Circular Design for Fashion

Sumner is a lecturer in Sustainable Fashion at the University of Leeds. His research topics include textile and fashion sustainability, microplastics, modern slavery and consumer behaviour. He has made major contributions to UK and International sustainability initiatives and contributed to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee report on Fast Fashion, as well as industry projects with a wide range of clothing brands.

With almost 25 years’ experience, Dube leads the Institute of Positive Fashion (IPF) programme at the British Fashion Council (BFC), responsible for its strategy and delivery.  Within this role, she supports BFC members prepare for the EU’s sustainable and circular textiles strategy and directs the IPF’s flagship programme, the Circular Fashion Ecosystem Project, which is establishing a circular economy for UK fashion. Dube also sits on the Steering Committee for the Future Fashion Factory.

PHOEBE ENGLISH was founded in 2011 and designs clothing with our planetary boundaries in mind. The studio has dual roots in textile craftsmanship and reduced environmental impact: aiming to develop ways of working with design, and fashion systems, that align within the realities of our planetary limitations. A personal narrative runs throughout the work within the studio's established aesthetics of both the decorative and the utilitarian. English recently received: Marie Claire: Best Sustainable Designer (2022).

Lewin is a curator and writer based in London. Currently developing her first exhibition as Senior Curator at the Design Museum, she was previously Curator, Exhibitions and Design at Serpentine, London. As well as producing independent exhibitions and texts, she has also been a guest lecturer at Chelsea College of Art & Design and Slade School of Art, and has taught on courses at the Royal College of Art and Design Academy Eindhoven.

Scott is a Lecturer in Fashion Design: Creative Knit and Innovation, at the University of Leeds. Previous industry experience has provided her with a distinct knowledge on issues facing the fashion knitwear sector, most notedly the urgency of waste reduction and the inefficiencies of product development. Eleanor’s explores these issues through many intersections, such as wearer perception, garment optimisation and environmental impact to reinvent the fashion system, from ideation to disposal.

Wesling, CBE, is a multi-award winning environmental entrepreneur. She launched Elvis & Kresse, which rescues and transforms decommissioned fire hose into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50% of profits to the Fire Fighters Charity. The company now collects 12 different waste streams and has several charitable partnerships across industries. In 2021 Elvis & Kresse also took on a farm to establish a regenerative agriculture project, generate their own renewables and implement a host of environmental initiatives.

Reducing impact is everyone's business and a continuous learning process. Discover how the Design Museum is experimenting with adopting new methods to cut the environmental cost of its exhibitions. Through Waste Age: What Can Design Do, on display until 20 February 2022, the museum set out to understand the resource use, production methods, supply chains, and lifecycles of all exhibits and materials.

To make sure the museum was genuinely challenging existing methods, an advisory panel of leading experts were appointed alongside URGE to guide the development of the exhibition, and the museum teams also partnered with designers dedicated to ecological practices.

"We asked specialists to monitor our process, helping us to make change throughout."
– Gemma Curtin, Waste Age Curator, the Design Museum