We asked Dilys about her views on women in realtion to her work at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion.

If we had a day, what would we do?

“The delight that I feel in waking every day is the delight in time spent in the company of family, friends and colleagues, engaging in endeavours to which I feel a passionate sense of belonging. This is not in itself distinctive, millions of women throughout the world wake each day with a passionate sense of what they could do and what it might mean to others. But we still live in a time where so much ingenuity is stifled, smothered and blocked in so many ways, limiting the possibilities in our individual and collective prosperity. Engaged, as I am, in dreaming (with my eyes wide open) of what fashion can offer to sustainability, I witness around me incredible examples of women’s great work, from the communities that I am a part of, Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, London itself and wider connected communities across the world. This is no co-incidence, as what sustainability needs has such synchronicity with what millions of women engage in every day; holism, compassion, reflection, imagination, collaboration, humility and quiet boldness.

Joanna Natalija Gourley. MA Fashion Photography

Imbalanced relationships within humanity and between us and nature have, over time, received an increase in media attention, legislation, audits, discussions and agreements over the treatment of women and our roles as the earth’s guardians, but how much has really changed in our actions, perceptions or habits? Inequalities are starkly visualized across the gamut of education, fashion and sustainability, from seamstresses burning to death behind locked doors in factories to mental health issues related to societal pressures.

If we had a day, just us, what might we do? Taking evidence from the women I see, know, meet, hear of and from what I know of the woman I am, we’d foster relationships that create communities, beautiful artifacts, infrastructures and shared spaces. We’d link experience with what is yet to exist, we’d dress up, make food, write poetry, make useful and beautiful objects and we’d decorate our public places. We would laugh, a lot. We’d see our interdependencies as a reason to collaborate rather than compete and we would see leadership as visualizing what needs to be done for the good of the whole and doing whatever is in our power to get it done. We’d protect the youngsters, the elders and the vulnerable; we would find practical ways for us to thrive. We’d do it in style and we’d do it with integrity. We have great work to do and we are best placed to do it. We live each day in gratitude of the great women who have enabled us to be who we are and where we are, who continue to contribute to what the world needs and we each need to mark ways to make way for women throughout the world on 8th March so that we can see more of what might be.”

Watch the live stream replayed here…

Image: Roberto Aguilar
Na Di. MA Fashion Design Technology (Menswear)

MA Events Schedule

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Menai Sian Davies. MA Fashion Design Technology (Womenswear)

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Nadia Scullion. MA Fashion Design Technology (Womenswear)

Here is the first in the series.

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Antonia Lloyd. MA Fashion Design Technology (Menswear)

At the college we have launched LCF MEN.

How does this relate to clothing and the day to day items that we use every day? Where are the inventions and radical ideas? Fashion’s rationale is supposed to be revolutionary: each season something has to be adopted. In reality the basic design and sometimes even the basic technology supporting the construction of an item of clothing can be hundreds of years old. Radical new developments have changed the way we dress but they have all required a combination of factors to bring about a universal adoption, the evolution of the components of a man’s business suit is just such an example.

Yuhua Shen. BA (Hons) Bespoke Tailoring

The male shirt is probably the earliest, simplest and most basic item of clothing, barely changing since medieval times. It is a constant undergarment whose basic shape is a front-opening tunic with sleeves and some form of collar. Over the centuries it has served men as a work-wear or fashionable garment and whilst fabrics, cuts and colours have changed, its purpose as a protector to the skin from outer heavier fabrics has remained constant. The cultural dominance of the west means that the shirt – along with the two piece business suit – has spread from its European origins to be seen as the acceptable form of dress – in fact often the most appropriate form of dress – for any business or internationally focused meeting.

The business suit is itself at least 150 years old with a background in the Regency period when Beau Brummel’s influence meant that simplicity of fabric, cut and a fitting which emphasised the overall silhouette began to alter a gentleman’s wardrobe. His ideas about figure hugging clothes in plain colours – known as the Great Masculine Renunciation – were built upon as the social constraints around clothing began to relax its formality. These social changes combined with influences from the military, including Russian Cossacks, brought about the development of long trousers. Details such as single or double vents were a result of activities such as riding a horse, whilst turn back cuffs were a consequence of the fact that professionals couldn’t remove their jackets whilst performing an activity.

The necktie is interesting because there are so many social factors associated with its development and adoption. It became a part of a man’s wardrobe just before the suit started its evolution as during the 1670s a neckcloth began to supplant the lace collar. Stocks and cravats made from silks and linens were the tie’s antecedents. Once introduced it was considered a key part of a man’s attire and convention still considers that a man is incorrectly dressed without a tie to accompany his two or three-piece suit. Whilst so called creatives, artists or poets, from Bryon onwards, have flouted and played with these social conventions, today many hotels, restaurants, professions and social occasions still insist either overtly or subtly that a tie must be worn.

Emily Hayward. BA (Hons) Bespoke Tailoring

Technologies in fabrics such as nylon for shirts, uncreasable fabrics for trousers, the sewing machine, the adoption of computer-aided design and laser cutters have been key to the mass production of business clothing. While polo-neck jumpers and t-shirts have demonstrated that the suit can be made more casual, it is still, nearly two centuries later, an integral and essential item of a man’s wardrobe- even if it is only kept for weddings and funerals. Topman, Marks and Spencers, Saville Row, tailors in Hong Kong or Thailand- a suit can be purchased to match your income and style. The shirt, the business suit, the tie are universally accepted now as a form of professional dress.

They are not the consequence of a single innovative idea, but rather a steady layering of ideas and innovations over time, yet essentially little has changed over the last century. The cut, the designs and even the colour has varied over the years, yet the concept of the business suit is instantly recognisable today.

John Rocha SS13

From the dramatic Westwood show with its 50s inspired clothes and Warhol influenced make-up, John Rocha’s stunning dresses that exploited knit to dramatic effect, to the cooler palette of Howell, Farhi and Daks where shades of white, apricot and grey were used to reference the heritage of these brands. Here, attention to detail, layering of fabrics, sheer, leather, knit and soft tailoring was a clear theme. Whistles showed their new collection for the first time at the Savoy – a few yards from Somerset House – and the sporty influenced, sharp silhouetted pieces were sharp strong and bold – the fabric selection was stunning as were the bags. This revealed just how strong their sense of direction is and also how London is unique at demonstrating how the High Street influences up as well as designers’ collections influencing down.

Somerset House as the main venue for London Fashion Week continues to stretch its influence – the Rock Vault with its showcase of the latest thinking in jewellery, to Esthetica’s exhibition of new approaches to sustainable fashion emphasised clothes that are beyond seasonal shifts and easily available online.

London itself was visible with many shows taking place in some of our most magnificent buildings – for example, Westwood in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or PPQ at Goldsmiths Hall it felt this time round that London was fully embracing the ideas creativity and glamour that fashion brings. However it was SHOWstudio’s innovation of panel discussions that commentated on the live-streamed latest collections that stand out in my mind from this London Fashion Week. Having taken part in two such panels I know that this is an innovation that brings a range of commentators as well as the collections directly to everyone- people talk about the democratisation of fashion for me it is this initiative that truly makes this happen.

See the SHOWstudio panel discussions.

Visit SHOWStudio here.

Never having visited India before, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and diversity – suffering sensory overload. In a land of blatant contrasts – rich and poor; tradition and modernity; craft and technology – the overall impression is a country striving to maintain the balance between competing needs. It symbolises both the balance between people and the planet and the struggle we have to maintain equilibrium between our instinctive thirst for advancement and the quality of nature surrounding us that we need for our survival.

Alaksha Jivan. MA Fashion and Film

The very essence of the country affected the speakers so that many brought out the tensions bound up in the duality of human nature. In India the sole aim of too many people is merely survival, so they cannot aspire to a different quality of life or individual fulfilment – a vital part of the fashion industry. In an inherently entrepreneurial country with an extraordinary range of skills, modernisation might empower many, but it also moves people from self reliance to reliance, a factor compounded by globalisation. How can the extraordinary hand-weaving skills of organic materials in this country compete with cheap industrial textiles that are often off-loaded from mills elsewhere? The discussions around the role of craft in a contemporary technological global and economically interdependent society epitomised both the symbiosis between humans and nature and the inherent contradictions in our human nature. We want the advances and are prepared to exploit our land and nature to achieve them – yet then we cry what could be portrayed as crocodile tears when human skill and nature pay the highest of prices.

A keynote speaker, Rajeev Sethi, set us this challenge. He is renowned across the world for bringing contemporary relevance to the time-honoured skills of traditional artists and crafts people from South Asia – creating a basis for their livelihood in a contemporary industrialised and globalised world. He believes we must find ways to balance the relationship between the high and low tech and we should not make machines replace what hands can do more effectively. By doing this, we devalue not only the human but also the machine. We have to find ways to produce low cost good quality clothes without compromising either the design or the production values. As he put it we need to “be more wise about what we don’t know”.

This is not about trying to withstand advances in technology or holding back industrialisation. To move people out of poverty and ensure we can clothe people, we must use contemporary methods. However, increasingly we are coming to recognise that we need to balance quantity with quality and find ways to produce good quality garments which combine a number of strategies that at their heart exploit and utilise craft skills. The conference threw up some interesting examples. Spandex, a stretch fabric used in many garments, is made by some Indian manufacturers with a combination of materials that use 80 per cent corn, which is both completely renewable and easy to grow. Similarly, many of the Indian fashion industrialists highlighted developments around reduction in water usage and the creation of zero discharge plants. While we heard numerous examples of the production of high quality textiles that are avidly sought in luxury markets, there needs to be rethinking about the production of lower cost garments. Many contemporary Indian designers such as Manish Aurora or Abrahan and Thakore take traditional skills, garments and influences and reinvent them – not by just westernising them but creating fashionable clothes that are inherently Indian in philosophy, colour, texture and, at times, form.

Those of us with more westernised fashion systems are learning from a country that is at the edge of breaking down the barriers between craft and fashion, tradition and the contemporary. They are encouraging us to look at the craft skills we have in our own cultures and traditions to find ways that we can revive them and link them to contemporary technology and production. I hope this will increase the overall quality of global production values and encourage consumers to think more carefully about the quality of their products. As countries such as India develop their approach to fashion that utilises and incorporates traditional iconography and surface decoration with a contemporary fashion vision, it might encourage consumers to embrace a diverse range of global fashions. We also want to stop designers based in the west from simply appropriating the craft skills and traditions in countries such as India to then get them produced more cheaply elsewhere.

As Rajeev said:

“Westernisation is not modernisation”.

Article for Sublime Magazine