Professor Dilys Williams

Biography

Professor Dilys Williams FRSA is founder and Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a University of the Arts London Research Centre, based at London College of Fashion, which she established in 2008.

Guiding the centre’s exploration of fashion and sustainability, her work contributes to the study of fashion as a life well lived within ecological boundaries and practices of human equity. Through design practice, this is applied to new forms of education, business, public and political dialogue.

Dilys’ work draws on her longstanding research, teaching and industry experience as a lead womenswear designer with international collections for Katharine Hamnett, Liberty and Whistles, AHRC, ERDF, ESRC and Erasmus funded projects in Fashion Design for Sustainability and knowledge exchange work with small to large businesses. Having established and led MA Fashion and the Environment, now MA Fashion Futures, led by Julia Crew, her teaching spans from BA to PhD supervision.

As Special Advisor to the House of Lords All Party Parliamentary Group on Fashion, Sustainability and Ethics, she brings a range of climate and social change considerations to the attention of key political figures, creating space for a range of voices for change to be heard.

Her place on the Evening Standard’s London’s Progress 1000 list in 2015, 2016 and 2017 evidences the public and academic influence of her work. Dilys holds advisory roles to business and academic institutions and regularly contributes to media publications including the Guardian, ShowSTUDIO and Salt magazine. In 2020, she was named Drapers’ Sustainable Fashion Champion.

Trained at Manchester Metropolitan University and holding a UAL professorship, Dilys publishes widely on fashion and sustainability in academic journals and published books.

Current research projects include leadership of a cross EU project, FashionSEEDS, funded by Erasmus, to develop a platform for teaching and learning in Fashion Design for Sustainability, which will become an open source resource for tutors internationally.
Fostering Sustainable Practices, funded by AHRC, which Dilys co-manages and is co-investigator, is a cross university partnership exploring small and micro business design and entrepreneurship practices that balance cultural, social, environmental and economic sustainability. She is also Co-I on BFTT, a multi-stranded project with multiple partners, Dilys is working with Steve Evans of Cambridge University and with industry partner, ASOS, to develop design and business practices for sustainability.

For more information about the centre, go to www.sustainable-fashion.com