The Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at the London College of Fashion (LCF), UAL launched on January 24 FashionSEEDS (Fashion Societal, Economic & Environmental Design-led Sustainability), a free-to-use platform created to help fashion educators across the globe in exploring, teaching and learning sustainability practices in and through fashion design. The FashionSEEDS platform has been developed through three years of research.
Who's behind it: It has been created by a European network of fashion universities (University of the Arts London, Politecnico di Milano, Estonian Academy of the Arts and Design School Kolding) under the leadership of Professor Dilys Williams, CSF Director. The Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union co-funded this project, which involved educators from over 70 universities around the world.
What it does: FashionSEEDS offers insights from tutors and researchers and a range of resources to help tutors consider the why, what, how and with whom fashion education takes place. It claimed to have been designed with, by and for a range of tutors in mind, from those just beginning to integrate sustainability in their teaching to those with deep expertise.
The features at hand: FashionSEEDS features the Tutor’s Toolkit, which can be applied or adapted to help educators consider ways to put nature and equity at the heart of fashion design curricula. This includes:
- Course Designer: Aiming to equip educators and course teams to foreground and apply fashion design for sustainability principles and practice in their teaching and learning design
- Design Canvas: Supporting academics, leaders and practitioners in identifying their strategic priorities through a holistic approach to fashion design for sustainability
- Cards: Offering practical exemplars for fashion educators to adapt and apply sustainability-oriented course content to reform, transform or complement current teaching and learning
- Learning Activity Tool: Sharing 24 teaching activities developed to be integrated into existing courses or to be used as inspiration for building new course content
What else is included: The project has designed key resources to help underpin the practicalities of teaching and learning. These include:
- the Reader, a pocket book to the platform which acts as a stand-alone reference in fashion design education for sustainability in higher education,
- the Library, a curated list of reviewed external platforms, the fashion tutor as sustainability, developed to help tutors in the development of their own practice,
- and the FashionSEEDS project reports, which share the underpinning documents developed in the creation of the platform itself.
What is significant: The very concept of sustainability, not to speak of benchmarks, is still evolving. Educating becomes difficult in such a scenario, rendered worse by the fact that there is precious little literature still on the subject, and many of these often contradict one another. The FashionSEEDS project does serve as a good starting point.
The Achilles Heel: Even though more than 70 universities are said to have been involved, it is still a European project that tells the world what sustainability is or ought to be.
Team and Partners
- EU funded Erasmus + Strategic Partnership €437,678 3-year project.
- Coordinated by: Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL.
- Partners: Politecnico di Milano (IT), Design School Kolding (DK), Estonian Academy of Arts (EE)
- UAL Project Team: Professor Dilys Williams, Nina Stevenson, Egle Juospaityte & Natasha Bonnelame.
