Known for her expertise in developing and promoting sustainable-minded practices in clothing manufacturing, Fashion Design assistant professor Lynda Grose was recently cited in the January issue of Mother Jones magazine ("Is Fake Leather Really More Eco-Friendly?").

The popular magazine turned to Grose because of her assertions that businesses within the fashion industry can be designed to create less impact by changing their focus.

Sustainability Starts at the Root

Grose, a designer and coauthor of Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (forthcoming from Laurence King Publishing Co., United Kingdom with Dr. Kate Fletcher), enlightens her CCA Fashion Design students each year to the necessity of designing for sustainably. Eco-consciousness begins long before the clothing takes shape in understanding basic principles of ecology, the traditional role of fashion designers, and training students to consider not only each step in the design process when building collections, but also the new roles that designers can take on.

A Matter of Business

Having an eco-friendly perspective as a designer makes for a great story; however, it also makes for new future business strategies. In Mother Jones, Grose notes an increase in the number of fashion companies developing renewal programs. She named Patagonia as a strategic leader in this practice. She also cited Timberland's Design for Disassembly program as another successful "closed-loop" program. (Closed loops are significant deviation from the traditional fashion supply chain, which is based on a linear system of making selling and disposing garments.)

Closed loops require different business infrastructure, new supplier relationships, and communicating to the customer about new ways to dispose of their clothes. Designers can help the companies they work for make these shifts.

Grose’s students learn to recognize where and how fashion design businesses are trending, which allows them to develop clothing concepts and modes of working that will fit into future fashion industry business models.

Form follows function, one might say. Fashion can form the future.

About Lynda Grose

Identified in 2008 by London's Financial Times as one of the "green power brokers," Grose cofounded Esprit’s ecollection line, which was the first ecologically responsible clothing line developed by a major corporation and set pioneering standards for the textile industry. She also developed the groundbreaking curricula for CCA's "Fashion Design: Sustainability," in which students learn about the ecological crisis, including the philosophies and methodologies of some eco-design pioneers.

Related
Visit Lynda Grose's blog
Lynda Grose: Two decades of Eco-Fashion
Learn more about CCA's Fashion Design Program, including how to apply.