Our research explores
our interdependencies with each other and with nature, played out in and through fashion as social, cultural, economic, educational and artistic practice.
Research
We engage in diversely informed, critical discourse, exploring Fashion Design for Sustainability’s epistemological, philosophical and ontological elements. Our multiple approaches and methodologies are informed by the diverse backgrounds and interests of our researchers, all contributing to realising the centre’s ambitions.
Research is one of the three foundational pillars of Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), it demonstrates our bold and radical approach to questioning, originating, and co-creating new understanding of fashion in the context of the three-fold crisis of planetary, personal, and societal health.
Our research takes a systemic approach to create knowledge, understanding, and practice of fashion in its ecological context. Through the premise of equity and the valuing of diverse perspectives, we challenge exploitative practices, social inequality, and discrimination in gender, race, culture, class, and religious terms. Our collaborative research is informed by and informs a diverse range of participants including students, designers, tutors, fashion industry leaders, politicians, UK, EU and international governments, peers, physical and virtual communities, journalists, NGOs, and citizens around the world.
We shape and contribute to Fashion Design for Sustainability as a field of research in cultures and practices of fashion as sustainability in action.
We create, exhibit, and publish world-recognised research in:
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Fashion Design for Sustainability
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Transformation Design
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Culture and Climate Change
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Sustainability methods and frameworks
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Community Resilience
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Sustainability
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Migration, Identity & Inclusion
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Social Justice
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Health & Wellbeing
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Inclusive Economies
We are a UAL Research Centre
We are one of UAL’s 8 Research Centres providing a focus for excellence in research in identified areas of strength. Research Centres support groups of researchers in a range of activities that extend beyond the remit of individual projects, creating an environment where debate can flourish, providing a sound foundation for future work.
Awards and Funding
Our members have been successful in receiving notable national and international funding awards, enabling world-leading research to be carried out and demonstrable impacts to be realised. Our research is supported by UKRI and EU funding bodies, trusts and philanthropists, cultural bodies and other organisations.
PhDs at CSF
Our PhD community represents a wealth of fashion and sustainability research ideas and themes, explored through both theoretical and practice-led research.
Archive Projects
For over a decade, we have sought to shape and respond to the four-fold agenda of our times – the interdependencies between cultural, economic, social, and ecological sustainability.
Research Projects
Antarctica
A visual arts project exploring issues relating to the environment, politics, autonomy, habitat, mobility and relationships among people.
Dress for Our Time
Using the power of fashion to communicate climate change and the mass displacement of people. The dress is created out of a decommissioned UNHCR refugee tent from Zaatari Camp, Jordan.
LASTING
LASTING investigates durability as one of the most promising strategies towards more sustainable consumption.
70 x 7 The Meal
A participatory public artwork gathering communities across Peterborough to collaborate and celebrate locally sourced food and to better understand its significance to the cultural heritage of the city.
Art for the Environment Residency
An international artist-in-residence programme for UAL graduates to explore concerns that define the 21st century: biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy and human rights.
Fashion Futures 2030
Fashion Futures 2030 (FF2030) has been created and realised using film, text and ideation toolkits. The project invites audiences to imagine how fashion practices can contribute to ways to live well together in nature.
Making for Change: Waltham Forest
A programme of activities in relation to education, manufacturing and community engagement, aimed at creating positive change and activate legacies within the community.
BFTT Re-modelling Fashion
Re-Modelling Fashion engages researchers and industry practitioners in a transformation design process to co-create products and business models of ecological, social and economic value.
Fostering Sustainable Practices
The FSP project investigates the creative practice in fashion design-led micro and small enterprises (MSEs) as a potential driver for change towards a more sustainable future.
Za'atari Action
Zaatari Action seeks to create new opportunities through knowledge exchange and to research counter narratives for fashion’s use and for design to play an activist role in creating change.
