Professor Kate Fletcher

Profile image of Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion

Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion

London College of Fashion

k.t.fletcher@fashion.arts.ac.uk

Biography

Kate Fletcher’s work is both rooted in nature’s principles and engaged with the cultural and creative forces of fashion and design. Over the last two decades, her original thinking and progressive outlook has infused the field of fashion, textiles and sustainability with design thinking, and come to define it. 

Kate has over 50 scholarly and popular publications in the field. She is author of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (2008), with a fully revised Second Edition with new content released in 2014. Readers call it “inspiring,” “the foundation for a radical new perspective” and “a bible” and it is in active use in commercial design studios and is the principal text in academic seminar rooms around the world. She is co-editor of one of the prestige Routledge International Handbook series on Sustainability and Fashion (2015), co-author of Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (2012) and most recently author of the Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion (2016), exploring fashion opportunities beyond consumerism.

With a PhD from Chelsea College of Art and Design (1999), Kate is Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion where she has a broad remit spanning enterprise, education and research. Her strategic leadership permeates the Centre’s activities, including its role as co-secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion at the House of Lords.

Research interests

Sustainability, nature, design, localism, practices of use and consumption in fashion. ‘Post-growth’ fashion, slow fashion, the craft of use, design and fashion ecologies.

Research statement

My work spans sustainability, design and fashion. My current research project is Fashion Ecologies exploring localism in fashion as a vehicle for sustainability change.

Other current work includes nature writing about kinship between garments people and place.

Students

Current students and thesis titles

Paul Yuille, Fast-fashion resource responsibility: how might raising the awareness of a UK fast-fashion consumer group through enhancing their understanding of the materiality of the sector, guide them to have more responsible resource use?

Emily Towers, The practice of mending: unravelling its effect on the wearer’s relationship to clothing.   

Completed students and thesis titles

Emma Rigby, Fashion Design and Laundry Practices: Practice-Orientated Approaches to Design for Sustainability.

Mathilda Tham, The Lucky People Forecast, Goldsmiths University of London. 

Amy Twigger Holroyd, Folk Fashion: Amateur Re-Knitting as a Strategy for Sustainability, Birmingham City University.

Flavia Amadeu, Reflecting on capabilities and interactions between designers and local producers through the materiality of the rubber from the Amazon rainforest.

Selected research outputs

Follow this link to go to more information aboutView all outputs

Other resources