THE FASHION SUBJECT

A documentary by

* Project developed by Portugal Coordination on October 2015

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The Fashion

SubjectC

THE FASHION SUBJECT is a collaborative documentary about

how Fashion schools can prepare designers for a better world

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Because fashion is responsible for four of the major worlds illnesses

2
Labor Exploitation

3
Craftsmanship Extinction

Environmental Destruction

4
Planned Obsolescence

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Shouldnt fashion schools unite for change? Fashion corporations will only make a
move if consumers change first. But it is very difficult for consumers to change a
whole industry by themselves. Especially when they are the last link of the chain.
Although they have the power, they are stuck with a narrow range of choices.

While we wait for fashion brands to take bigger steps, let us start from the
beginning and help improving the fashion education towards sustainability.

The mission of this documentary is to develop a guide for fashion education
institutions and professionals, based on the opinion of experts, students and
consumers. This will further help opening space for a new workforce prepared to
design products with bigger impact in our lives and societies as a whole.

30 outfits

CHINA

Americans
consume

USA
UK

20,000,000,000

9 outfits

garments a year
Just 25%
of the world

That is 68
garments and 7
pairs of shoes
per person

and

$1,700

Throws away
32,000,000 tons of
clothes every year

per family

1980

The American woman

has 4 times as many
clothes she had 30
year ago

Its the weight

of 5 pyramids!

A third of all
purchased
clothing goes to
UK landfills

Consumers buy it

2013

2013
In the UK, people
dont wear 30% of
their wardrobe
(51% for women)

And 1 in 10 clothes that were thrown

out in the US were brand new

but they throw it away

month

Is the average time

women use a product
before its usage drop
to almost zero

and dont even wear it

This can mean that consumers are being induced

to buy clothes with which they are not satisfied
* Sources: WARP, Forbes, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, Global Times, Telegraph, Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline

So, how wisely have we been preparing our fashion designers?

3,000 Fashion

graduates
each year
in UK

Fashion schools teach young

students to become catwalk
designers and divas. They are no
longer instructed in basic
knowledge about cloth

Li Edelkoort, Trend
Forecaster

The graduates fail to launch their

own labels or find jobs as
designers. But the fashion
business need graduates like
never before
Francis Corner,
Head of

London College of Fashion

FITs Accessories graduates

and Parsons Shoe
graduates that have found a
full-time job in 2010

10%
1999

2014

Fashion undergraduate
offer expanded from 7
courses to just over 40

$110,000,000
Spent in Fashion
courses each year in UK

More graduates

Our primary purpose is for the

students to learn to develop their
own creative design signature
Anne Smith, Dean of CSM
Some skills are being squeezed
out of fashion courses, because
they are too expensive to teach
Linda Florence, CEO of Skillfast

but no skills

More than a half a

million American
fashion industry jobs
were lost
- 500,000
1996

2011

no employment

The education system just isn't

delivering enough skilled people,
and employers are increasingly
concerned
Linda Florence, CEO of Skillfast

We need to safeguard any form of

tradition and to do this we have to
invest in the training of young talent
Francesco Pesci, CEO of Brioni

As one generation dies, theres no one

to pass the trade on to
Anne Smith, Dean of CSM

Now there's a panic that all the senior

craftsmen are dying off. It's really an
emergency for the industry
Linda Loppa, head of Fashion at
Antwerp Royal Academy

industry without designers

but retailers are still
making billions!
(Zara and Forever 21 together
make $13,300,000,000 per year)

* Sources: Business of Fashion, Forbes, NY Magazine, Footwear News, Li Edelkoort, The Guardian, Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline

This means that the fashion system has a fifth serious problem:

Simons was frustrated by the

lack of time to create: I think if
I had more time, I would reject
more things, and bring other
ideas or concepts in.
BoF, when he
Raf Simons for
left Dior

I have to think about whats
new, whats next. Its too busy
for me. I wanted people to
keep on wearing my clothes
for at least 10 years or more
Yohji Yamamoto for The Talks

No Time

The frenetic pace of collections don't

leave any freedom, nor the necessary
time to find fresh ideas and to
innovate.
in Dazed Digital,
Jean Paul Gaultier
when he decided to quit RTW

No propensity for Innovation

No Skills

We dont lose any money if we do

fewer collections. Creativity should be
the only concern. But today there is no
time for creativity. We cant just
squeeze the young talents and then
throw them away.

Azzedine Alia
for BoF

No Market Space

So, how can fashion schools give graduates fertile ground for change?

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want to knowC
How are subjects in fashion schools being held by teachers?
Do students feel that what they have learned is accordingly to outsides demand?
How are fashion schools preparing their students regarding sustainability?
What good cases are worth pointing out as examples?
Is the next generation of designers prepared to face an adverse and obsolete fashion system?
Are they prepared to further have an active hand on changing the system? How?
What creative processes should be taught to Fashion students so they can develop a richer
grasp about their consumers and know what society is asking from them?
What teaching methods should be applied to accomplish these goals?
What assessment criteria would be the most adequate?
What kind of equipment, resources and activities fashion schools need to have?
Which reference authors could be interesting to include?

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HcollaborativeC

Although Fashion Revolution Portugal will be shooting

on its own country and also in Southern China

there are many other countries that can make their own interviews and footage for
a common goal, and together, we can make this documentary more complete

Therefore, we will need a common guide to make sure we are following

the same lead in every country, such as interview scripts, equipment and
conventions about video/audio and language (for translation)

A filmmaker will then help editing all the footage and finishing the
documentary, to be released on the next 24th of April 2016

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IntervieweesC

Here is an open list of possible interviewees,

still waiting for new ideas:
- Fashion students (freshers and grads);
- Fashion lecturers / managers. E.g.:

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The New School of Form, Poland

Design Academy, Netherlands
C.S.F. or London College of Fashion, UK
Bunka Fashion College, Japan
Parsons, USA
F.I.T., USA (Sass Brown)
California College of Arts, USA
ESMOD, Germany

Fashion Startups CEOs;

Unemployed fashion designers;
Social entrepreneurs in Fashion;
Fashion designers who work for
multinational brands;

- Fashion designers with revolutionary

methods or creative processes.
- Pedagogues, designers, intellectuals
that share opinion about the topic. E.g.:
Li Edelkoort, Netherlands
Ian Cook, UK
Hasmik Matevosyan, Netherlands
Irmeli Halinen, Finland
Pasi Sahlberg, Finland
Alexa Chung, UK
Suzy Menkes, UK
Johanna Blakley, USA
Livia Firth, Italy
Katharine Hamnett, UK
Vivienne Westwood, UK
Stella McCartney, UK
Note: Making experiments with fashion students
and reporting results may also be a good idea

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This documentary will be important for Fashion designers and students of all
academic degrees, but most of all, we want to reach the fashion academy itself:
schools, universities, and other departments that hold education-related decisions.
If not the institutions pedagogic management, change can come from fashion
teachers or other academics who are eager to improve teaching methods.
Whatever the documentarys final message will be, its diffusion will have more
impact if started openly in a classroom full of students.

Contact Portugal@FashionRevolution.Org