Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), part of the London College of Fashion, to support the United Nations Climate Change conference COP21 has launched its ‘Dress For Our Time initiative’ that aims to address climate change. The initiative by Professor Helen Storey will be released in a series of chapters, the first of which is a dress that has been produced using a tent gifted by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and fitted with digital data displays that clock the effects of climate change if we do nothing, with the aim of fuelling a conversation on the important topic.

The Dress For Our Time was placed on display at London’s St Pancras train station during the COP 21 summit to create a stir among the delegates and dignitaries passing through the station to Paris where the conference was taking place. The dress has been developed in partnership with interactive creative agency Holition and uses data from a study conducted by a team of global scientists and provided by the Met Office. It hopes that by giving the tent a second life as a public fashion art installation will represent the “importance of nurturing and protecting all people and safeguarding generations to come”.

The project has been two years in the making and was born from a meeting where Professor Storey gathered climate scientists and researchers to look at how we are or are not responding to climate change. In collaboration with different backgrounds, from business, science, technology and fashion to humanitarian work, the Dress For Our Time project was born as a way to engage a public debate that uses the power of fashion to allow people to connect with the issue in a different way.

Sustainable-fashion.com