Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices MA

Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices sets out to challenge current thinking in fashion by embedding holistic sustainable design and operational solutions throughout.

The coursework represents a values-led approach to teaching and learning that incorporates participatory action and requires critical thinking and problem solving. The programme is designed to create systemic change, resulting in innovative and ethical solutions as well as transformational systems and organisations.

Projects are designed to develop and deepen your understanding of the multi-dimensionality of sustainability as it relates to fashion. The programme gives participants the opportunity to develop solutions and plot a new future for themselves and the fashion industry, thereby displacing a dysfunctional system and replacing it with practical and inspirational alternatives. This is fashion not designed to produce more 'stuff' but intended to develop systems and practices that intervene and replace the mainstream fashion system.

The course capitalises on the studio ethos of learning by doing, producing tangible outcomes and solutions to industry problems through creative problem solving that crosses disciplines and bodies of knowledge for inspired responses. It challenges the accepted and traditional methodologies within the fashion system, to cause students to question every step of the process from inspiration through sample making and production to sales and marketing and end of life considerations.

Using design thinking, the course supports students in the analysis of industry impacts, and the testing of ideas to bring lean and agile processes together in the development of solution creation. Project work adheres to the four pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, social, and cultural.

Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices is a registered member of the United Nations' Education and Academia Stakeholder Group (EASG).

After you graduate

The Sustainable Fashion Business and Practices curriculum helps to prepare students for a multitude of sustainably focused undertakings and employment opportunities. These range from brand and product development, sustainable supply chain management, systems and services management, sourcing and communications, not limited to medium, and expressed both physically and digitally, through to websites, blogs, apps, magazines, e-zines, exhibitions, installations and more. This course will address the gap between intent and the in-depth knowledge required for diverse application.

The curriculum prepares students for a rapidly changing industry, where the old models of career development no longer apply, impacted as they have been by the fourth industrial revolution, climate change, the global pandemic and a myriad of social and cultural movements that have shifted our collective value systems. Students may choose to set up their own businesses or freelance across the creative and production.

Students are trained to develop their own work profiles as independent practitioners and advisors across markets, with sustainability an increasing focus for all businesses, allowing students the flexibility to enter into non-fashion specific roles.

We encourage research practice during the MA programme, with the potential to develop postgraduate practice at MPhil and PhD level.