Recently, I travelled to Jaipur in India for the annual conference of the International Federation for Fashion Technology Institute. The theme was Fashion Beyond Borders, which enabled speakers and delegates to look at the role of technology, globalisation and craft in the industry and the implications of this for fashion education institutions around the world. [...]
Duty: that which one is bound by any obligation to do I have become increasingly interested in how certain actions become first acceptable to society and then, ultimately, something that you have to do. Following on from that, why do society and culture come to see certain behaviour or beliefs as acceptable when they are [...]
In the opening chapter of his biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd points out the parallels between our time and the Victorians “… The death of Dickens came as evidence of a giant transition; in these last decades of the nineteenth century, the English people were witnesses to the fatal disruptions of an old order and the [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
We usually apply the concept of evolution as a biological reference to the sequence of events that result in the development of a species or group of organisms. For me, however, that concept is a far more interesting when applied to the development of activities of a biological group. The human evolution of shopping, over [...]
