Sustainability Week: Fashion focused

The Fashion and Textiles Institute is driven by the environmental, ethical and moral challenges of our time. So, when third year BA Fashion Photography students were set a live brief set by environmentally conscious fashion curator, Shonagh Marshall, it was the perfect fit.

Among various other projects, Shonagh writes Denier, a bi-weekly newsletter that responds to fashion’s relationship to the three pillars of sustainability: people, the planet and profit. In her live brief, Shonagh challenged the students to create a body of work that employed common tropes of fashion photography in a way that aided people and the planet over profit.

Shonagh was so impressed by the responses that she featured several students in Denier. “I think what blew me away was the level of research that each student undertook to develop their response to the brief. I asked them to think about the way fashion photography can be a site for ideology, not selling clothing. They embraced this cue, and each went down a path of discovery into a subject they felt they could explore through photography and would dismantle the very function of a fashion image – to sell something.”

We spoke to three of the selected Fashion Photography students to discover how they approached the live brief, their thoughts on the importance of sustainable fashion and how working with Shonagh improved their understanding of the fashion industry.