This year Centre for Sustainable Fashion and London College of Fashion are running Fashioning the Future Summer School. Taking place in London from 1–19 July, the summer school is a unique opportunity for fashion students, tutors and practitioners to collaborate across traditional geographic, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries. Aiming to create an innovative, experimental learning environment for undergraduate fashion students , the summer school has brought together 30 students from 9 institutions across Europe: London College of Fashion, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Goldsmiths College, Robert Gordon University, Hogeschool Gent, Aalto University, KEA – Copenhagen School of Design & Technology, University of Ljubljana, and University of Boras.
This three-week programme has placed London as the creative focus to expand and deepen knowledge about sustainability while providing skills for addressing design challenges in a resource stricken world. The global move towards urbanisation and the need for innovative design for sustainability is ideally suited to this focus due to the diversity of London’s multicultural urban environment. By the end of this century over 80% of us will be living in cities, through out the summer school students will discover what our greatest challenges are and what new possibilities this brings for fashion design. Students have been asked to consider key city locations: London, New York, Shanghai, Paris and Rio de Janeiro, thinking about how each city has reacted to urban growth, environmental changes, social cohesion and declining resources. We will look at what life like in these cities now and from this imagine London in 2025. Through out this project we will reference the past, present and future to create fashion that is informed, inspired and visualises what the future might be.
In the week leading up to the start of the Summer School in east London, we asked the participating students to carry out a series of daily tasks in the environment of their home cities, which took them through a process of seeing, knowing and doing:
Seeing – observe their surroundings
Knowing – identify and analyse their surroundings
Doing – interact with their surroundings
Students were asked to photograph surfaces they came across during a journey they took; record the feelings of strangers around them; observe and record all the sounds they heard through out the day; do something out of the ordinary; and think about and leave behind the objects they rely on in their everyday life. The images and words posted to the blog over the past couple of weeks has created a unique map for each participant and the variety of work posted has given us incredible insights into each of the student’s own experience of ‘their city’.
Please note this is an archive blog post.