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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

Our PostDoctoral Research Fellow Francesco Mazzarella tells us about the co-creation workshop he will facilitate with Professor Helen Storey at the upcoming Global Fashion Conference, aimed at mapping out the fashion activism landscape. The mainstream ecosystem of fashion production and consumption is proving unsustainable in terms of autonomous livelihoods, cultural heritage, social equality, and environmental stewardship. This is building momentum for an increasing number o

Photo by Samantha Sophia On International Women’s Day this year we reflect on the title of last year’s exhibition at the Design Museum. What is the interplay between them when it comes to fashion and sustainability? And what can we make of these words in a Post-Weinstein #TimesUp #MeToo world? What of Women. Fashion. Power… 100 years after some women got the vote? When women’s bodies are still commented on and evaluated publicly with private consequences? When women still ear

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

a piece from Lucy + Jorge Orta’s forthcoming exhibition, featuring hundreds of loaves baked by local Peterborough residents and cast in aluminium Food and fashion are rarely considered on the same platform, discussed at the same debates, or indeed even thought about in the same way. However, despite their apparent differences and the fact they seem so vastly removed from each other- think size zero models, skimpy dresses and unnaturally shaped mannequins- however, there are m

‘I love watching everyone’s presentations rehearsals and hearing about their projects,’ one Kering Award finalist stated last week. ‘It’s like doing a Master’s degree in sustainability!’ I have to agree. I’ve worked at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion for three months, the final three months of the 2016 Kering Award for Sustainability, which culminated in presentations by nine exceptionally talented and creative students at Kering’s London headquarters last week. It really

We asked guest speaker Eleanor Snare to reflect after her LCF Manifestos talk… Once you’ve come up with an innovative idea for fashion as sustainability, how do you put it into practice? Talking to fashion consumers about innovative ideas appears simple: fashion is built on renewal and change, so new things are likely to be readily accepted. But ‘innovations in fashion’ might mean a trend, a colour palette, a new silhouette; they’re unlikely to require us to significantly cha

This week we are lucky enough to have a student perspective on the blog, here Dino Bonacic (MA Fashion Media Production) tells us about his approach to communicating sustainability through the fashion media. Having an honest story behind the communication of sustainability is extremely important. Here’s one of a media guy trying to understand what sustainable media is and how to put that puzzle together. Around 5 months ago, I decided to stop buying new clothes. It was partly

Be resourceful for #theloveof… the planet It’s Be Resourceful week this week and we’ve teamed up with Love Your Clothes (part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan, SCAP) to think more about resourcefulness and fashion. Much of our work and thinking at CSF is inspired directly or indirectly from thinking about both resourcefulness and acknowledging that there are challenges and opportunities in the face of resource scarcity for us as fashion designers, thinkers, supporters

Fashion is in turns captivating, distracting, satisfying, sometimes bringing a bit of the extraordinary to every day life, and often connecting people and cultures with wonderful results. It is amazing to think that an industry that has often been described as frivolous spans so much of the world and impacts so many people and places – perhaps more than most industries. It is not known exactly how many people currently work in the multi-trillion dollar global fashion industry