working with designers and makers, who have given their skills, imparted their wisdom and received considered responses to their work. This example of sustainability in action has been manifest in three different guises to date recognised informally through narratives around the work and more formally by winning the Green Gown Award for Social Responsibility in 2008.
This paper, describing the project, was published as part of the LeNS Conference: Sustainability in Design, Bangalore 2010.
Fashion Futures
We cannot predict how clothing and fashion will change over the next 15 years, but it’s unlikely to look how it does today. The Fashion Futures scenarios are not meant to be predictions. Instead, they aim to be stretching but plausible images of possible futures for global clothing and fashion in 2025. They raise awareness of plausible, long-term issues as well as inspire innovation in how we respond to them.
This project brief was developed by Forum for the Future and the Centre for Sustainable Fashion for the MA Fashion & the Environment and is now available for fashion courses to employ as a one-off session or a curriculum embedded project. The brief enables students to make deep investigations into systems and cultural phenomena to propose new concepts and products for a future world.
Sustaining Individuality
Through this project, womenswear design students at London College of Fashion were re-introduced to ideas that are personal and niche to identity and the great worth (emotional and financial) of considering and reacting to identity when designing. As part of this module the students were given the opportunity to work with or aid students at HMP Send whom had a similar brief, offering a deeper insight into individuality and personal sartorial matters. Students are asked to question today’s fashion conformist values and beliefs to create with the individual in mind. In other words, current fashion imagery and regularity is not acceptable in this brief. Students are required to respond in a way they see fit, designing for a reason, with sustainability in mind and foremost that which considers and values identity.
Creating the Fashion Brand
There are a number of activities and roles that work together to deliver a product proposition that satisfies the potentially conflicting demands of financial success and product creativity. These activities and roles are further complicated by the demands of modern business approaches: increased speed to market, the development of corporate social responsibilities (CSR) and a continual focus on value addition and cost reduction within product ranges.
BA Fashion Management at London College of Fashion developed this project using Timberland as a case study to enable students to think holistically about a business’ needs and how CSR can play a crucial role.
Neighbourhoodies
In today’s “flat” and globalised world there is a simultaneous stretch of two opposite tendencies, closely interlinked. One is a flattening global movement seemingly eliminating cultural differences, the other puts emphasis on the urban localities, cultural identities and spatial haecceIties, occasions of particular thisness. Neighburhoodies expands on a practice-based endeavour where fashion students from London College of Fashion’s MA Fashion & the Environment reflected on their glocal London identities through the design of a special hoodie – a Neighbourhoodie.
