Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World

Syllabus

• Week 1

  Why Sustainability in Fashion?

  • Welcome to the course

    Welcome to the course! This set of steps will give you an idea of how the course works and what you will cover over the next six weeks.

  • Sustainability and luxury fashion

    In this first week you’ll be hearing from Professor Dilys Williams, Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, and Marie-Claire Daveu, Chief Sustainability Officer at Kering.

  • What are the agendas that affect sustainability?

    This step will explore Social, Economic, Ecological and Cultural agendas and their context for fashion and sustainability.

• Week 2

  Contextualizing Sustainability for a Changing World

  • Sustainability issues in relation to luxury fashion

    This week introduces you to the issues and context of fashion and sustainability in a changing world.

  • Introduction to Planetary Boundaries and Human Equality

    In this step we introduce you to Planetary Boundaries and Human Equality as contexts for fashion and sustainability. We begin with examining the world in which we live in order to understand where we are best placed to contribute.

  • Demonstrating your values through creating a draft manifesto

    Over the next steps we would like you to take what you learned about sustainability and focus on what is most relevant and applicable to your own work and principles. We will guide you through steps to create a draft manifesto.

• Week 3

  Material Dimensions: Sourcing for luxury fashion

  • The role of materials in luxury fashion and sustainability

    This set of steps introduces you to social and environmental considerations within fashion supply chains, and helps you to understand how to make better informed materials related decisions.

  • The challenges of sustainable sourcing

    Material specialists explore the environmental, social, economic, aesthetic and logistical challenges that sourcing materials exposes.

  • The sourcing debate

    The debate! Exploring how differing priorities need to be negotiated and resolved in the developing of sustainable luxury products.

• Week 4

  Informed Decision Making: tools and methods

  • The business of fashion and sustainability: tools for measuring environmental profit and loss in luxury fashion

    Welcome to week 4! This week we introduce you innovative tools for environmental and social measurement, and its impacts on luxury fashion.

  • Shifts in scale and habit

    In this step we would like you to think about the scale and volume of fashion consumption, changes in fashion habits, and how we might reimagine ways in which fashion success might shift from quantity sold to value gained.

  • Social sustainability and ethics in luxury fashion business

    This step introduces the imperative for social responsibility and explores ways in which this can be considered in luxury fashion business practice.

• Week 5

  Creative Possibilities

  • Empowering imagination: innovative approaches

    Welcome to week 5! This week we will be using design for sustainability methods and processes to generate and explore ideas. We’ll be discussing what is good design, and how to approach fashion design for sustainability.

  • Design methods

    In this step we introduce you to design methods that offer structured techniques that help us design solutions to real world problems.

  • Design challenge!

    Now it’s your turn! In this step we have set a design challenge around the agendas and issues. You will follow the same steps that we have just guided you through to work through a design challenge.

• Week 6

  Creative Realisation

  • Be a changemaker

    You have reached the final week of the course - congratulations! In this final week we invite you to be a changemaker, encouraging you to revisit, reflect, refine and share your manifesto for fashion and sustainability.

  • Creative narratives

    This step offers tips on how to creatively communicate your manifesto and tell your story.

  • Looking ahead

    Congratulations, conclusions and reflections – together we look ahead to our future where we can make positive impacts and effect meaningful change across fashion.

Who will you learn with?