London College of Fashion | Dilys Williams Introduction to all courses

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Welcome to Fashion Values, a new portfolio of courses brought to you by Centre for Sustainable Fashion. I'm Dilys Williams,
professor of fashion design for sustainability at University of the Arts London and director at Centre for Sustainable Fashion. We're

part of a university which is made up of six colleges bringing together nearly 20,000 students from around the world.

We're based at one of those colleges, London College of Fashion. And the Centre provokes, challenges, and questions the status
quo in fashion. We use fashion design for sustainability practises to create a fashion system that recognises its ecological context

and honours equity.

As for me, I'm a designer, researcher, and the lead academic for these four new courses where we explore fashion's value and

values in terms of nature, economy, culture, and society. Fashion is an exploration of what is relevant to time, place, and people
within a wider planetary context. There's never been a more important role for fashion than in our current times. It can be both

joyful as an expression of who we are, a contributor to livelihoods, cultures, societies, and economies. It is also a destroyer of
dignity, lives, cultures, and the only true economy, nature's wealth, which is the only source for all of our prosperity.

And fashion is many different activities and businesses large and small doing different things. But overall, its place as the seventh

largest industry in the world is based on a model that is built on, reinforces, and perpetuates exploitation of people, including

creating conditions of modern-day slavery. It is also built on an extractive economy. It is a significant cause of climate change.

These courses, however, are not here to tell you about fixing the symptoms of the harm that is done by fashion. The courses are

here to ask you to consider what you value and to look at what kind of fashion system you would like to be part of. Because

whether you're working or studying in fashion, whether you have a direct or indirect professional or educational link to fashion, you

are most likely to be wearing clothes.

So everyone who engages with this is an active part of the fashion system. Anyone who engages with this can make changes to
that system. And the more that we recognise and elevate our values in action both professionally and personally and the more that

we call out destructive practises, the closer that we can get to a world that we can really all thrive in.

Time is short. The evidence is starkly apparent. The climate emergency is recognised by governments and organisations around

the world. Social injustice is also starkly apparent. Racism, gender, and other social inequalities must be stopped. Swift action does

not, however, mean surface action. We need to develop skills and capabilities for deep change. This is what these courses seek to

develop with you.

They start with a provocation, a new lens through which you can reimagine what a thriving system might look like. At Centre for

Sustainable Fashion, we've collaborated with many friends and colleagues across different locations, disciplines, and viewpoints to

develop these courses. We come together to offer you a diversity of perspectives, theories, applications, and experiences that

we're really excited to share with you.

The courses are based on a fashion design for sustainability framework that we've developed at the Centre. It has two underlying

principles-- a recognition of the Earth's carrying capacity made clear through scientific research into planetary boundaries and a
recognition of the rights of all living beings and that all humans are born as equals as laid out in the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights. The framework also articulates four agendas within which fashion operates-- nature, culture, society, and economy.

These are the four courses, the Fashion Values.

The courses also relate to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a call for us to work towards a better and more

sustainable future for all by all. You can take these courses in whichever order you wish. But we do encourage you to work through

the whole portfolio. Then you'll be able to really explore your values and develop your skills and design thinking to creatively and

imaginatively respond to possibilities in and through fashion.

Through each course, you will be supported through a design thinking process that helps you to define a problem area and

generate ideas in relation to that. You'll be exposed to big ideas, spotlight issues, and case studies and be supported to prototype

and evaluate the responses that you have to the problems that you have defined.

Through the courses, you will connect and colearn with a community from around the world. You're likely to be amongst people in

many different locations from across different generations, vocations, and backgrounds, fashion students, designers, creative
directors, educators, as well as people in a range of professions all of us being citizens. We invite you to make the most of this

amazing planet-wide network by engaging in conversation with others through the course, particularly in the activities and

comments sections.

The resources and activities on each course are designed to be for up to three hours learning each week. Within each of the

courses, you will also find links so you can spend more time looking at further resources, giving you the opportunity to extend and

expand your learning in your own time.

The courses seek to inform and inspire cultures and practises of fashion design in studios, across departments in all fashion

businesses large and small, within communities, and essentially within the lives of each learner. These courses are creating a

community of fashion and sustainability thinkers and doers with the vision, skills, and commitment to radically transform how we

live and work in and through fashion.

These courses are brought to you digitally but are very different in content and design from what you will generally find online. We

are not here to bring you information. There is more information available to more people now than at any other time in history.

Some say that it has overtaken money as a primary resource with the perception that the more of it we have, the better off we are.

But information, as with money, does not mean anything by itself. It's how we apply it that matters.

So these courses seek to explore and apply information along with ideas and questions in the context of the lives of all who are

taking part in the courses and in relation to all others with whom we share this planet. They seek to connect you with a range of

perspectives from people who have come together to make the courses and between the people on the courses.

By taking something from a geographically based classroom into a planetary classroom-- you might be in a field, you might be at

home, you might be in a lecture theatre or on a journey as you're taking part in this course-- it means that we open up connections

between a great many different places and people doing different things. We've already witnessed learners from over 190

countries taking part in our previous course and conversing with each other. And we've learnt a great deal of insights from this.

Our ambition through these courses is to strengthen the connections between people and communities and places. We hope too

that it will deepen connections between us and our wider living world to those who came before us from whom we've developed

our identities and to those who come after us, those who will inherit the world that we leave for them.

At Centre for Sustainable Fashion, we along with many of our collaborators understand that education is a mutual learning

opportunity between all who take part. We understand it is learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live

together with those whose perspectives we share as well as those who have very different ideas, beliefs, histories, and identities

from ourselves.
We expect that you're taking the course for a number of different reasons. Our intention is to offer you something that is fulfilling

to you and as part of an intention that education fulfils its potential to transform of all of our consciousness, to recognise our

identities as part of nature, which is a very big ambition but one we're very excited about involving you in. In the words of Thomas

Berry, "Our greatest work is in creating a world where our values prevail."

So this introduction to the courses, however, comes with a warning. We are seeking to give you a thirst for knowledge about

fashion in the context of our times, not to give you answers to every question that you have as the answer to your questions do not

only reside in the minds of those who are creating this course or with anyone else, in fact.

We are very keen to share with you what we know, what we've learnt, what we've found out, what we've researched. But there's

no crystal ball for any of us to look into. The future comes to be, in the words of Gregory Bateson, "as it is imagined." It's up to

each of us to decide what to do with the contents of these courses. It's our ambition to give you a sense both of what is but also a

sense of what isn't yet but could be.

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