This year’s Industry Partner Awards acknowledge the exciting collaborations between undergraduate students and industry. These projects form an important unit of study for LCF’s undergraduate students, giving them invaluable experience in pitching, negotiation and collaboration.
2015 projects included retailer Liberty commissioning BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Development students to come up with ideas to commemorate and celebrate the Regent Street retailer’s ties with Japan and the Orient.
Pittards challenged BA (Hons) Cordwainers Fashion Bags & Accessories: Product Design and Innovation students to produce bags from their Ethiopian fine gloving-weight sheep and goat skins. The suede and leather manufacturers took five winning designs to international trade fairs to showcase their work and to demonstrate new in which this material, not conventionally used for bag construction, could be applied.
BA (Hons) Fashion Visual Merchandising & Branding students were asked by Warehouse to come up with a concept for their central London store. Winning student Emma Fearne took over their Argyll Street shop window, and was involved from the early planning stages to overnight execution of the project.
Luxury shoe and accessory brand Bally were highly commended for their work with BA (Hons) Fashion Business and BA Marketing and Promotion students.
LCFxH&M Brighton – New Wave Fashion, featuring LCF students Dimas Bian, Jessica Chung, Emily Goh, Sun Young Kim, Diane Melnik
But the winning project of the Industry Partner Awards 2015 Undergraduate Project Collaboration Award was H&M, who brought LCF BA (Hons) Creative Direction for Fashion students in to create seven window display concepts for their major UK stores, promoting the sustainable fashion campaign #FashionCyclingWeek. Each window had to relate to an environmental issue and students worked alongside our own Centre for Sustainable Fashion. For H&M’s Oxford Circus store, located in an area of London known for it’s pollution levels, LCF students were asked to consider air quality and create something with the message that we shouldn’t be sending our clothes to landfill. The Breathing Window was formed from a wall of aquamarine pillowy clothes.
In Brighton, LCF students created a denim wave, highlighting the global water shortage and educating people on how much water it takes to create new fibres for a pair of jeans.
On this collaborative project Catarina Midby, Sustainability Manager for H&M UK and Ireland said:
“It has been such a rewarding process to work with the extremely capable and creative LCF students on these installations, which proves that not only can waste be used as a resource for fashion but also for art.”
Collaboration and sustainability is at the heart of what LCF do and it was a great opportunity for LCF students to work with a global retailer to bring about change.