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Call to action from XR to Swarm at London Fashion Week, February 2019 Last week CSF hosted Sara Arnold to talk about Extinction Rebellion (XR). Sara had been involved with the direct action that took place across London earlier in April. She was also active during London Fashion Week back in February – highlighting climate change as an urgent issue for the industry to address. Sara talked to CSF’s Elliot about her thoughts on power, education, direct action and fashion. If yo

The Laundry Pile and is the launch of CSF’s Prof. Kate Fletcher’s new book Opening up the Wardrobe. Emma completed her PhD at CSF last year. Through the lens of domestic laundry, her research has explored how fashion design, resource consumption and sustainability are tied into social practices. *** While about as routine and mundane as it gets, laundry is often overlooked as an extremely resource intensive and polluting practice. It annually uses up massive quantities of fin

Tiger Girls show their LOVECOAT creations, photo by UNHCR Jordan/Za’atari Camp This week saw CSF’s Prof. Helen Storey return from her fourth trip to the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan. Helen started working with those living at camp in 2016 after she was gifted a UNHCR decommissioned refugee tent. From the tent Helen created the ‘Dress For Our Time’, a project which uses the power of fashion to communicate and act upon some of the world’s most complex issues, notably climate

What started as a conversation over lunch turned into a commitment from world leading filmmakers, fashion designers, musicians, actors, producers and others to the Creative Climate Coalition, presented by Alison Tickell, of Julie’s Bicycle, at COP 21 in Paris. In making this pledge, these signatories were indicating the imperative for collective agreement for action on climate change by governments from across the world. What had seemed impossible in previous COPs, now became

Guest post by Rochelle Motha Rochelle Motha is a freelance artist and graphics designer. She worked as an art director in Sri Lanka and a magazine designer in London, after graduating from Fashion (Dip) Colombo Sri Lanka, Fine Art (BA) from Srishti Bangalore, India. She is alumni of MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries at UAL Central St Martins and owner of fashion brand RocEthical. Growing up in Sri Lanka, an island which is known as the “pearl of the Indian oce

As COP21 talks draw to a close and we wait to see a new global agreement on climate change, it seems the perfect time to visit the last in a series of four podcasts exploring the voices and opinions of the UAL student body. Introducing Podcast #4: Solutions. In this final chapter we hear a range of thoughts from students on the possible solutions to climate change. What is needed from government? What responsibility do education institutes have? What is the role of design in

Melting Icemen by Néle Azevedo As the first generation to really understand climate change and the last generation to be able to do something about it students at UAL (and of course the world over) are in a unique historical position. Climate change will affect our future lives, it is already doing so, but, to paraphrase Naomi Klein: Has the future become just a luxury that we cannot afford? The future will reflect what are doing now, and solutions and change in this present

Image by David Buckland, Cape Farewell In the run-up to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) taking place from 30 November to 11 December 2015, in Paris, many are the cultural events that challenge our perspective on climate change, proposing alternative solutions for a sustainable global culture. Nature has been always present in the artistic investigations since the inception of art, but it is in the last decades that the relationship has shifted, calling

Photos by Kate Fletcher I am just back from a few days in Paris at the start of the COP21 negotiations on climate change. I was there as part of an event organised by The Alternative – the new green political platform of Denmark who have 9 seats in the Copenhagen parliament. They event was a jamboree of a thing and part of the activities taking place in the run up to the formal meeting itself. It was billed as a ‘floating political talk show’ and the floating bit was courtesy