Top designers do not emerge fully formed from nowhere. They have learnt their craft with rigour and fashion is as integral to their life as getting up in the morning. For fashion educationalists the idea of learning “in” and “through” the subject is at the heart of our craft. A key aspect that drives the [...]
“We recognise that linkages are an integral part of our subject matter; we can connect with almost any topic, discipline, or issue. Our work relates to the physical and social worlds; deals with the relationships among people, products and processes; and shifts continually between abstract concepts and concrete forms and issues.”
Sophie Robertson. BA (Hons) Fashion Photography The concept of the fashion body provokes in me a number of ideas and thoughts. For example, the role I play in an industry which is dedicated to style, personal identity or the ways we use clothes and adornment to express our bodies. How I like to try and [...]
It takes 2700 litres of water to produce one cotton t-shirt from ‘crop to shop’. Just imagine how many full swimming pools it took to manufacture the contents of your wardrobe. In the meantime, 5000 children die each day due to lack of clean water. All of us need to remember that stark equation: designers, [...]
If we are to have a sustainable future we need to address a number of dilemmas at the heart of the fashion industry. Fashion designers and retailers have always had to tread the line between clothes with a signature style that their clients recognize and pressure to increase sales by developing new ones. Over recent [...]
It is my contention that fashion as a discipline needs to extend and expand its influence, to counter the traditional stereotype of fashion as a lightweight subject, which is not quite worthy of real research and instead, to clearly make the case and set the pace for developing areas of research that extend fashion’s influence. [...]
Image: Sean Michael Fashion is often dismissed as trivial by those who see clothes as adornment, rather than an external display of internal thinking. However we dress we make statements about ourselves, willingly or unwillingly. At the London College of Fashion, while we encourage our students to think the unthinkable as they search for tomorrow’s [...]
Designers are working with animal pelts again, both real and faux. With demand high, now that farming conditions are better than they ever were and the manmade version is so good – what’s the problem? Why are fur sales rising? The case against fur was made so strongly in the 1980s that many people in [...]