Teaching sustainable fashion through ethics and encounters

This article explores approaches to education for sustainable fashion and textile design. Students, as future industry professionals—and as present wearers of clothing—need to understand the various sustainability issues of fashion in ways that are straightforward yet also draw the necessary subtle distinctions required to move beyond a simplistic understanding of the issues. However, there is an abundance of information available on sustainable fashion, and this is part of the challenge for educators. Alongside the many academic publications in the area, a growing number of activist groups, governments and non-governmental organisations are releasing reports on the topic, and at the same time, the number of brands and retailers purporting to be ‘green’, ‘ethical’, and ‘sustainable’ are mushrooming. Given the amount of information now available on the topic, there is a need for discernment in presenting the issues incisively while also doing justice to their complexity. The article offers a detailed overview of the present sustainable fashion literature, from both academic and non-academic sources, and frames approaches to teaching as ‘ethics’ and ‘encounters’, in which students are challenged to examine their assumptions and frame their own philosophy of what ‘sustainable fashion’ may mean to them