Fashion can be a powerful medium for the exploration, representation and amplification of voices and cultures from around the world. However, fashion can paradoxically be responsible for the silencing, shaming and marginalising of individual and collective narratives. Through Fashion Values: Cultures, the fourth and final Fashion Values four-week open-access course, learners nurture stories of the ingenuity and creativity of fashion in its many cultural forms.
“We explore storytelling as a means to contribute to equitable, inclusive and diverse cultures in and through fashion.”
A range of global experts introduce an exploration of cultural practices that nurture a pluralistic perspective, where fashion has many roles and meanings in everyday lives. Learners are encouraged to rethink the relationship between fashion and sustainability, exploring how storytelling can celebrate fashion’s diversity and move beyond the consumption-led fashion model.
Fashion Values: Cultures uses elements of design thinking to craft world-relevant skills to understand the big challenges facing the fashion system in a cultural context. The course acts as a foundation to develop visions for the future of fashion, putting planetary and human health and wellbeing first, reflecting the diversity of fashion cultures that can and do exist.
The course was developed by Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s education team – Prof Dilys Williams, Nina Stevenson, Liz Parker, Anna Fitzpatrick, Lou Budd, and Andreea-Diana Stan. Contributing experts include Wilson Oryema, Caroline Stevenson, Dr Otto von Busch, Pak Chiu, and many others.
“Fashion is an exploration of what is relevant to time, place, and people within a wider planetary context. There's never been a more important role for fashion than in our current times. It can be both joyful as an expression of who we are, a contributor to livelihoods, cultures, societies, and economies. It is also a destroyer of dignity, lives, cultures, and the only true economy, nature's wealth, which is the only source for all of our prosperity. These courses are here to ask you to consider what you value and to look at what kind of fashion system you would like to be part of.”
- Prof Dilys Williams, Centre for Sustainable Fashion
There are four courses in the Fashion Values programme on FutureLearn – Fashion Values: Nature, Fashion Values: Economy, Fashion Values: Society and Fashion Values: Cultures. All courses build on the CSF Framework, explored in detail within our first online course – Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World. Together, these courses provide a holistic exploration into diverse perspectives on values and ideas of sustainable fashion, and have been completed by over 90,000 learners in our global community of changemakers.
The Fashion Values courses are self-paced (with just three hours of weekly study suggested) and run continuously, so learners can join at any time. These courses are suitable for all levels – including undergraduate and postgraduate students, business professionals, designers and communicators.