Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2018

The circular economy (CE) agenda is gaining traction within the fashion industry and increasingly within fashion education. It provides a connective, interdisciplinary framework that offers a roadmap for transition towards a sustainable economy. As business eco-systems re-align to meet new standards of ethical and sustainable practice for the fashion industry, a new agenda for fashion education emerges: one of circularity. This article evaluates Amsterdam Fashion Institute’s (AMFI) Reality School concept, examining how CE education is being embedded within it and the levels of integration achieved. It argues that a CE approach to curriculum design can motivate deep learning through experimental practice, deep-dive research and systems thinking. It provides a structural framework of a CE agenda to fashion education curriculum, establishing a novel approach that could be applied to other specialist fashion education institutions.

This article presents a case study of a collaborative project between garment technology students and museum costume curators, centred around object-based research. The project brief was to re-produce patterns and toiles of selected archive garments, with a focus on incorporating digital pattern technology, to explore the possibilities of this technology in an exhibition context. In addition to these specified outcomes, a successful knowledge exchange was observed, with the curators advising the provenance and social history of the pieces and the students sharing their expertise in manual and digital pattern cutting and in garment construction. During the project, the personal development of the students transitioned from a position of inexperience relating to archived garments, to one of recognized expertise through their recreation of the pieces in a pattern and construction context.

The aim of this research is to explore how the discipline of pattern cutting can be taught, investigated and practiced through innovative, interdisciplinary approaches. Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic disciplines into one activity (for instance in this enquiry, pattern cutting is merged with disciplines such as health and engineering). The study discusses how interdiscipinarity can break rules, which involve going against a set of regulations that direct a practice or method within an area of activity. This mutinous concept can make pattern cutting appear more exciting and creative to the student and often leads to them exploring different concepts and approaches. The research was based on secondary sources gathered from a review of research papers presented at The Second International Conference for Creative Pattern Cutting, held at University of Huddersfield, 24 and 25 February 2016. This conference was purposively selected due to its discipline relevance and international representation and was unique to the authors because they organized and chaired the event. To date, this has been the sole global platform to disseminate research in pattern cutting and the approach is described as a methodology of conference organization, using content analysis and interviews with the individual authors of selected papers. It focuses on works that considered new ways to pattern cut by effectively implementing interdisciplinary activity into its practice. The findings discuss how the disorderly methods impacted on the student’s experiences. Ultimately this supports the development of original, novel and innovative pedagogical approaches to pattern cutting practice and has the potential to enrich the fashion industry, encouraging pattern cutters to develop essential skills to cross discipline boundaries.

Chinese history represents a traditional costume culture that provides a rich source of inspiration for fashion students. This article references typical Tibetan clothing as an example of Chinese traditional costume and proposes a virtual reality interactive teaching mode for use in fashion design education. This mode enables fashion students to understand in greater depth the structural features of traditional costumes through virtual garments and also provides self-learning platforms and opportunities for other non-fashion students. Virtual reality interactive teaching can fully demonstrate the characteristics of traditional Chinese clothing, increasing access to garment knowledge that is not readily available outside museum collections. These processes include using two-dimensional (2D) clothing CAD software to display the traditional clothing structure, using virtual reality technology for making three-dimensional (3D) clothing models and using the Unity 3D game development platform for interactivity. This virtual reality interactive teaching approach expands upon traditional teaching methods for fashion design and the study of traditional costume for design development. This article presents this virtual method for fashion education to enable increased access to traditional costume knowledge.

Design practice in the craft sector of India has witnessed a paradigm shift in the last decade. There have been an increasing number of attempts to include the rural craftsperson in the creative process. Various design schools, scholars, individuals, organizations and government agencies have integrated the design process amongst the grassroots by working closely with the makers of hand-crafted products.

Fashion design pedagogy in higher education needs to engage with emergent consumer-led consumption schemes that are problematizing the roles of producer and consumer. Traditional fashion design pedagogy does not explicitly teach students to reveal the systems of fashion production to consumers, thus distancing them from the materials and processes that animate consumer products. Consumers are at a disadvantage as they have little agency over or knowledge of how garments are produced in the global top-down fashion system – a system that could be characterized as a black box. In response to this, consumers and designers have been employing concepts from hacker culture and the sharing economy in order to participate in novel consumption schemes that focus on underlying values of openness, transparency and collaboration. This article reviews a number of these schemes, using secondary sources, and proposes that their underlying values be introduced into sustainable fashion curriculums.

This research article provides an account of a series of curriculum interventions at undergraduate and postgraduate level which engage fashion business students with real world practical and ethical complexities faced by twenty-first-century fashion businesses. Fashion education has predominantly nurtured creativity in design and promotion whilst focusing on identifying efficiencies for business operations, but increasingly the negative environmental and social impact of the global fashion industry requires a new focus on how fashion business can promote ethical and sustainable practices. The authors explore how research into sustainable fashion can be integrated into the business curriculum to guide students as they develop their personal positions on engagement with the serious issues the fashion industry faces today and tomorrow. The authors applied their research into sustainable fashion with contemporary sustainability pedagogies to design teaching delivered through case studies, lectures, seminars and assessment tasks designed to engage students with a 360-degree understanding of sustainability and to promote students’ development of creative solutions to our industry’s challenges. The authors sought to develop a range of teaching resources and learning sessions in line with the United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and in doing so used the lens of sustainability to explore every aspect of the fashion industry: production, design and promotion. Through the examples explored in this article, our exploratory research aims to understand how to design and implement a model of responsible fashion business education that responds to social and environmental needs and resonates with new generations of students who demonstrate an increased interest in concepts of shared social, environmental and economic value.

To non-residents, Hawaii embodies the archetypical tourist destination – erupting volcanoes, magnificent beaches, surfing lifestyle and hula dancers; a year-around place of adventure, romance and relaxation; and the perfect setting for advertisements and movie fantasies. However, the realities of contemporary life in Hawaii are quite different from those idyllic visions. The site-specific public fashion project Ahola (Aloha Backwards) mined these dichotomies by integrating fashion design, public art and collaborative teaching methodologies to engage the local community. In so doing, Ahola adapted a Social Practice Fashion framework to the cultural context of Hawaii while providing informal, community-centred professional training for aspiring local fashion entrepreneurs. Through its use of Collaborative Learning methods, this participatory fashion project expanded teaching beyond traditional academic settings, while simultaneously empowering Honolulu residents by allowing their direct input at every stage of the project. This article analyses how Ahola took advantage of standard methodologies from the fashion industry as tools for social activism and integrated them with collaborative teaching to enable informal learning opportunities. In addition to discussing the implications of the project’s methodology, as a viable approach for socially conscious fashion design practitioners. The article also examines the pedagogic significance of Collaborative Learning for both traditional high learning institutions and community-centred educational initiatives.

Modemuze@OBA, OBA (the public library in Amsterdam), Amsterdam, 17 March–2 July 2017

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 27 May 2017–18 February 2018