RECOMPOSE

Fashion education programmes continue to proliferate in parallel with a dramatically changing climate and heavily degraded ecologies. The dominant linear fashion imaginary is incompatible with Earth’s cyclical systems. Fashion education programmes therefore should work critically to engage with these crises, introducing a new repository of socio-ecological thinking and practices. Ecological economist E.F Schumacher reminds us that in contexts like these, if we are to have yet more education, then it is going to have to be an education of a very different kind. This paper challenges fibre-centric discourses, as well as uncritical reflections on continued economic growth in the sector, to which, mainstream circular fashion initiatives align. Authors developed the workshop series Recompose for the MA Fashion programme at the Royal College of Art, where the cohort engaged with bioregionalism, regenerative design, and reflective practices through situated environmental learning. The study presents student reflections on this process and further develops these through interviews with fashion designer Lee Roach and practitioners in regenerative fibre and food systems. The paper cautions against practices that are fibre-lucid at the expense of becoming system-blind and invites the fashion education community to adopt regenerative pedagogies tailored to their local contexts, fostering diverse practices that challenge globalised fashion systems and support bioregional fibre production.