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Better Lives: Expanding our Thinking
The thinking behind fashion as a discipline needs to extend and expand its influence, to counter the traditional stereotype of fashion as a light weight subject, not quite worthy of research and instead to clearly make the case and set the pace for developing areas of research that extend fashion’s influence – issues that will… →
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SUBLIME: Sustainability and the Curriculum
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… →
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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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OPINION: A Statement for Copenhagen
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… →
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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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OPINION: Sustaining A Fashionable Future
The London College of Fashion has transformed since its inception just over a century ago and speculating on the next hundred years raises interesting questions. The College was founded to help prepare young women for work in West End couture houses. Now we educate students in every aspect of the industry from footwear and accessories… →
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SUBLIME: Tailored Choices
Fashion draws people together, women in particular. The London College of fashion is using the cohesive nature of fashion skilling to provide opportunities for women prisoners in education and future employment. For those of us who see clothes as adornment, rather than an external display of internal thinking, fashion is often dismissed as trivial. However… →
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SUBLIME: Green Credentials
Renowned sociologist Anthony Giddens, in the introduction to his book “Modernity and Self- Identity “, highlights the risks facing our contemporary social and economic structures. He states that: Modernity reduces the overall riskiness of certain areas and modes of life, yet at the same time introduces new risk parameters largely or completely unknown to previous… →
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SUBLIME: A Cut Above
With the concentration on our carbon footprint, we forget that an essential part of our human DNA is the cultural footprint we construct throughout our lives, which plays a key role in our economic, social and cultural interactions. Whether it is the books we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, or… →
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SUBLIME: Surprise Package
Developing a sustainable future for fashion cannot be a short term fad. Those of us involved are acutely aware that we are in for a long haul; that we are in fact part of a global work in progress with climate change and respect for the environment our goal. We in the business of fashion… →