Francesca Erdosh

For systemic change in the fashion industry, consumers, policymakers, and designers each have a key role to play. 

The Ellen MacArthur foundation states that 80% of a productʼs environmental impact is influenced at the design stage, but sustainability is still being taught as a niche in the fashion education system.

Fashion design students are the future of the fashion industry, yet in standard fashion education they are not taught to question the global fashion system which relies on exploitation and extraction for its pursuit of capital gain and which perpetuates the histories and practices of colonialism.

To address these curriculum gaps, a supplementary sustainable fashion education system, that through a combination of both structured and unstructured methods, provides resources and incentives to encourage critical thinking, build community, and empower students for systemic change. 

The system consists of FASHION FUTURES: A one-stop sustainable fashion design hub, garments made out of design-student-waste collected from the Parsons studios, up-cycling workshops that question how we define waste, and a sponsored sustainable fashion internship grant proposal. 

The first concept for my thesis grew out of my experience with low fashion design student participation in sustainable fashion initiatives due to the many disconnected streams of information on these events and activities.

During my research, I also found there to be a gap in the non-institutional platforms for sustainable design education, as almost all of the sustainable fashion organizations I encountered focused on consumer and policy influence and education. 

The first formal method of fashion education in this system is FASHION FUTURES.

Currently, Fashion Revolution is supporting this initiative through a consultation-based pilot partnership!

The Fashion Futures: Advancing Sustainable Fashion Design Education Through Sponsored Internships grant proposal outlines a project to address the gap in sustainable fashion education through internships.

Many sustainable fashion brands are not able to offer paid internships, and many students cannot afford to take unpaid internships. The project provides stipends for student designers to complete paid internships with sustainable fashion design brands and facilitates opportunities for mutual learning and knowledge sharing.

Connecting young designers with sustainable brands creates potential for community connection, collaboration, innovation and a fashion system that is rooted in reciprocity. 

Once funding is received for the grant proposal, the internship application will be added to the FASHION FUTURES hub as an incentive for students to visit the platform.

After struggling to keep students engaged with more formal conversations about sustainability, I had a breakthrough when I began experimenting with materiality and my peers started coming over to engage with the garments.

I realized that I needed to speak the fashion design language. So as a part of my thesis, I designed garments out of fashion design student waste that used materiality to attract student curiosity. Every evening before I left the studios, I would walk around and collect scraps from the ground. I would be grabbing thread bits by students' feet as they sewed and I'd ask them, "Are you using this material?" And they would look at me like I was crazy, but with each interaction, I would see students begin to register all of the waste around them. 

I began asking students how they define waste while collecting scraps each evening.

I have many voice memos in my phone of students reflecting on their definitions of waste. I believe that these unstructured interactions opened the door to meaningful student reflection. 

I wanted to provide students a more formal opportunity to engage with this practice, so I started hosting workshops shaped around the question: At what point does material cross the threshold to waste?

I ask students to collect their scrap material for a period of time and then bring it to the workshop to up-cycle. 

I hosted 3 workshops: 1) Class-specific workshop in Parsons Systems & Society Thesis Class; 2) Helix Commons Launch at Yale School of the Environment; 3) FASHION FUTURES x Fashion Revolution, Fashion Revolution Week Workshop

I met my workshop collaborators at sustainable fashion events I had attended.