MA Fashion Futures places sustainability at the heart of fashion practice to help shape the next generation of sustainable brands and fashion pioneers.

Course overview

MA Fashion Futures places sustainability at the heart of fashion practice to help shape the next generation of fashion practitioners who prioritise environmental, social, economic and cultural criteria. Students are encouraged to critique the nature and purpose of design in a rapidly changing world, imagining and envisioning alternative ways in which fashion will be created and experienced in the future, whilst grounding their research in an understanding of the immense challenges that face the industry and wider society today.

In this ground-breaking course, you are encouraged to explore and develop experimental fashion practice and theoretical perspectives in parallel in order to conceptualise a transformed fashion system, one that values nature first and creates economic prosperity in service to this goal. Using your own knowledge, practice and experience as a starting point, you will identify new territories for fashion and work in new spaces with novel technologies, to communicate ideas in relation to design for sustainability to varied audiences.

Through a combination of taught content and independent study, you will examine a diverse range of methodologies and forms of communication, including film, digital platforms, garment and artefact prototyping, publishing, events and performance. Key to MA Fashion Futures is critical fashion practice and reflexive thinking to test, reframe and make responses to existing paradigms. This will enable you to develop a very personal response to, and a critique of, the current paradigm and the role and activities of fashion in a changing world.

Through a systems thinking approach, the course has been developed to connect fashion’s social, cultural, environmental and economic aspects, examining perspectives from local to global scales and embracing fashion practice from both traditional and technological spheres. MA Fashion Futures offers a space to experiment with new ideas and physical/digital prototyping to challenge existing narratives as well as being a place to put principles into action in a manner that aligns with each student’s individual strengths, interests and future aspirations.

Students are encouraged to read widely, attend internal and external lectures, events and symposia, engage with UAL research hubs and researchers, and collaborate both across other postgraduate courses and across the wider University of the Arts community.

Aligned to the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, the course involves research and knowledge exchange led teaching, with contribution from a range of the Centre’s members. Further specialist technical teaching and support is provided by the Digital Learning Lab.

Climate, Social and Racial Justice

The course is committed to embedding UAL’s Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice.