Fashion Design for Sustainability. A transformative challenge across the European fashion education system.

Abstract

Today, we are witnessing the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had, and is still having, on social, economic and cultural life worldwide. In particular, the educational dimension has seen the regular operating of schools altered, with an indeterminate closure of educational institutions, as well as the impossibility to perform face-to-face lectures, and their transposition to digital platforms (Sà et Serpa, 2020). These difficult conditions can be a moment of opportunity to accelerate a process of digital transformation that was beginning to shift in higher education institutions (HEIs).  HEIs are using digital transformation strategies to refine how they work, to digitalize their existing operations while designing new digital models, to create entirely new digital models or to fully digitize their current ones (Rodrigues 2017). In the European fashion education system this can result in addressing the transformative challenges that are nurturing the discussion on the future of HEIs (Moja, 2008; Sterling, 2011; Fletcher and Williams, 2013). Therefore, digital innovation becomes the means by which implementing a positive transformation of the sector on key issues that will permeate our daily lives and that can no longer be postponed. Among the pivotal topics there is sustainability which today is slowly trying to establish itself (Wolff, 2020).   Trough the analysis of best practices, this paper will decode current behaviors in Fashion Design for Sustainability (FDfS) throughout the European fashion education system.