© 2010 Gwendolyn Hustvedt gh21@txstate.edu

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Sustainability in Fashion: Bringing the Triple Bottom Line to the Campus

Abstract Home Economics is an excellent starting place to introduce sustainability topics to the college campus. This case study focuses on the role that clothing and textiles faculty at one US university play in bring sustainability into the clothing and textiles curriculum as well as to other areas across campus.

Country USA

Author Details AUTHOR Title of author DrSurname HustvedtFirst Name GwendolynName of Institution Texas State University-San MarcosAddress of Institution 601 University Dr.

San Marcos, TX 78666 USA E-mail address of author gh21@txstate.eduAuthor biography Gwendolyn Hustvedt is an Assistant Professor of Textiles at Texas State University. Her research focuses on the lifestyle of health and sustainability (LOHAS) consumer. Past projects include a survey of consumer willingness to pay for animal welfare certification and consumer sensitivity to biotechnology in the fiber supply chain.

Category− Consumer− Education− Home Economics

Theme UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014 themes-

− Environment− Sustainable consumption− Sustainable urbanisation

UN Millennium Development Goals - − Ensure environmental sustainability

Type of Contribution − Case Study− Illustrated story with photographs

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G Hustvedt gh21@txstate.edu

Sustainability in Fashion: Bringing the Triple Bottom Line to the

Campus

Gwendolyn Hustvedt

IntroductionSustainability has become an important topic on college campus in countries

around the world, both as a source of activism and as a curricular issue. Taking a cue

from industry, campuses recognize the importance of the Triple Bottom Line: putting

social and environmental productivity on par with economic productivity and suggesting

that all three are required for a venture to be truly sustainable.1 Families are being

impacted by the increasing pace of globalization and the environmental, social and

economic damage that modern lifestyles can create. The central concern of the Home

Economics professional is quality of life for families. Home Economics educators are in

an excellent position to help meet the increasing demand for education related to

sustainability for families and consumers. In fact, sustainability education provides an

important opportunity for Home Economics professionals to demonstrate the vitality of

their applied art by placing the issue of sustainability into a context that is relevant for

families and consumers.

Social, Environmental and Economic Sustainability

While some sustainability education efforts focus primarily on environmental

sustainability, the interconnection of social and political realities with the environmental

impact of the modern life is undeniable. The United Nations Decade of Education for

Sustainable Development (2005-2014) was established to help integrate sustainable

development into educational programs around the world to “help people develop the

attitudes, skills and knowledge to make informed decisions for the benefit of themselves

and others..”2 One of the seven themes for Education for Sustainable Development is

changing consumption habits to make them more sustainable. In their paper 'Toward

Sustainable Consumption: Two New Perspectives', Heiskanen and Pantzar suggest that

environmental issues are “…caused by social and economic behaviour” and that these

1 J Elkington, ‘Towards the sustainable corporation: Win-win-win business strategies for sustainable development’. California Management Review, vol. 36/no. 2, Winter 1994, pp. 90-10.

2 UNESCO, ‘Education for sustainable development’, 2005-2014, viewed on 2 May 2010, < http://www.unesco.org/en/esd/>.

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behaviors “are mediated through technical systems and affect the natural environment,

which in turn has social and economic impacts.”3 The conclusion of their paper on

sustainable consumption is that families become hostage to consumption patterns that are

embedded in the past and are difficult to change. Home Economics in the US has played

an important role in the development and introduction of household technology and needs

to play a role in understanding and changing cycles of household consumption wherever

they have become unsustainable.

Home Economics on the Campus

This paper is a case study focusing on the ability of Home Economics faculty to

address sustainability issues on campus in a holistic manner. Texas State University-San

Marcos (Texas State) is a large public university in Central Texas that began as a

Teacher’s College. The University’s heritage of focusing on secondary education means

that while the university has only recently begun pursuing status as a research university,

it has a stellar reputation in the area of teaching. In this student centered climate, the

faculty in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) are respected across

the campus as educators and the undergraduate programs in Family & Child

Development, Family & Consumer Sciences Teacher Certification, Fashion

Merchandising, Human Nutrition, and Interior Design are large and growing.

Partly because of a supportive administration that seeks to build the research

efforts of successful teaching departments, the FCS Department has also received

external grant funding comparable to or exceeding other departments on campus. This

administrative support includes willingness to highlight FCS faculty achievements and

facilitate relationships between faculty from all areas of campus. For example, when

Fashion Merchandising faculty received funding related to consumers of sustainability,

the administration broadly publicized the achievement. This climate of parity and respect

may be unusual for Home Economics faculty at more research-intensive universities,

where curricular achievements related to sustainability may go unnoticed or

interdisciplinary initiatives may receive only token support. Texas State, however, has

been an excellent laboratory for the expansion of Home Economics ideals and ethics to

reach students across the campus.

3 E Heiskanen and M Pantzar, 'Toward sustainable consumption: Two new perspectives', Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 20/no. 4, 1997, p. 411.

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Fashion Merchandising as a Sustainability LeaderThe sustainability education provided by the Fashion Merchandising program is

the focus of this case study. It should be noted, however, that faculty in the areas of

Human Nutrition and Interior Design also have achievements in this area. The Fashion

Merchandising program has 350-400 majors and 50-75 minors at any given time. The 4-

year 120-credit hour program requires a Business Minor from all majors and focuses on

the product development, visual merchandising and retail aspects of fashion. Time

intensive construction and fashion design skills instruction were removed from the

program in the 1990s to help cope with growing numbers of students and to provide

improved career prospects for graduates, as evidenced by increasing industry recruiting

of students. While there is currently no graduate program in this area, the faculty of five

tenure-track assistant and associate professors and two full-time instructors teach and

conduct research with both undergraduate students and graduate students from other

disciplines.

Textile Science

The integration of sustainability into specific Fashion courses is more or less

successful depending on the type of course. The introductory textile science course is a

large freshman level course that can introduce sustainability issues to all the majors in the

FCS Department. The course is typically only 50% Fashion Merchandising students with

the rest of the students taking the course as a departmental elective. Here is a list of

sample lectures that contain sustainability material and examples of the type of

information provided.

1. Protein Fibers:

a. Social Sustainability of hand labor to extract silk

b. Environmental Sustainability of disposing of wool scouring waste

2. Cellulose Fibers:

a. Environmental and Economic Sustainability of producing cotton

conventionally

b. Environmental Sustainability of mono-cropping versus rotation cropping

using hemp as an example

3. Synthetic Fibers:

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a. Environmental Sustainability of polyester versus olefin based on density and

recyclability with an emphasis on olefin as ocean waste

4. Dyeing and Printing:

a. Environmental and Social Sustainability of over dyeing denim and denim

distressing in terms of worker exposure to caustics and water pollution.

Other Fashion Courses

Many other Fashion Merchandising courses include environmental or ethical

issues as part of the learning objectives for the course. Students in Textile Product

Analysis study manufacturing issues and are educated about the social impact of

manufacturing timeline and sourcing decisions on workers in factories around the world.

Fashion Merchandising Administration focuses on Human Resource management and

includes discussions of the ethical responsibility of managers in fashion towards their

workers and the responsibility of all workers to understand and utilize their employer’s

social compliance division. The Consumer Behavior course includes discussions about

green consumer and consumer interest in corporate social responsibility.

Fashion Economics provides an opportunity for in-depth discussion of the impact

of American fashion consumption on the rest of the world, with a particular emphasis on

economic or environmental exploitation. This course uses as a text “The Travels of a T-

Shirt”, an in-depth exploration of the US cotton industry, factory conditions in China and

the impact of the used clothing trade on Western Africa4. Using discussions rather than

lectures allows the students to explore all sides of the issues and creates room for students

of various economic, ethnic and political backgrounds to expand their initial reactions to

the topics to include an understanding of other perspectives. The students are broken into

small groups at the beginning of the semester and the small groups are each named after a

country in Africa where large quantities of American used clothing is sold. The groups

are encouraged to listen for “their country” in the news and consider the impact of

various economic and environmental issues on the families in “their country”. Here is an

example of some of the discussions in the Fashion Economics course.

4 P Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, 2nd edn, Hoboken, New Jersey, Wiley, 2009.

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1. What role does religious intolerance play in the formation of trade alliances,

focusing on the Silk Road and the Byzantine Empire?

2. What is the role of corporate monopolies in the development and distortion of

international textile trade, focusing on the British East India Trading Company?

3. What role did civil society play in the failure in the Southern United States of the

1934 US Textile Workers strike and what is the lasting impact of this failure?

4. What explains the attitude of the Chinese government towards independent trade

unions?

5. Are unannounced factory inspections an effective method of reducing worker

abuse?

6. What are consumer concerns surrounding genetic modification/biotechnology and

did the industry tactic of treating these concerns as invalid speed or hinder the

adoption of biotechnology?

7. Is donating used clothing an appropriate response to a natural disaster?

8. Why are men’s clothing more valuable in the Mitumba market in Western Africa?

Interdisciplinary Courses

Besides courses taught in the Fashion Merchandising program, including courses

taught to other Home Economics majors, the faculty in the program teach sustainability

in an interdisciplinary across the campus. For example, a fashion faculty member who

researches sustainable consumer behavior was invited to make the opening presentation

for a team-taught doctoral seminar on sustainability. The PhD students in the course

came from the sociology, biology and philosophy departments. The team of graduate

faculty teaching the course felt that it was important to include a consumer centered

approach in the discussion. The opening lecture introduced the conflict between the

political economics perspective of maximizing utility as the primary motivator with the

consumer as the primary unit of measure and the Home Economics perspective of quality

of life as the primary motivator with the family as the primary unit of measure. Readings

were selected for the students that help them explore the production capability of families

and the loss of family based production skills in developed economies.5 Other readings 5 C Leviten-Reid, ‘What happened to home economics? An essay on households, the

economy and the environment’, in The Progressive Economics Forum. 2003, viewed on 2 May 2010, <http://www.progressive-economics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/clreid.pdf>

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stimulated students to consider the failings of a market based approach to sustainability

and the weakness of ‘consumer sovereignty’ in the face of asymmetric information on the

economic, social and environmental impact of the products in the market.6 While the

remainder of the semester was spent discussing theories from sociology, hard sciences

and geography, placing the family and quality of life front and center had a significant

impact on the direction of the conversation.

Texas State has an Honors program for gifted undergraduate students that allows

faculty to offer the typical courses in an enriched environment, such as an Honors section

of Organic Chemistry, or an interdisciplinary course on an unusual topic, such as

Baseball and the American Experience. Sustainability related courses are popular with

the Honors students and the program was excited to offer a course in Sustainable

Textiles. This course was designed to provide a basic textile science education for

students from a variety of disciplines (English to Economics) as well as challenging them

to consider the issues of sustainability created by textiles and clothing. The text for the

course was a publically available report compiled by the University of Cambridge on the

sustainability of the U.K. textiles industry.7

The culmination of the Honors course was a design project intended to introduce

textiles to students who had never before considered the source or structure of clothing.

The project was called “Choose Your Own Apocalypse”. After a brief discussion of the

enduring popularity of post-apocalyptic English language fiction, the student selected an

apocalyptic scenario as the backdrop for their design process. Apocalypse was chosen

because the disruption of the normal flow of goods and services caused by man-made or

natural disaster provides an opening for the expression of creativity. Apocalypse also

served as a focus for sustainability related anxiety and allowed students to express their

optimism or pessimism about the impact of human on the environment through action

rather than words. The first step of the design process was to completely dismantle a

textile product of their choice. Some students brought in typical clothing (sweatpants,

shorts) while other students selected items with symbolic meanings for their apocalypse.

A student using The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood bought a used wedding dress 6 U Hansen and U Schrader. 'A Modern Model of Consumption for a Sustainable

Society', Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 20/no. 4, 1997, pp. 443-468.7 JM Allwood, SE Laursen, C Malvido de Rodriguez, et al. , 'Well Dressed? The

Present and Future Sustainability of Clothing and Textiles in the United Kingdom', Cambridge UK, University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing, (2006).

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while a student inspired by the Kevin Costner film Waterworld dismantled an umbrella.

The design process focused on creating something from the dismantled textiles that

would be useful in the post-apocalyptic environment, from flippers to swim a water

soaked world to an enveloping sunshade needed to cross a desert. An exhibition of the

designs sparked conversation about the role of textiles in everyday life both pre- and

post-apocalypse (see the exhibition catalog in the Appendix).

Extra curricular Connections

Besides coursework, both within the Family & Consumer Sciences and across

campus, the faculty and students of the Fashion Merchandising program have engaged in

sustainability issues on campus. The annual Earth Day event at the lake on campus that

is the headwaters for the San Marcos river find student members of the AATCC student

chapter handing out eco-detergent samples and flyers about line drying. The annual

Fashion Merchandising Career Forum that hosts students from across Texas for a one-day

career fair with seminars includes an eco-bag design contest where students are

challenged to turn a typical non-woven cloth shopping bag into something more

attractive. Student organized fashion shows feature sustainable clothing and service

activities educate the campus about the recyclability of cotton textiles into paper or blown

insulation.

Conclusions and SuggestionsIncorporating sustainability into the Fashion curriculum involves a multi-pronged

approach. Besides including economic, social or environmental sustainability in

coursework and student learning outcomes, sustainability can serve as an entry point to

bring Home Economics into a campus-wide discussion. Starting small with student

activities or presentations in classes in other disciplines can open doors to engage in an

interdisciplinary dialogue with other professionals on campus who are also engaged by

sustainability. Stepping forward as consumer advocates or consumer educators with a

track record of helping families improve their quality of life builds our credibility as

Home Economics professionals and provides an opening for us to weigh in on this very

important topic.

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ReferencesAllwood, JM, SE Laursen, C Malvido de Rodriguez, et al. , 'Well Dressed? The Present

and Future Sustainability of Clothing and Textiles in the United Kingdom', Cambridge UK, University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing, (2006).

Elkington, J ‘Towards the sustainable corporation: Win-win-win business strategies for sustainable development’. California Management Review, vol. 36/no. 2, Winter 1994, pp. 90-10.

Hansen, U and U Schrader. 'A Modern Model of Consumption for a Sustainable Society', Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 20/no. 4, 1997, pp. 443-468.

Heiskanen, E and M Pantzar, 'Toward sustainable consumption: Two new perspectives', Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 20/no. 4, 1997, p. 411

Leviten-Reid, C‘What happened to home economics? An essay on households, the economy and the environment’, in The Progressive Economics Forum. 2003, viewed on 2 May 2010, <http://www.progressive-economics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/clreid.pdf>

Rivoli, P The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, 2nd edn, Hoboken, New Jersey, Wiley, 2009.

UNESCO, ‘Education for sustainable development’, 2005-2014, viewed on 2 May 2010, < http://www.unesco.org/en/esd/>.

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Appendix: Photos and Links

Figure 1: Students at Line Drying Exhibition at Earth Day Fair

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Figure 2: Honors Class Discussing Eco-laundry

Figure 3: Eco-Bag Designers from Texas State University and Incarnate Word University

Links

Well dressed: The present and future sustainability of clothing and textiles in the UK

Honors Design Project Exhibition Brochure

Consumerism and Sustainability Lecture for Doctoral Seminar

Texas State Fashion Merchandising Career Forum Eco Bag Contest Guidelines

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