Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas

Glasgow Caledonian University | GCU · British School of Fashion GCU London

As consumers and activist organisations press for greater transparency about fashion’s social and environmental impacts and new legislation comes into force requiring accurate environmental, social and governance reporting, fashion businesses are called upon to generate, validate and act on data relating to their sustainability business operations....

Glasgow Caledonian University London is a postgraduate satellite campus delivering a range of Masters Programmes covering fashion, luxury, marketing, finance, business and management. Glasgow Caledonian University’s mission, as the University for the Common Good, is to deliver social benefit and impact. Being the first university to adopt the Unite...

Public engagement with science has become increasingly important for the scientific community. There are many documented public engagement events that focus on aspects of microbiology, but relatively few utilise biofilms as a topic, despite their importance. Kombucha tea pellicles are easy to grow biofilms, facilitating their use within the public...

Facilitating the infrastructure for clothing reuse is a key strand of the circular economy. The UK-based charity TRAID has been working for over twenty years to address fashion’s negative impact by promoting the reuse of clothing through its network of innovative charity stores. Furthermore, TRAID funds global projects helping the transition to org...

Environmental pollution caused by textile waste is an increasing and urgent issue for the global fashion industry. Redress is a pioneering NGO working since 2007 to minimize fashion’s negative impacts and promote a more sustainable industry through circular economy practices including zero-waste design and upcycling. In this interview, Professor Na...

Luxury is an industry that defines its value through the quality of its raw materials, which fosters creativity, elevates artisanship and relies on brand heritage and local production to underpin the provenance of its products and justify its pricing strategy and, as such, can be considered as embodying many of the practices of sustainability. Yet,...

Fashion Business Cases: A Student Guide to Learning with Case Studies allows students to apply what they are learning in the classroom to real-life situations in the global fashion industry. Adapted from the Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases (BFBC) online resource, this text will aid instructors in providing high-quality examples from scholars arou...

Real world learning and the internationalisation of curricula are relatively new considerations in contemporary higher education discourses. Inquiry and application lie at the heart of real world learning, and the internationalisation of academic programmes is expected to equip learners with diverse learning styles and global citizenship skills. Ho...

Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases

The authors review a transformative global classroom project that links undergraduate students in the UK and Asia and how cross-disciplinary peer collaboration is used to enhance employability. The authors explore how international collaborations can simulate some of the complexities of working in the modern creative industries and highlight how so...

This research article provides an account of a series of curriculum interventions at undergraduate and postgraduate level which engage fashion business students with real world practical and ethical complexities faced by twenty-first-century fashion businesses. Fashion education has predominantly nurtured creativity in design and promotion whilst f...

PROFIT AND PURPOSE: THE CASE FOR SUSTAINABLE LUXURY FASHION Keywords: sustainability, luxury, fashion, social-enterprise, innovation It is over fifty years since businesses became actively engaged with issues of ethics and sustainability and the new millennium has seen an exponential increase in awareness-raising initiatives yet consumers remain...

With production moving offshore in the race to the bottom, necessary to satisfy increased demand for more garments and faster trends delivered at lower prices, fashion in the developed world has become not just fast, but disposable. One of the ‘successes’ of the twentieth-century fashion industry was to democratize fashion; by adopting mass product...

Bloomsbury Childhood Studies

Communication is key, especially to create forms of connection and promote acceptance.' So wrote one of our first year undergraduate students reflecting on her experiences of a collaborative online international learning project between students in London and Asia. The global classroom project launched in 2013 and so far over 450 students in London...

As industries are increasingly globalized, our students’ future workplaces require facility with cross-cultural collaboration, yet curricula often remain situated within the home culture. This chapter presents a qualitative case study on a collaborative project between students in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. An overview of the process is give...

UNESCO recognizes local craft knowledge and skills in its global system of ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ which has been adopted by Shanghai and Hong Kong to recognize their tailoring traditions (Legco, 2014). In London’s Mayfair, Savile Row has long been the physical and spiritual home of men’s tailoring; the street having such a strong resonance...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power of social media networks, namely Instagram, in building brand communities and co-creating value for brands. By analysing the 2015 campaign #withoutshoes by TOMS, the authors intend to demonstrate how the value creation process can be extended to involve all stakeholders and raise the e...

Popular media celebrates the iconic Hong Kong dress – the cheongsam; yet, its existence is threatened as Hong Kong’s population of master tailors is rapidly dwindling. Hong Kong’s fashion identity is closely intertwined with the changing patterns of the global fashion industry. Hong Kong once buzzed with factories supplying the world’s wardrobes, b...

Creativity can be regarded as universally and internationally endorsed as a key trait for students and graduates across disciplines. This endorsement comes despite differing definitions of what creativity is and how it may manifest itself in creative individuals and products and in different contexts. The descriptor "creative" has been applied to c...

One of the key debates in contemporary fashion marketing is the local–global binary; the twenty-first-century fashion industry is increasingly international, both in terms of production and consumption, yet there is no consensus on whether globalization inevitably homogenizes cultural experiences or allows for heterogeneity. The authors argue that...

Abstract In the interrelated knowledge economy the fostering of creativity is key and as such is the focus of many government initiatives internationally. But is an international definition of creativity achievable or even desirable? Comparisons of different cultures’ propensities for creativity are problematic when we consider that most creativity...

The proliferation of social media, new generations of digital natives and the profusion of wireless campuses promise to revolutionise teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. No consensus exists on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies into an educational context, so whilst it is intuitive that educators have a vital role in determining a...

The recent explosion in ICT means computers are marketed as an essential element of modern education. Governments have spent heavily on ICT but evidence of the effectiveness of this investment is contradictory; teacher attitude is cited as both a barrier to and a facilitator of its implementation. Initially used to simplify course administration, I...

Globalization is dramatically increasing numbers of international students in UK art and design institutions. Education as a primary source of enculturation can play an important part in bridging cultural differences; however, without awareness of the different learning cultures of Western and Confucian Heritage Cultures there is a danger of stereo...