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Fashion Monster

Ongoing since circa 2002

An educational course at Kingston University for BA Fashion students to immerse them in sustainability and to get them to consider utilising sustainable textiles creatively as they move forward in their own fashion careers.

Students are challenged to create their own personal Fashion Monster, using second life textiles they have to collect, and think creatively out of the box by deconstructing garments and looking deeper into their colour, form and composition as well as their uses and possibilities. Each student’s ‘masked up’ Fashion Monster is an effigy representation of the childhood monster under the bed, something that every young mind fears and irrationally can’t cope with. With this in mind I actively want to debunk any negativity that the textile landfill is to be feared, but instead is a positive battery of resource and creative endeavour.

Eleanor Renfrew, as Head of Fashion at Kingston Art School, championed me and helped develop this pioneering sustainable fashion course, which I have since gone on to run in various forms at fashion schools across the UK and all over the world including Manchester, Glasgow, Brighton, Middlesex, Ravensbourne, Portsmouth, CSM Central St Martin’s London, NYU New York University London, ALBA in Beirut Lebanon and an outreach project in Amsterdam.

I wanted to create a Sustainable Design Directive for students to follow in a concise way.

Students first challenge is to collect all their monster’s textiles from sustainable sources, a creative journey that takes them into second hand shops, skips, bins, their own wardrobe, asking family for donations etc. Some students even leaflet their local community for donations.

The final challenge is build the monster from the mask down. The mask being an important part of taking control of their fears and less about fashion design ‘beauty myth’ and more about fashion investigation ‘forensics’.