The Fashion + Sustainability Paradox: Is Education a Way Forward?

The research included here was conducted in 2019 and has been delayed in publication due to the global pandemic. It was a pioneering project for a general fashion communication programme in the UK and provocatively questioned how sustainability might, and indeed should, affect the fashion industry. It was also unusual in that the researcher was personally connected to the line of enquiry, not as a sustainability researcher, but in reaction to teaching promotional strategic campaign planning, and seeing the need to professionally provoke students on the undergraduate programme to consider an alternative fashion future, to match her own change in values away from consumption to social responsibility. Since then, a global pandemic has disrupted broader systemic perspectives and required dramatic changes in pedagogic teaching approaches, an upsurge in hybrid channels of educational dialogue and a common interest in citizens to understand issues such as climate change, sustainable ways of living, individualised activism, and accountability. The drive to embed responsibility and sustainability in all areas of design research and pedagogy is now nationally of focus by higher education institutions, and the strategic requirement for all educators to explicitly connect with these ideas is clear. Embracing a growth mindset (Dweck 2009) is therefore the challenge for educators as much as for students. Therefore, although this article is somewhat dated temporally, it remains highly relevant, instructional, and accessible, in how authentic mindset and behaviour change can be incited through stakeholder engagement in the classroom, dialogic agitation, and immersive lived experience, in response to phenomena and idiosyncratic action connected with through iterative design thinking. It will be of interest to many creative design academics who are looking for options to embed research-rich teaching in their discipline-specific curricula and aid students and staff with action research principles in the classroom.