Introduction to Fashion Values: Cultures

Professor Dilys Williams trained as a womenswear designer in Manchester, UK. She went on to design collections for a range of British labels, including heading up the Womenswear lines for fashion pioneer Katharine Hamnett. In 2008, Dilys founded Centre for Sustainable Fashion, creating a community of practitioners committed to work that provokes, challenges and questions the status quo in fashion; contributing to a system that recognises its ecological context and honours equity. As a practitioner, Dilys focuses her research, design and teaching practice to explore participatory and transformation design to realise fashion as sustainability in action.

In this film, Dilys introduces Fashion Values: Cultures. She discusses the role of fashion as a powerful medium for the exploration, representation and amplification of voices and cultures from around the world. Dilys notes that fashion can paradoxically be responsible for the silencing, shaming and marginalising of individual and collective narratives. Through this course, she encourages us to nurture stories of the ingenuity and creativity of humanity in its many forms, in and through fashion.

Dilys also shares her own thoughts on some of the big questions you may be considering as you embark on this course:

• Why are stories so important to fashion?
• Why do you think that fashion’s role as explorer and representation of cultures should be rethought?
• Who do you think holds the power to tell stories through fashion?

© Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, UAL