Image: The Diversity Network
The Diversity Network is a collaboration between Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, an initiative challenging the fashion industry’s dependence on unachievable and unhealthy body ideals.
Launched with the help of Government Minister, Lynne Featherstone, at Graduate Fashion Week June 2011, it promotes ‘emotionally considerate’ design and practice through innovative educational methods and research.
Led by Mal Burkinshaw, Programme Director of Fashion at ECA, The Diversity Network connects academics across the UK, facilitating knowledge exchange and the sharing of best practice on the theme of diversity and engagement with users’ needs and feelings.
A hub for developing and showcasing cutting-edge academic projects relating to diversity, it strives to inform existing industry stakeholders, and the fashion designers and influencers of the future.
From Body Talks to Beauty by Design and RSE funding
In April 2013, The Diversity Network held the Body Talks symposium at Inspace in the University of Edinburgh. The key speakers were from H&M, All Walks, the charity BODY and the Vestoj-Journal of Sartorial Matters and they attracted a multidisciplinary audience of people at all career stages, leading to a student project with H&M.
Network partners have played a leading role in Beauty by Design: Fashioning the Renaissance, a multidisciplinary project bringing together art historical research with contemporary fashion design to question cultural commonplaces about beauty and body image. Launched at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in September 2012, the project culminated in a major exhibition at the Gallery which ran from November 2014 to January 2015 and attracted over 152,000 visitors.
Building on previous funding from the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has awarded the Network funding to design new cultures of communication for fashion industries. The project will work towards the Diversity Network Fashion Forum 2018, bringing network members together with the public to demonstrate the positive ways in which fashion can be used to celebrate and enhance self-esteem.
In addition to research, the Network educates students in the importance of developing a more responsible, diverse and emotionally considerate response to fashion design and communication. For example, all fashion design projects at ECA now require the students to consider how their work will address and celebrate the needs of a very wide customer base in terms of size, age, race and height.