Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World

Explore the innovative approaches making fashion more sustainable

Fashion is a global industry worth $2.4 trillion, employing around 50 million people, and is said to be one of the world’s most polluting industries.

On this six-week course from the London College of Fashion and supported by luxury fashion group Kering, you’ll delve into sustainable fashion design, research, and business practice.

Once you’ve successfully completed this course, you’ll be able to better approach sustainability in your own work and become an innovative changemaker for the fashion industry.

Discover the social and environmental considerations in fashion supply chains

The fashion and textile industry needs to reduce its damaging environmental and social impacts across the supply chain.

This course will guide you through the concept of sustainable material sourcing, and look at the choices that can be made early in the design process to improve sustainability.

Delve into social sustainability and ethics within the fashion industry

There is a critical need for businesses to understand the environmental and social impacts of the design decisions they make.

You’ll explore the concepts of Planetary Boundaries and Human Equality in the context of the fashion industry and how social sustainability and ethics are currently treated in luxury fashion businesses.

Develop your skills through fashion design tasks

You’ll start by creating a draft manifesto to communicate what is important to you and how you want to approach sustainability in your work. This will guide your decisions throughout the tasks in this course, and beyond.

From there, you’ll embark on a practical design challenge based on one of four sustainability agendas. This will allow you to pull together your tools, techniques, and creativity to approach fashion design from a new, sustainable perspective.

This course is designed for anyone working in fashion and fashion education. It may also be useful for anyone interested in sustainability in the fashion industry.

• Why Sustainability in Fashion?
• Welcome to the course
• Sustainability and luxury fashion
• What are the agendas that affect sustainability?
• Contextualizing Sustainability for a Changing World
• Sustainability issues in relation to luxury fashion
• Introduction to Planetary Boundaries and Human Equality
• Demonstrating your values through creating a draft manifesto
• Material Dimensions: Sourcing for luxury fashion
• The role of materials in luxury fashion and sustainability
• The challenges of sustainable sourcing
• The sourcing debate
• Informed Decision Making: tools and methods
• The business of fashion and sustainability: tools for measuring environmental profit and loss in luxury fashion
• Shifts in scale and habit
• Social sustainability and ethics in luxury fashion business
• Creative Possibilities
• Empowering imagination: innovative approaches
• Design methods
• Design challenge!
• Creative Realisation
• Be a changemaker
• Creative narratives
• Looking ahead