Understanding the role of sustainability in fashion design and business, with Nina Stevenson

To access the available transcript please use the following link: https://bit.ly/3rFwgwA

Nina Stevenson is Education for Sustainability Leader at UAL’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion. CSF (Centre for Sustainable Fashion) ‘provokes, challenges and questions the fashion status quo’, ‘shaping and contributing to Fashion Design for Sustainability as a field of study, industry, and education practices.’

Her work involves collaborating with others to develop complex sustainability ideas into creative and measurable learning in online and offline spaces. 

We will be exploring how teachers can use creative education to enable conversations and learning about climate justice. We will also talk about how to remain creative, optimistic and experimental when working in an industry that has faced so much criticism.

Check out resources for fashion tutors: www.fashionseeds.org

CSF’s latest free online courses: https://www.futurelearn.com/partners/lcf

Discover more about UAL Awarding Body qualifications.

Transcript

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Matt Moseley:

Hello, and welcome to the Teach Inspire Create podcast. I'm your host, Matt Moseley, chief examiner for art and design at the UAL Awarding Body. In this series, I'll be talking to artists and creative industry leaders under the lenses of three main themes: teaching, inspiring and creating. Nina Stevenson. Let's talk about Nina. Nina is the education for sustainability leader at UAL Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Her work involves collaborating with others to develop complex sustainability ideas and create learning in online and offline spaces.

Matt Moseley:

As their website says, CSF provokes, challenges and questions the fashion status quo, shaping and contributing to fashion design for sustainability as a field of study, industry and education practices. Today, I'll be talking to Nina about how teachers can use creative education to enable conversations and learning about climate justice, and how to remain creative, optimistic, and experimental when working in an industry that's faced so much criticism. There is a transcript available for this episode. Please click the link in the episode description so you can read as you listen.

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Teach

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Teach

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Matt Moseley:

Hi, Nina. How are you doing?

Nina Stevenson:

Hi, Matt. Good. Yes. Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Matt Moseley:

Good to see you too. Yeah, thank you very much for joining us today for the UAL Teach Inspire Create podcast. So one of the questions we've been asking all of our guests is around the idea of an inspirational teacher or an experience that you might have had that's kind of helped to shape part of what you do now, or has inspired you to follow a career in fashion or in education. Is there anything that kind of leaps to mind or has stuck with you?

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question and I've been reflecting upon that a little bit since you gave me the heads up that you might be asking me this. And I think, interestingly, it made me think about my lifelong educational career, right from a child up to where I am today. And there actually wasn't necessarily a standout moment or a standout teacher or a standout kind of lesson or experience, but just this kind of reflection on my life as somebody who's really keen to learn. And I'd say that my most transformative educational experiences have come later in life. They've definitely come as an adult, not as a child.

Nina Stevenson:

Whereas when I think about my time at university, I studied modern languages, I spent some time in Spain. I then went on and did a masters in transnational studies. I was exposed to some of the really big ideas that underpin our world and our society and us as human beings and the way in which we make decisions about how we live our lives and how we organise our societies and how we interact with each other and how we create culture and things like that. And so postgraduate study and then came to work at UAL quite soon after I finished my master's. So I was in my 20s and I have worked at UAL ever since.

Nina Stevenson:

And I think that one of the reasons that I've continued to work at UAL is that I have had the brilliant opportunity to work alongside and learn from hugely inspiring people who have continued to encourage a thirst for knowledge and a kind of creative inquiry, a reflection on the world, which I didn't really necessarily have when I was growing up and I was in the school education system.

Matt Moseley:

What you were saying about just your journey through life and more the experiences that you've had, you mentioned moving to Spain, obviously, that takes a certain mindset. Do you feel like children are getting that from school at the moment?

Nina Stevenson:

I don't see it firsthand. I would love to hear from other parents that are. That's not any reflection on the quality of our teachers or the commitment and the compassion that they have for their job, it's the broader system that we're working within, and how can we challenge that in a constructive way? I think one of the examples where it really resonated was during the pandemic and the lockdown periods, and my kids were at home being homeschooled for very long periods of time.

Matt Moseley:

Seemed extraordinarily long periods of time, didn't it?

Nina Stevenson:

It really tested everyone's resolve and gave you huge respect for teachers. But at the same time, I was hugely frustrating as a parent was this fact that this is a huge opportunity for us to say, okay, every child has experienced disruption. We're not going to try and push everybody, speed them up to get back onto an existing standard that hadn't ever encountered a global pandemic and huge major disruption. Let's use this opportunity to reassess what those standards are and make sure that they're much more compassionate and much more reflective of the difficult periods of time that every child has experienced.

Nina Stevenson:

And actually the thing that was most important to get back on track was the children's wellbeing and their sense of fun and creativity. Being trapped indoors for months at a time and being told they can only exercise outside for an hour at a time, not being able to socialise with anyone other than those in their household, missing out on their friends, the other generations of their families. It's heartbreaking.

Matt Moseley:

Yeah. What would you like to see your kids do at primary school? What would feel like a balanced thing for you?

Nina Stevenson:

Something that actually they do do at primary school level that they don't do at secondary school level is this kind of topic-based learning. So you have a topic; at least they do it in my kids' school anyway. They have a topic for six weeks and then they will explore creative writing through that topic, they'll explore math problems through that topic. And that's an opportunity to set some kind of globally relevant topics that allow you to think about the role of maths within that kind of context. So that, I think, is encouraging.

Matt Moseley:

Is that something that you try to kind of build into your work within the university and at HE about creating learning within a topic?

Nina Stevenson:

I think one of the things that's really interesting at higher education level that we're trying to do is to contextualize fashion. We can look at the way in which fashion education for a long time has been at the service of industry. What does business need? What do you need? Do you need more seamstress? Do you need more pattern cutters? Do you need CAD designers? Do you need marketers, buyers? What do you need? We'll create them and then we'll send them out into the workforce and power this massive fashion industry that we've created. I think we're at a real transition point where we need to think, what are the values that we need fashion to represent?

Nina Stevenson:

What does the earth need? What do societies need? And how can fashion be a creative model to be able to create wellbeing for people working in that industry or people who are engaging in that industry in some way? So it's around working with tutors who are teaching, whether they're teaching on business courses, design courses, communication courses, and being analytical of your subject matter, of your discipline, and being able to contextualise that within the kind of global scenario that we find ourselves in.

Matt Moseley:

So do you feel there's a kind of a changing of the guard at the moment, then, between industry informing education and now education needing to inform industry? Does that feel as though that's the sort of the shift a bit?

Nina Stevenson:

I think it's much more symbiotic and I think it's around us equipping students and tutors with those critical thinking skills so that we can look at the dominant fashion system and be able to appraise its problems. Lots of what we see when we think about sustainability in fashion, in the industry, a lot of the approaches are around problem solving. So, okay, there's a problem here around garment work is not being paid enough. What can we do to address that? There's a problem here, an environmental problem, around the amount of water we're using in this particular dyeing process. What can we do to address that? And that's good and some really interesting and amazing innovations occur at that localised level, but essentially what they're doing is they're making the existing system more efficient, or less bad. So how can we do the really difficult thing, which is redesigning the whole system?

Matt Moseley:

Yeah. Well, I guess, as well, there's a future-proofing in that, isn't there? Because there won't be an industry or a system to prepare people for unless there is this shift. How do teachers start to introduce that into the conversation with students? What should their approach be, do you think?

Nina Stevenson:

I think the really exciting thing about places of education is that that is a safe space for students and teachers to be experimental, to take risks, because you don't have the pressures of if you're working in a big company and you haven't got your boss telling you can't do that, or you've got a bottom line that you... Or a certain number of orders that you need to meet. When you're at university, you should be able to have the opportunity to explore new, radical approaches to these ideas. So I think if you're a teacher or if you're a student, it's really good to be honest and transparent around not knowing the answers, and to just keep asking the questions.

Nina Stevenson:

And that's something that I come across all the time is when I speak to colleagues who are teaching on courses. They feel this pressure to know the answers all the time. Nobody knows the answers, we're all just trying to figure out our way through this, and that vulnerability and that honesty I think is really important. And I think as soon as we shift that power dynamic so that the teacher isn't the source of all knowledge, but the teacher is there to facilitate a learning scenario where everybody's learning and we're all learning from each other, then that's really important and we can kind of figure out what the right approach is together.

Matt Moseley:

It sounds as though it's about fostering a growth mindset; an inquisitive mindset and an open mindset.

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah, absolutely. We have kind of set of mindsets that we try and use when we are looking at identifying certain behaviours or competencies within students and within their works, that we look for things like resilience and resourcefulness and activism and ecological thinking. So these present new kinds of assessment frameworks, so how can we appraise this kind of thinking and this kind of approach to fashion, which is a totally different way of assessing a student's progress?

Matt Moseley:

And for those students who are kind of thinking about progressing to study fashion at a degree level or beyond, would you recommend that they are able to be articulate and conversant with some of these themes, either within their work or within themselves for interview and for progression?

Nina Stevenson:

I think it's fundamental in the world today. I think it's fundamental that you have an awareness of the context in which we're living our lives. We've all got our own sets of values so feeling like you have an understanding of your values and your experiences and how they inform the decisions you make and the work that you do I think is really critical.

Matt Moseley:

So it's not just limited to academic progression, it's something that industry wants to see in people as well then?

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah. I suppose you want to think about the kind of organisation that you want to work for. When you have to have an understanding, I think it's good to have an understanding of how your values as a person align with the values of that organisation. And that's a good exercise to do when you're thinking about applying for jobs. Again, that's assuming you've got choice and that's not necessarily the case. We constantly sit with this tension that students, on the one hand, we want to prepare them to be creative thinkers with an ecological mindset that can go out into industry and change things and create new ways of making fashion, designing fashion, interacting with fashion, that are flipping the industry on its head.

Matt Moseley:

But it's also, it sounds as though it's important for students to do their own research as well and to couple that with a reflective critical analysis of their own ethical value systems and to identify mirrored values within organisations that they want to study at or they want to work for. Is that correct?

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah, I think so. Is that your experience?

Matt Moseley:

I think so, yeah. For me, obviously, that's what drew me towards the UAL. I worked in education on a local level, I wanted to influence things on a national level. I feel that the UAL has that scope and in the same way I feel that the UAL is a healthy, disruptive voice within the education system. And so absolutely, I completely agree. I think that's a valuable bit of advice for students without doubt. Just going back a little bit too, when you were talking about your kind of training and progression, you mentioned there were some people at the UAL when you joined that have been really influential to you. I'm just interested, is there anyone within that who kind of stands out as someone? And really just what I'm interested in is about this idea of mentoring and whether you think that's a valuable thing for students to pursue.

Nina Stevenson:

Absolutely. My long-term mentor, boss, friend, is Professor Dilys Williams, who's the director of the Center for Sustainable Fashion. And I met Dilys within a year or two of starting to work at UAL. At the time, she was a course leader at LCF, but has a career as a women's wear designer in industry. And she was asking all the right questions. She was asking the questions of our teaching, asking the questions of us as an institution. And the head of college at the time, Frances Corner, who was quite new in post, listened and agreed that these questions need a space to be explored. And together we were able to mobilise a voice and activity around the role of fashion in relation to nature and people.

Matt Moseley:

What were those early questions that Dilys was kind of asking of the organisation?

Nina Stevenson:

She was working in the design school at that time, and she couldn't believe that within the curriculum there weren't any projects around the environmental and social impacts of fashion.

Matt Moseley:

Right. Really? Okay.

Nina Stevenson:

Or very few, and just located with those that had maybe been doing something around that in industry. It was around the time as well, it was just before things were starting to kick off in the media. There was kind of media exposés around unethical trade, or people beginning to understand the impacts of some of the materials that we use; the cotton industry, for example. And these are things that Dilys had been working with for about 10 years or so in her own career and problem solving as a designer and trying to figure out how do I produce women's wear without creating unnecessary environmental or societal damage?

Nina Stevenson:

So she'd had that firsthand experience. And as a leading institution, it was absolutely important, it was fundamental that we had a voice on this issue and that we could begin to support our community of practitioners to ask these questions of our own practice. That's been our work since 2008. It's been our work within our own institution, it's been our work with collaborating with others. We've got members of the team that work very closely with industry, working with government and lobbying, and our research team as well, who were all doing very, very interesting and very specific things around understanding, really understanding fashion's role and how can we design a fashion system that puts the earth and equity at the forefront of that?

Matt Moseley:

When you started this, was it more difficult to get people to listen than it is now?

Nina Stevenson:

It was niche. You were kind of singing to the choir in many ways. There was a very energised movement within London and the UK of committed campaigners: small business owners, designers, people working within government and charities and NGOs, who formed a very strong, tight community who did important things. Generally, what happened was that it was viewed as other to the mainstream fashion industry. I think kind of a shift point that we saw was, we were working with industry, but we were working on quite small projects, maybe. In 2014, we collaborated with Kering, who are a luxury fashion group. So they own Gucci, they own Balenciaga, and tons of luxury fashion brands, and they're one of the biggest fashion organisations in the world.

Nina Stevenson:

And we collaborated with them and signed a five-year deal to do three things, actually. And this was really good because on the one hand they wanted to work with us for five years, so this wasn't a flash in the pan, this wasn't a one-off project and then walk away.

Matt Moseley:

It's a commitment.

Nina Stevenson:

It's a yearly program of activities, four or five years, so we could embed change and iterate on what we were doing and improve what we were doing. So we were looking at creating new curriculum so we developed a course with them that we taught at master's level. And it was co-created, so it was us challenging them, them challenging us, and kind of looking fundamentally at what sustainability in luxury fashion could be. And that was a really interesting process of developing that course. We also developed an awards program, and then we did a yearly showcase event. So we'd host a lecture, we'd get somebody from the Kering group to come in, and we had Stella McCartney, we had Marco Bizzarri from Gucci Group, we had François-Henri Pinault who's the CEO of Kering, so kind of really big, important industry figures.

Matt Moseley:

Must have been amazing for the students to hear from those people directly as well, isn't it?

Nina Stevenson:

Exactly. That was a great commitment from them as a group, and they do collaborate with many different education institutions worldwide, and gave us the opportunity to put some roots down in being able to understand what this teaching looked like. And interestingly, that course that we created with them, it then got transformed into an online course. So we created it and we put it on a platform called FutureLearn, which is full of short courses from universities around the world. They're free to access. And we also then kind of took it back into the college and we created a blended unit, so really understanding what digital learning could look like and how to balance the face-to-face with the digital. So that's just one of the examples where we've been able to build our kind of experimental toolkit of what teaching and learning can look like when you take away some of those traditional thinkings.

Matt Moseley:

Is it more expensive for them to be sustainable? Does it come as a financial impact?

Nina Stevenson:

Well, they, interestingly, did a big piece of work called the Environmental Profit & Loss where they looked at environmental impact in financial terms. So they were able to look at all of their supply chains and trace them back all the way back to raw materials, because actually most fashion retailers would only think about their product from the moment that they're cutting the fabric and turning into their products, whereas they traced it back to the-

Matt Moseley:

The production of that fabric to the raw materials.

Nina Stevenson:

... and all of the processing that happens. And then they were able to look at the environmental impact of that product, or of all of their products, over that life cycle. And what they identified was that the biggest environmental impact came at the raw material stage. And they were able to convert that into a financial figure, so if we were to write a check to nature, how much do we owe them? And that enabled them to speak to their shareholders and the economists and the business strategists of the fashion world and be able to give kind of hard evidence to say, "Look, this is where the impact is. You're spending all your time on your carrier bags and your packaging, but actually you need to be looking at how you're sourcing your cotton or your leather or your polyester. That's where the change is going to happen."

Nina Stevenson:

So these kind of opportunities to look at data, to collaborate with scientists, to think beyond your own little world, it's that kind of holistic thinking and thinking about the interconnections that we have and the power that we have, and identify if we're going to invest effort into somewhere in this world, where are we going to have the most potential for change and impact?

Matt Moseley:

There's quite a lot of organisational, cultural thinking change shifts that have to happen there as well, isn't it? You said that they were focusing on maybe some of the more immediate things about plastics, single-use plastics, and things that they were kind of doing at their end of the supply chain. How does an organisation go about thinking differently in that way? What do they need to do?

Nina Stevenson:

Think about what power you have, what agency do you have in your role with... If you are a small business owner and you employ people, then you've got power, haven't you? You've got a certain amount of opportunity to make change for those people that you employ, or for the people that are buying your product or engaging in your service, and all the network of different suppliers and people that you connect with. So it's around thinking about, is it my role here just to turn a profit and to keep growing that profit, or do I want to see different measures of success?

Nina Stevenson:

Are they around the people that I engage with and doing something within my community? Is it around the people that I don't employ, but my suppliers employ and their suppliers employ? Is it around the materials that I'm sourcing and the environmental impact that has been created to produce those materials? Is it around the actual service that I provide? Is growth, for me, about selling more product and making more money, or is it around having an impact on people's lives or having an ecological impact?

Matt Moseley:

I think that can be applied anywhere, can't it? Even in a student's creative practice, they can think about what they want to change and how to do that.

Nina Stevenson:

I think that's a really exciting, inspiring, starting point, isn't it, for your creative practice?

Matt Moseley:

Well, I just think that's wonderful for anyone listening to kind of try and take that on board and to think about if what they're doing at this moment in time is answering that value system, or if they're actually really aware of what their value system is and whether they maybe would benefit from taking some time to reflect on that. So I think that really kind of naturally takes us into the next section of the podcast, which is the Inspire section.

Speaker 2:

Inspire.

Speaker 3:

Inspire.

Speaker 4:

Inspire.

Matt Moseley:

I wondered if I might just ask you for a couple of definitions around a couple of terms, which obviously get talked about quite a lot, but not everybody listening might really understand what they mean or what they mean in the context of this conversation. So climate justice is one of those terms which we hear a lot these days. What does that mean?

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah. And it's complicated, and you ask 10 different people a definition of climate justice, and they'll all come up with something different. And I think that complexity is often why it makes it feel very difficult to get your head around. But for me, climate justice is around the intersection of lots of different agendas. So we've got the climate crisis, the fact that our world is unacceptable levels of global warming and extreme ecological devastation and the displacement of huge quantities of people. So sitting with that reality, that our systems that humans have created, our economic models, are not sustaining us, are not going to sustain the planet for our children and our grandchildren; that for me, is obviously a hugely alarming feeling that you're constantly battling with when you're working in this area. And sure, many people who are not working in this area are also battling with them.

Matt Moseley:

Yeah, yeah. I guess.

Nina Stevenson:

But yeah, it's the intersection. So the climate injustice, so the fact that we are disconnected from nature in our planet and we are not nourishing it, we're not regenerating it, we are taking from it. We have a system that is extractive and-

Matt Moseley:

So we're ignoring our responsibility to it?

Nina Stevenson:

We've set ourselves, as human beings, apart from nature. We are not a part of nature. We have set ourselves as different, as separate, that nature is like a set of resources that we can draw on to make our lives wonderful, but that's short-lived. So it's going to all fall down around us very, very shortly and it already is. But then the impacts as well on people and on societies, so the societal injustices that many, many people experience every day is hugely interconnected with that. So those that experience climate crisis first are those that are the most vulnerable in the world are already feeling the impacts of the earth's changes. So we hold responsibility in the global north for those that are going to experience that but there's this individualism, this separatism from that.

Nina Stevenson:

We're not working as a global community to take responsibility for that. And there's so much work that I still need to do about understanding the history of justice movements and how important they are. And many people have been fighting and putting their lives on the line for human rights, for ecological rights, and all of that history needs to be respected. And it's my job to be constantly thinking about those different power plays and those different inequalities and how can we acknowledge them, but then also begin to dismantle them at the same time? So climate justice for me is around an intersection of all of those issues.

Matt Moseley:

And so within that, obviously, looking specifically today at the fashion system and the fashion industry, what does sustainable fashion mean? Does it mean a world without a fashion industry or does it mean a fashion industry that works in a particular way? And then within that, obviously, we hear a lot about fast and slow fashion, and I just wondered what those different terms mean?

Nina Stevenson:

I think it's important to acknowledge the fact that the global fashion system that we see most evidently is one that's very samey. It's homogenised. There's no diversity in there. And what we need to be able to do is create an environment where we've got multiple responses to what fashion looks like. There's no one version of sustainable fashion. Sustainability is like an ongoing conversation where we're constantly trying to create interactions with fashion that are impacting positively, so not just... We talked earlier about making efficiencies and making things less bad. It's not going to be good enough.

Nina Stevenson:

We've got to flip it, so we've got to be thinking about fashion which is actually benefiting nature and benefiting societies. We do this exercise where we do a wardrobe analysis and get a student to look at their wardrobe and to identify the pieces within that wardrobe that have the most value; not the most economic value, financial value, but the most value to them as items. And the things that are pulled out are the things that have the stories, that have the memories, that maybe they made, or they mended, or maybe it was passed from a family member.

Matt Moseley:

There's a sentimentality and a personal investment in those and some of that sentimental value that's placed into that, and some of those stories which they attach to those objects. I just wondered, is there anything that you own that you've got a particular sentimental attachment to and a story connected with it?

Nina Stevenson:

Well, I've got so many things that I'm sentimental about. I'm really, really terrible and I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to clothes. And I don't part with those sentimental items easily. I've got a wardrobe full of dresses that were my mother's from like the 1980s that she used to go and prance around corporate events in. So I have those. Whenever I need a little black dress, I've got them there. But one of the items that I think I really treasure is a jumper. It's a wool jumper that was knitted by my grandmother in about 1970- something. And it's a brown knitted jumper with a Guinness logo on the front, which my mom saw in a magazine, and she said "I want that jumper."

Nina Stevenson:

And it was the 1970s, so it wasn't a case of go online,, find the jumper or a version of the jumper, and order it and get it next-day delivery. No, she went to her mother and said, "I want that jumper. Can you make one for me?" My grandmother was the best knitter. She was a demon knitter. She did this kind of clickety-clackety thing with her fingers and she was super fast and she always used to take... I'm a very slow, bad knitter, and I kind of hope at some point in my future I might actually become a decent knitter, but not yet. And she always used to kind of tell me off for the way I held my needles and things like that. But now I've got this jumper, which actually it disappeared for a few years and it turned out my sister had it, but never wore it.

Nina Stevenson:

And my sister was going to get rid of it. And so I took it off her, I said, "No, that jumper is coming back to me." And now I wear this jumper a lot and it's very warm and it's in excellent condition despite the fact that it must be getting on for 50 years old. But the fact that it was, it's a connection to my mother as a teenager, or a young woman, and it's a connection to my grandmother because she made it with her hands. Yeah, it means a lot to me and I hope that I can wear it for many years to come.

Matt Moseley:

It sounds fantastic and a truly treasured possession. So how can a teacher in an FE college, working maybe with 16 to 18 year olds, or people who are kind of moved through their education system, now thinking about career direction, they're thinking about potentially the fashion industry, as in its broadest term, as a destination for them, how can a teacher start to prepare a student to think about some of these issues that we're talking about today in terms of sustainability, but also to progress into the fashion industry and to think about one day gaining employment in that area?

Nina Stevenson:

Yeah. Again, big question.

Matt Moseley:

Sorry. That's quite a broad one.

Nina Stevenson:

No, it's okay. Yeah, I'm bit of a broken record here, but coming back to values, as a teacher, what's important to you. Be honest around what you care about and share that and have those open conversations with students, acknowledge the difficult things that we are facing, and then really, I think, try to paint a picture that is of interconnection, that we can't look at these things in isolation, that... Yeah, I don't know what the answer is.

Matt Moseley:

Yeah, yeah. Does it feel like it's about showing students the damage, and is it about teaching students to have some ownership over that, to take some responsibility in that and to therefore...

Nina Stevenson:

I think that's unfair to give 16 to 18 year olds the responsibility for all the mistakes that our generations have made, or you don't want them to feel like it's their job to solve it. In many ways, that's basically the bed that we've made for our children is that they're going to have to try and unpick and undo all the problems of us and the generations that came before us. I think that it's around remaining optimistic, remaining creative, approaching problems with a creative mindset, starting with what excites you, not with the problem. So if you're working within a fashion space and you're teaching that age group, yes, they can go and find loads of information about the problems with the fashion industry, but why don't you start with the fundamental joy of fashion and what connects us as human beings and how fashion is important?

Nina Stevenson:

Because then you can start to unpick and look critically at all the ways in which fashion is currently not sustaining us. And then yeah, you can kind of, I think, also get out of the classroom. I think it's really important that we have a connection with nature, that we do things in nature. Lots of my colleagues who are teaching regularly take their students out of the classroom, might do some... There's a lot of work around deep ecology and observing and being within nature. And that's, particularly if you're working in an urban environment, how can you connect with nature if you haven't got a lot of it around you, is there? It's tuning, I think, students, into being observers, being reflective and being experimental.

Matt Moseley:

I think that's great advice. And it certainly, in my experience, that would entail teaching fashion in a different way than maybe has been traditionally taught, introducing some different sort of disruptive techniques to open up that mindset. So you've got students, obviously, who've chosen fashion as their area, they've maybe done their FE course or A-Levels, or they've now been through a degree program and they are looking to move into industry. Are there any really key tips or hints that you could offer a student about how to start seeking work within the fashion industry?

Nina Stevenson:

I think it starts much earlier than that. Most of the students that I have any contact with are working jobs on the weekends, and they're part-time. In their free time they're doing placements, doing their studies, they are working the holidays. So I think that it starts earlier than that. I think it's around identifying, yeah, which part of the industry do you want to be working in? Is the industry as it currently exists, do you feel that there's a place for you within that, that sits with your values? It might be not in fashion.

Nina Stevenson:

I think what's really interesting, coming out, I think future generations are going to be much more adaptable and they're going to have skills that can hopefully enable a cross-pollination across different disciplines and different industries. So you've got fashion working with science, working with governance, working with tech. We don't want to have this siloing. I think it's around having creativity in all of these different areas is really important. I think we spent a lot of time breaking down fashion into different roles and building courses to create particular vocations within the fashion system, but I think a fluidity within fashion is really important as well.

Nina Stevenson:

You don't really see students that are necessarily limiting themselves to one kind of creative art form so they might be multidisciplinary and working across a number, and actually collaborating. And it's not as much individualistic approach; the opportunity to collaborate and learn from others and see what emerges, I think, is really important as well.

Matt Moseley:

Great. It feels like a good moment to segue way into the final part of our podcast recording today, which is our Create section.

Speaker 2:

Create.

Speaker 3:

Create.

Speaker 4:

Create.

Matt Moseley:

We've asked each of our inspirational guests to set a provocation or a question or a challenge or just offer a thought. I just wondered if anything had come to mind for you that you'd like to pose to our students.

Nina Stevenson:

So we've got these online courses that we've got on FutureLearn, and we've got two that are online currently. So there's one, it's called Fashion Values: Nature, one which has just gone live, which is called Fashion Values: Economy, and then we've got another one, which we're in the throes of finishing at the moment, called Fashion Values: Society. And then we've got another one which is going to look at cultures. So within these four courses, we've got four different lenses on fashion, because there are so many different interconnected issues when you think about fashion and sustainability. So we've got these four different perspectives on fashion.

Nina Stevenson:

And within each of those courses, we set a design thinking challenge for the learners to be able to develop some core skills around trying to deal with this overwhelming scenario we find ourselves in. And we've written a provocation for each of these courses. So interestingly, for the Fashion Values: Nature course, our provocation is how will fashion value nature? So as soon as you kind of think about changing the value system of fashion, and thinking, well, if Mother Earth was here, sat around the table, what would she have to say about your fashion design or your fashion product or your new business model that you've come up with?

Nina Stevenson:

How is it benefiting nature? Are you just taking from nature? Are you regenerating nature in any way? And we kind of look at a mitigation hierarchy. So how can you look at evaluating your idea and thinking about is it reducing harm on nature? Is it neutral? Or is it actually positively contributing to healthy and thriving ecosystems?

Matt Moseley:

The idea of really personifying Mother Nature as an individual holding you accountable and saying, "This is what I'm doing for you. What are you going to do for me?" is a really powerful... Well, for me, that was a really incredibly powerful way of thinking about it, and a great provocation, so thank you very much for that. You mentioned some toolkits for teaching and some resources that you've been working on. Are they available for teachers and students to access, and how would they go about finding those?

Nina Stevenson:

Absolutely. Yeah, we've been working over three years with some other universities in Europe who are all fashion practitioners and researchers, and we've developed a website. It's called FashionSEEDS. Google FashionSEEDS, it should come up. And that's a website designed specifically for fashion educators. It would work at FE level, HE level, all different levels. And on that website, we have got a range of tools. So it might be that you need a quick fix: I need to design a workshop, I want to do something on environmental impact of cotton or something like that. And we've got examples of resources and reading lists and workshops that you might want to tap into and use in your teaching.

Nina Stevenson:

But it also has got tools where if you're in the lucky position of maybe designing a course from scratch or being able to make some really big fundamental changes to an aspect of your teaching or you want to just kind of slowly chip away and reflect on your own role as a tutor, then we've got some big, meaty reflective tools and concepts in there as well. So it's a bit of a rich resource of tools and resources and reference points for fashion educators.

Matt Moseley:

It's clear that you are deeply invested in this. We really see this as an opportunity for people to hopefully take things directly from what you've been saying and apply that to their own life, and I think you've given so many great starting points for that.

Nina Stevenson:

Oh, I hope so. Yeah. I find podcasts a really important way of listening and processing things and I've learned a lot from listening to other people speak. So I hope it's been useful.

Matt Moseley:

It's been incredibly useful. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's Teach Inspire Create podcast with Nina Stevenson. I hope you've been able to take some valuable information from this episode and apply it in one way or another to your creative practice. Join us next week. We'll be talking to musician and producer Jesse Quin from the band Keane. We'll be discussing how collaboration and community are key in the music industry and how education today supports but also sometimes fails young artists. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to, please do share your responses and feedback on social media, using the hashtag #ticpodcast. See you next time. Bye.