Fashion Design for Living

Fashion Design for Living explores the positive contribution that the contemporary fashion designer can make within society. The book seeks to reveal new ways of designing and making fashion garments and products that not only enhance and enrich our lives, but also are mindful of social and sustainable issues.

This book sets out to question and challenge the dominant, conventional process of fashion design that as a practice has been under-researched. While the fashion designer in industry is primarily concerned with the creation of the new seasonal collection, designed, produced and measured by economic driven factors, society increasingly expects the designer to make a positive contribution to our social, environmental and cultural life. Consequently an emergent set of designers and research-based practitioners are beginning to explore new ways to think about fashion designing. The contributors within the book argue that fashion designing should move beyond developing garments that are just aesthetically pleasing or inexpensive, but also begin to consider and respond to the wearers experiences, wellbeing, problems, desires, situations, and engagement with and use of a garment.

The practitioners and researchers that have contributed to this book share different perspectives on how fashion design can support individual and social enhancement. These accounts foreground approaches to fashion design that focus on users, lived experiences, actual and everyday problems or scenarios, which traditionally have remained unfamiliar or aside from the fashion design process applied in industry or in the educational fashion design studio. Fashion Design for Living champions new approaches to fashion practice by uncovering a rich and diverse set of views and reflective experiences, which explore the changing role of the fashion designer and inspire fresh, innovative and creative responses to fashion and the world we live in.

Alison Gwilt is a fashion design academic, consultant and researcher exploring the integration of sustainable strategies across the lifecycle of fashion products. Her work focuses on the use of positive/sustainable design interventions within the fashion industry that challenge the current production and consumption paradigm. She has published widely in the field of sustainability and fashion, and outputs include books, chapters, conference papers, and articles published in a number of international publications and press. Her books include Shaping Sustainable Fashion (edited with Timo Rissanen) published by Earthscan in 2011, A Practical Guide to Sustainable Fashion for Bloomsbury (2014) and forthcoming, Fashion Design for Living for Routledge (2014). As a curator and practitioner, she has been involved in a number of exhibitions and received competitive funding from organizations such as the Australian NSW State Government’s Environmental Trust.

Alison has a degree in fashion and textiles from Central St Martins College of Art in London, and a PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne, and her career in academia includes managing courses, researching and lecturing in fashion and textiles design in the UK, New Zealand and Australia. She currently holds the post of Reader in Fashion and Sustainability in the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.