Energizing Futures Ultimate STEM Challenge is a high school-based educational initiative intended to build the science capital of over 1.2 million young people and over 12,000 teachers each year. The competition is designed to bring STEM knowledge and skills front and center by highlighing real-life issues and empowering students to think outside of the box to come up with exciting ideas and innovations for the future. The 2023 challenge focused on sustainable fashion to engage learnings with science, sustainability and the cirucluar economy, for which I supplied case studies and interviews to form the basis of the curriculum.

Gap Inc’s Design with Audacity programme is a company-wide initiative intended to support the development of creative talent in partnership with experts from across the fashion industry. Industry leaders were invited to engage with creative teams across all brands, in support of the development of individual, diverse and collective power and future innovation. As part of that series, I was invited to develop two sessions to address diversity, inclusion, and representation as well as cultural appropriation, challenging design leads to think differently about inspiring, engaging and creating change.

The Ethical Fashion Initiative is a flagship programme of the United Nations International Trade Centre. The Designer Accelerator supports African design talent that require additional support to accelerate business in the global marketplace. The programme has a business development approach that prepares young African fashion brands to be investment-ready. The EFI helps to bring African fashion design to the world stage through participation in Vogue Fashion Night Out, Pitti Uomo, and Altaroma. I was asked to develop a master class for Accelerator participants.

I wrote and lead a new Master’s programme for Kingston University London entitled Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices. The programme sets out to affect systemic change in the fashion industry by offering alternatives to the mainstream fashion system. It focuses on developing a deep understanding of the multi-dimensionality of sustainability as it relates to the fashion industry. Sustainable solutions are embedded across all coursework, using fashion as a medium to affect social change, and resulting in innovative and ethical solutions, transformational systems, and organisations. The programme offers participants the opportunity to develop solutions and plot a new future for themselves and the fashion industry, thereby displacing a dysfunctional system and replacing it with practical and inspirational alternatives.

Craft and Sustainability is a course module written for Politecnico di Milano masters in fashion design. The module is focused on considered and ethical collaboration with elements of intangible cultural heritage. Students design a collection based on an endangered traditional craft and utilise, or interpret it, in collection development in an ethical and considered way. Students must understand the embedded codes in their chosen craft to ensure they are being used respectfully and appropriately. The design elements must do more than inspire the collection but be part of a strategy to sustain the traditional, technique and the practitioners through a unique and unexpected design application and strategy. Thereby undertaking research, concept development, collection planning, and strategy.

Sustainable Fashion is a short non-credit online course developed for the London College of Fashion short courses programming. The course was launched prior to the pandemic and UK-wide lockdowns which spurred exponential growth in online academic programming resulting in multiple modules running simultaneously throughout the year. The course reviews the primary impacts of the mainstream fashion system on people and planet, exploring approaches for the incorporation of sustainable design concepts, conscious material choices, zero waste design, and strategies for cyclability for fashion product and business development. The course provides an overview of sustainable fashion design practices, with examples of designers incorporating a variety of strategies in their own practice.

FIT’s Design for Social Impact executive studies programme introduces participants to design as a problem-solving tool. It addresses the systemic nature of the fashion industry through the reevaluation of markers of success and the development and identification of a personal values hierarchy. Through lectures, discussions, exercises, and creative challenges, the programme enables participants to create products and systems that empower and give back to society. The module on design strategies for sustainable and ethical design was written specifically for this synchronous and collaborative experiential program.

FIT’s MFA in Fashion Design is a creative laboratory where technology, talent, and inspiration intersect in one of the world’s premier fashion capitals. The module - The Fashion Activist plays an important role in the unique four-semester programme, which gives students the opportunity to challenge the accepted and traditional methodologies within the fashion system. This custom-written course requires students to question every step of the design development process from inspiration to sample-making and production to sales, marketing, promotion and end-of-life considerations.

The Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI) is a private non-profit university, designed to address the growing need for talented designers and innovators in the UAE and beyond. The University offers the first integrated Bachelor of Design in the region. As Founding Dean of DIDI, I ushered the programme through licensing and full accreditation with the Ministry of Higher Education. I was responsible for the development of all academic policies, curricular development and coordination with curricular development partners MIT and Parsons the New School.