Abstract

Material-led pedagogies can transform postgraduate fashion education by repositioning materials as active collaborators rather than passive resources. Drawing on research within the MA Fashion Artefact course at London College of Fashion, this session shows how thinking through making fosters ecological awareness, cultural responsiveness, and reflective learning. Students developed knowledge through touch, experimentation, failure, and dialogue with materials, while peer exchange and collaboration with technicians and artisans expanded learning communities. We argue that sustainable fashion education must move beyond outcome-driven models toward pedagogies of care, attentiveness, and co-creation, where making becomes both a critical practice and a regenerative way of learning.

Session and activities

This session presents findings from a qualitative action research study conducted within the MA Fashion Artefact programme at London College of Fashion. The research explored how multidisciplinary, material-led, practice-based pedagogies can facilitate ecologically responsive learning in postgraduate fashion education.

Situated within current debates around sustainability, decolonising design education, and the loss of embodied craft knowledge, the study draws on New Materialism, Material Driven Design, and ethics of care frameworks. It examines how materials can be understood not as passive matter selected after ideas are formed, but as active agents that shape thought, process, and outcomes.

Using focus groups with current students and alumni, the project identified four key themes: material agency, learning through iteration, cultural and ecological responsiveness, and collaborative studio culture. Participants described how materials “talk back,” redirect decisions, and generate unexpected pathways through resistance, tactility, and experimentation. Working with culturally significant or reclaimed materials also strengthened connections to heritage, locality, and environmental responsibility.

The session will combine presentation, discussion, and reflective audience participation. We will share selected student case studies that demonstrate how material encounters can lead to new forms of learning and design authorship. Participants will then be invited to reflect on their own teaching or creative contexts through guided prompts: How do materials shape learning? How might making become a more ecological or relational pedagogy? What forms of knowledge emerge through the hand, body, and studio community?

The session argues that fashion education must move beyond purely product-driven and digitally accelerated models. Instead, thinking through making offers a pedagogical framework rooted in slowness, attentiveness, experimentation, and care. These approaches can help prepare future designers to work more ethically, collaboratively, and sustainably within complex cultural and environmental futures.