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TRAVEL: India – Human Nature
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.… →
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SUBLIME: Beyond Duty
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… →
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SUBLIME: Work it Out
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… →
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SUBLIME: Drying Out Fashion
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,… →
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SUBLIME: A Model of a Woman
Today there are thousands of girls aspiring to be the next Kate Moss in an age when perhaps it has never been easier to get into modelling. Yet there was once a golden age, when only a handful of models made it into the history books. We meet one of them Flicking through a magazine,… →
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SUBLIME: Making it Big
Feeling stuck in a rut, bored with your job – or just glad you’ve still got one? For students and workers in the creative industries, raw talent on its own will never be enough to get on. For the rest of us, we probably could do better. We see a lot of talent at the… →
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Opinion: Fashion Education in Prisons – Female Prisoners
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… →
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SUBLIME: The Fur’s Flying
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… →
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SUBLIME: Evolving Shopping
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… →
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SUBLIME: Education as Alchemy
‘There ain’t going to be a next big thing because it’s all spinning off into a magnificent diversity for the first time in our tribe’s history…. There’s an unprecedented degree of personal creativity that’s coming from anywhere and everywhere.” Ted Polhemus, anthropologist. < Alexandra Gross. MA Fashion Artefact I am often asked why there are… →