Social and environmental responsibility in fashion education, research and practice

My work in ethical fashion is predominately at the intersection of writing, education and advisement, and most of the time what I talk about with students, brands and other academic institutions, are the various impacts of fashions value chain on people and planet. My work extends beyond environmental impacts, to prioritise ethics, reflecting on the cultural and social Zeitgeist and the responses from an industry struggling in the midst of rapidly shifting global values and expectations. As an outgrowth of that perspective, I have written a number of modules, courses and programmes for both under and post graduate education that focus on a hybrid, cross-disciplinary approach to business, practice and ethics, that rewards risk taking and uses fashion as a problem solving tool instead of an industry designed to make more stuff. One of the things I constantly challenge, is the notion of what constitutes success in our industry, as traditionally the concept of success has been strictly dictated by a single, outmoded strategy. I strongly believe in design as a creative problem-solving tool, design to make the world a better place, design that is unique to a region and the culture it comes from, design that respects all of those in its supply chain, and design with end-of-life considerations built in, and when I say design, I don’t just mean product, I mean the design of systems, of businesses, of brands and of processes. To quote Ghandi from the Indian anti-colonial struggle “There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.”

Dr Sass Brown MPS, PhD is the Programme Lead Sustainable Fashion Business and Practices at Kingston University London.