Research Professor, Author, Consultant and Design Activist
Kate Fletcher’s work is both rooted in nature’s principles and engaged with the cultural and creative forces of fashion and design. For more than two decades, her original thinking and progressive outlook has infused the field of fashion, textiles and sustainability with design thinking, and come to define it.
Currently Kate is Professor in Sustainability and Design at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark; Research Professor at Consumption Research Norway at Oslo Metropolitan University; and Guest Professor at Design School Kolding in Denmark.
Kate brought systems thinking to fashion – and this and the pioneering key concepts such as Earth Logic, Fashion Ecologies, ‘craft of use’ and ‘post-growth’ fashion and her role as a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion – have fundamentally changed how fashion, textiles and sustainability is understood and also engaged thousands of people worldwide with a pioneering approach.
Kate is the most cited scholar in the field of fashion and sustainability with over 80 scholarly and popular publications in the field. She is author of 11 books including Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (2008), with a fully revised Second Edition with new content released in 2014. Readers call it “inspiring,” “the foundation for a radical new perspective” and “a bible” and it is in active use in commercial design studios and is the principal text in academic seminar rooms around the world.
She is co-editor of one of the prestige Routledge International Handbook series on Sustainability and Fashion (2015) and of Opening Up the Wardrobe: A Methods Book (2017), co-author of Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (2012), author of the Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion (2016), exploring fashion opportunities beyond consumerism. In 2018 a collection of Kate’s work was curated and translated into Italian: Moda, Design e Sostenibilità. More latterly, Kate has published autobiographical writings on clothing and nature in the book Wild Dress (2019), Outfitting (2021). She is co-editor of Design and Nature: A Partnership (2019) and co-author of Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan and Earth Logic Gardening. Her work is available in eight languages.
Kate was awarded a PhD in 1999 from Chelsea College of Art & Design. She is also the proud recipient of an Honorary Doctorate in 2015 from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, Canada.