Achieving sustainability in the fashion industry is more challenging than you might imagine at first. The challenge is global with many elements at play: What materials are used? How and where are they harvested or created? Who makes the garment? Where is it made and under what conditions? How is it transported and where is it sold? How does the consumer use it and how do they dispose of it?
Professor Margaret Frey and Lecturer Fran Kozen from the Department of Human Centered Design created a new class – FSAD 3200: Global Textile & Apparel Sustainability – to answer these questions after students expressed a desire to explore these issues.
“We all have familiarity with clothing, so it’s an accessible way to study sustainability. It provides a great jumping off point to delve into the topic of sustainability in business that applies to other industries as well.”
The class, first offered in fall of 2021, immerses students in the real-life, contemporary challenges of sustainability in the fashion industry. For the first offering, 60 students from all eight of Cornell’s undergraduate colleges enrolled in the class, demonstrating the broad interest in the issue.
“We all have familiarity with clothing, so it’s an accessible way to study sustainability,” Frey said. “It provides a great jumping off point to delve into the topic of sustainability in business that applies to other industries as well.”
The course was structured to address the connection of fashion to the 17 sustainability goals outlined by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Guest lecturers from a variety of academic and professional disciplines, including Jason Judd from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cotton industry researchers, and industry representatives from material developers, garment production contractors, sustainability managers, clothing rental firms, and waste upcycling firms spoke in the class. In addition, students worked in groups to address sustainability challenges posed by industry mentors.
“The class is exciting because we delve into these problematic issues, but the students are also able to see all of the work people are doing across the industry to make improvements,” Kozen said. “There is a lot of momentum for sustainability right now both in industry and among young consumers.
“An overarching emphasis of that class is that it takes everyone to ensure sustainability in the industry,” Frey said. “We really tried to highlight that we needed engineers, science, labor, design and business expertise. With its broad range of diverse studies, Cornell is really uniquely positioned to move this issue forward.”
Kozen and Frey were awarded a $21,000 grant from Cotton Inc.'s 2022 Cotton in the Curriculum Grant Program, which will support expanding the course and incorporating a community engagement aspect, most likely concerning the use of post-consumer textiles.
“We were delighted we could get support from them for the development of this course,” Frey said. “We hope to welcome even more students to the class for fall 2022.”
Above: Students and faculty visited FabScrap, a textile recycling facility in Brooklyn, in 2019. Here they listen to an explanation of how the bags of fabrics in the background are sorted and reused or recycled.