Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices MA
Why choose this course?
Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices sets out to challenge current thinking in fashion by embedding holistic sustainable design and operational solutions throughout.
The coursework represents a values-led approach to teaching and learning that incorporates participatory action and requires critical thinking and problem solving. The programme is designed to create systemic change, resulting in innovative and ethical solutions as well as transformational systems and organisations.
Projects are designed to develop and deepen your understanding of the multi-dimensionality of sustainability as it relates to fashion. The programme gives 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. This is fashion not designed to produce more 'stuff' but intended to develop systems and practices that intervene and replace the mainstream fashion system.
The course capitalises on the studio ethos of learning by doing, producing tangible outcomes and solutions to industry problems through creative problem solving that crosses disciplines and bodies of knowledge for inspired responses. It challenges the accepted and traditional methodologies within the fashion system, to cause students to question every step of the process from inspiration through sample making and production to sales and marketing and end of life considerations.
Using design thinking, the course supports students in the analysis of industry impacts, and the testing of ideas to bring lean and agile processes together in the development of solution creation. Project work adheres to the four pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, social, and cultural.
Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices is a registered member of the United Nations' Education and Academia Stakeholder Group (EASG).
| Mode | Duration | Attendance | Start date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full time | 1 year | 2 or 3 days a week | September 2025 |
| Part time | 2 years | 2 or 3 days a week | September 2025 |
| Main Location | Kingston Business School and Kingston School of Art, Knights Park |
Reasons to choose Kingston University
- Kingston University is consistently rated among the best institutions in the UK for fashion and related disciplines.
- Kingston School of Art includes world leaders on the topic of sustainable fashion, who bring a depth and breadth of understanding to the topic.
- The programme's approach to pedagogy challenges the current system of fashion, plotting an alternative and more sustainable future for fashion businesses and related activities, based on critical thinking and creative problem solving.
What you will study
Students will study the human and environmental impacts of the mainstream fashion system throughout the entirety of the value chain. The programme offers sustainable methodologies for the development of fashion businesses, services and practices. It provides students with the knowledge and skills required to effect positive change through creative problem solving, and equips them with the management, business and creative decision-making skills to develop their own career path.
This is an indicative list of modules and is not intended as a definitive list.
Modules
Core modules for Teaching Block 1
The System of Fashion 1: Fashions impact
30 credits
This module addresses the diversity of impacts and challenges within the fashion system, giving students an in-depth understanding of the problems that perpetuate the unsustainability of the fashion industry from an ethical as well an environmental perspective. It connects the dots between appropriation, marginalisation, practice, and process by giving voice to alternative systems, people, and places. Lectures, presentations, and site visits will provide insight into the challenges the fashion system engenders, acting as a baseline for the exploration and identification of individual values to inform future work.
Sustainable and Ethical Practices
30 credits
This is a live project with direct interaction with an external stakeholder, intended to have a tangible outcome and based on human-centric design solutions for an under-represented group. Adaptive and universal design is used to tackle societal bias and stereotyping by presenting and sharing other stories, experiences, and histories. This is socially-centred design, with the objective of encouraging critical discourse about the culture of fashion inclusion and exclusion, diversity, and representation.
Core modules for Teaching Block 2
Design for Social Impact
30 credits
This module focuses on universal design in a broad context, with students working with either a local or global community in the development a collaborative response to a set of objectives and problems. This is an opportunity to revaluate the hierarchies embedded within the fashion system in the development of projects, skills, strategies, and trainings to support employability and integration into the greater community or industry. This is not a project ‘for' them, but ‘with' them, intended to develop products and skills and provide a focus for the community outside their experience and history, offering new possible futures.
The System of Fashion 2: Design, Business and Operational Responses
30 credits
This module reviews the various business types and operational strategies that act as an alternative to business-as-usual profit only businesses. Content evaluates sustainable businesses that positively impact people, planet, or both, with a particular focus on the role that technology plays in the sustainability of business, product and operations. Lectures, workshops, and site visits provide insight into the breadth of creative responses to the fashion industry's challenges, by sharing concrete examples of designers, brands, agencies, and technologies disrupting the system effectively.
Core modules for Teaching Block 3
Capstone Project
60 credits
The capstone project offers students the opportunity to challenge the status quo through their personal practice, impacting social, cultural, environmental, and ethical norms across a myriad of expressions and outputs, by encouraging them to push boundaries with radical outputs with transformational potential. Outcomes must be implementable and can include business or brand development, products, services, systems, strategies, websites, apps, communication vehicles, magazines, websites, film, e-zines and exhibitions without restriction, as long as they affect positive change in some aspect of the fashion industry.
Entry requirements
Teaching and assessment
Who teaches this course?
This course is taught by leading academics and practitioners in sustainable and ethical fashion, business and technology.
This course is delivered by Kingston School of Art, which has its roots in the studio-based approach of Britain's art school system (the original School of Art was founded in the 1890s).
Learning takes place in our specialist studios and classrooms.
Our students are encouraged to engage with the diverse businesses that make London one of the most important centres for the creative industries. Our industry connections mean we provide unique opportunities through a diverse range of visiting lecturers and industry specialists.
Fees for this course
Additional costs
Depending on the programme of study, there may be extra costs that are not covered by tuition fees which students will need to consider when planning their studies. Tuition fees cover the cost of your teaching, assessment and operating University facilities such as the library, access to shared IT equipment and other support services. Accommodation and living costs are not included in our fees.
Where a course has additional expenses, we make every effort to highlight them. These may include optional field trips, materials (e.g. art, design, engineering), security checks such as DBS, uniforms, specialist clothing or professional memberships.
Facilities
You can use our studio spaces, workshops and facilities to experiment and explore new ways to push the boundaries of project work as well as to develop new skills across disciplines.
Throughout the course, you'll be encouraged to explore and develop expertise across a variety of approaches. The Fashion archive houses an eclectic collection of historical and contemporary garments that you can use for reference and inspiration.
At the heart of Knights Park campus are new, professional-standard workshop facilities, which include:
- 3D workshop, with ceramics, concrete, resin-casting, plastics, metalwork, woodwork and a bronze-casting foundry, as well as a Big Build space for Architecture, set design and large scale model making
- Animation and post production studios
- Digital Media workshop
- Fashion (knitting and sewing workshops), with digital and analogue facilities, plus a working dress archive which includes pieces from 1750 to the present day
- HackSpace (for collaborative, creative, solutions-focussed projects)
- Letterpress and printmaking workshop, with digital and analogue facilities, to experiment creatively
- Moving Image workshop, with studios, editing suite, and industry-standard equipment
- Photography workshop, including studios, colour, and black and white darkrooms, processing facilities
All our facilities are open access, meaning you can use them whenever you want irrespective of what degree you are studying.
The University also has its own on-site galleries, including:
- Dorich House – the former studio home of the sculptor Dora Gordine and her husband the Hon. Richard Hare, a scholar of Russian art and literature. Now Grade II listed, the building was completed in 1936, to Gordine's design, and is an exceptional example of a modern studio house created by and for a female artist.
- Stanley Picker Gallery – one of the leading examples of a university gallery in the UK. Its public activities are dedicated to the research, commissioning and presentation of innovative new practice across the fields of art, design and architecture for general, academic and specialist audiences.
After you graduate
The Sustainable Fashion Business and Practices curriculum helps to prepare students for a multitude of sustainably focused undertakings and employment opportunities. These range from brand and product development, sustainable supply chain management, systems and services management, sourcing and communications, not limited to medium, and expressed both physically and digitally, through to websites, blogs, apps, magazines, e-zines, exhibitions, installations and more. This course will address the gap between intent and the in-depth knowledge required for diverse application.
The curriculum prepares students for a rapidly changing industry, where the old models of career development no longer apply, impacted as they have been by the fourth industrial revolution, climate change, the global pandemic and a myriad of social and cultural movements that have shifted our collective value systems. Students may choose to set up their own businesses or freelance across the creative and production.
Students are trained to develop their own work profiles as independent practitioners and advisors across markets, with sustainability an increasing focus for all businesses, allowing students the flexibility to enter into non-fashion specific roles.
We encourage research practice during the MA programme, with the potential to develop postgraduate practice at MPhil and PhD level.
Links with business and industry
This course incorporates live briefs with sector partners in pursuit of social and environmental sustainability, including Build a Nest New York – a nonprofit in support of global artisanship; the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market – the single largest gathering of master crafts people anywhere in the world; the Kingston Women's Hub – a local safe haven that supports women survivors of domestic and sexual violence build community; and the Kingston University Disabled Students Society.
Industry speakers and presenters encompass representatives from for-profit brands, social enterprises, not for profits and governmental and non-governmental agencies, including the United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative, Fashion Revolution, Labour Behind the Label and ReDress to mention just a few.
Our industry links have resulted in a number of student opportunities and recognition including finalists in international contests and experiences including the Craft of Leather – an invitation only series of workshops in Tuscany in collaboration with the Vegetable Tanned Leather Consortium; the Bilbao International Art and Fashion Contes; work study with the Saheli Women, internships with Safia Minney and By Walid, and student employment with the North American Linen Association, Marks and Spencers, Benetton, Two Hundred Million Artisans, the Polish Cultural Institute, and Deloitte's Environmental Social Governance. Students have developed their own businesses at home and abroad, and several have continued their education into PhD studies.
What our students say
Research areas
- Sustainability (economic, environmental, social and cultural) including CSR.
- Textile and production innovation.
- Fashion systems including supply and value chain.
- Innovation and technology in fashion services.
Course changes and regulations
The information on this page reflects the currently intended course structure and module details. To improve your student experience and the quality of your degree, we may review and change the material information of this course. Course changes explained.
Programme Specifications for the course are published ahead of each academic year.
Regulations governing this course can be found on our website.
