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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Cultures and Practices of Sustainability
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Sufficiency: Questioning Consumption and Growth Ecological Literacy
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Action in Climate Emergency
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Post-Human Thinking
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Social, Racial, Gender and Intergenerational Justice Community Resilience
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Practices of Care and Wellbeing
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.
Study with CSF
CSF works with a range of courses at London College of Fashion across both undergraduate and postgraduate portfolios, ensuring new knowledge is shared through research-led teaching and learning.
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.
Decolonising Fashion and Textiles
Participatory action research engaging refugees based in East London with the aim to develop a framework for decolonised design practice by advancing a cultural sustainability agenda within a fashion and textile industry context.
Life in Clothes
Place-based organic fashion systems for human and environmental healing. Life in Clothes explores the interconnections and parallels between fashion making and farming practices.
Re-Modelling Fashion (part of BFTT)
Through transformation design and participatory design practices, we seek to extend the value of fashion by design and business model innovation.
Traces: Stories of Migration
Exploring textile practices as a medium through which diverse cultural and social experiences of migrant communities can be acknowledged and celebrated.
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.
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.
Managing transition in the UK fashion sector
Managing transition in the UK fashion sector: design-led micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) as catalysts for net zero goals, resilience, and sustainable prosperity.
The Lost Species
Plays homage to the interdependency and diversity of wildlife through creative responses that inspire and amplify the public understanding of biodiversity loss.
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.
Beyond Net Zero Goals
Regenerative fashion design for micro-circular rural ecosystems. A design exchange partnership that supports the B-Corp certified social enterprise Elvis & Kresse in its ambition to become Net Regenerative by 2030.
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.
ReGo
ReGo takes metal from knives and transforms it into educational and employment opportunities for young people in the fashion industry.
Towards a Sustainable Fashion Ecosystem
UK-India scoping study in developing cultures and practices of sustainability and supporting Indian micro and small businesses (MSMEs) working in Fashion.