5 Steps To Creating A Sustainability Manifesto

This piece is an extract from the London College of Fashion & Kering's open-access digital course Fashion & Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World. 

The free training course includes over 18 hours of videos, articles, peer reviews and quizzes covering the context to sustainable fashion, sustainable sourcing, and realising creative opportunities.

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Header image: Design: Elena Louka. Image: Felix Cooper © University of the Arts London 2018

What is a manifesto?

Manifestos usually focus on external goals that shape and guide an individual’s or an organisation’s internal creative and business direction. They are often responding to real world problems, advocating a need or new idea to carry out and provoke change.

A manifesto is a statement where you publicly declare your intentions, motivations, and core values.

It serves as the bold expression of principles.

Why create a manifesto?

Creating a manifesto will give you the confidence to consider what is important to you in your work in fashion, and it will help you to stay the course and guide you on your journey to embed sustainability into your day-to-day work.

It helps you to examine what you stand for, what you might want to change, and what is unjust in the world.

Thinking about your ideas and values in this way helps you to gain clarity about your intentions and what really matters to you in relation to fashion and sustainability.

The earlier you start thinking about your core values, the easier it is to build a sustainability mindset into what you do, and the more positive impact you will be likely to create.

How to create a manifesto

By connecting a truth or fact that you can reference with emotion and what you value and what you can commit to, you create a powerful and important starting point for your work in fashion and sustainability.

1. Fact

What is it about fashion that you want to change and what are the facts that back this up?

2. Values

Think about your values in relation to fashion and sustainability.

One way to approach this is to try and write them down. Doing this helps you think about what sort of things you might want to encourage or promote or things that you love about fashion and the positive impact it can have.

3. Vision

What is your vision for a better world? A manifesto sets out this vision and how you perceive and understand the world is important, even if it is different from other people around you.

4. Change

What it is you want to change and why. What is the problem you are trying to address.

And what can you do to create a change? Manifestos are ultimately a call to action, so think about what action will occur as a result of your manifesto.

5. Commitment

You can now see a better world, so how do you get there?

What is it about fashion that you think you want to change and how can you do that? How could the fashion industry change for the better? Note down what you are committed to, to help this happen.

Examples of fashion sustainability manifestos

• Manifesto for a Fashion Revolution
• Manifiesto 8M from AMSE the Sustainable Fashion Association of Spain (in Spanish)
• Mistra Future Fashion Manifesto
• A Manifesto for a Modern Fashion Industry
• Ethical Consumer: A Manifesto for Change
• Manifesto from Moda Limpa (in Portuguese)

- Join LCF & Kering's free digital course -

To find out more and create your own manifesto, join the London College of Fashion & Kering's free digital course: Fashion & Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World. 

Through the course you will have the opportunity to share your work, invite comments from other learners, and take a look and comment on other draft manifestos.

Images: © University of the Arts London 2018