Camouflage fabrics are produced on a large scale for use in the US military and other applications. One of the highest volume camouflage fabrics is known as the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) which is produced for the US Department of Defense. At present, no standard measurement-based color quality control method exists for camouflage…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address the interface between design education and business start-up in the designer fashion industry (DFI) and provide a new framework for reflecting on ways to improve design education and graduates' business start-up preparedness. Design/methodology/approach: This interpretive study employed…

Our research examines the relationship among identity, age, gender and athleticism through a study of the association between sports clothing and the identity work of pre-adolescent female soccer players. Based on participant-observation and interviews conducted at three co-ed youth soccer camps, we find that age is an important element of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze changes in undergraduate student knowledge of issues of sustainability relevant to the apparel and textiles industry. Assessment occurred prior to and upon completion of a course that addressed topics specific to the global production and distribution of apparel and textile goods. The study also…

In an ever changing global economy, higher education experiences accountability issues in educating the workforce. Graduates require the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in the global workplace. For graduates to have the opportunity to attain this understanding and expertise, it is critical to identify what influences curriculum…

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that requires finding the shortest path through a set of points ("cities") that returns to the starting point. Because humans provide heuristic near-optimal solutions to Euclidean versions of the problem, it has sometimes been used to investigate human visual…

The purpose of this paper is to describe an educational partnership experience between rural retailers and graduate students in a Merchandising, Apparel and Textiles program. Students were afforded an opportunity to work with small business owners in rural communities, giving them real world exposure to the actual challenges being faced by…

Although social justice is a core value of social work, it can be more difficult to integrate into a research methods class. This article describes an assignment developed for a BSW one-semester research class that served the dual purpose of educating students about social justice as well as qualitative research. Students were instructed to…

To educate one's students about recycling garbage, art teachers can plan an "anti-trash costume bash" to promote public awareness of the ugly, unhealthy, and costly effects of litter. Such an event was brainstormed by the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG), a regional agency made up of the valley communities in Arizona working to…

This dissertation investigates the relationships between various aspects of self-concept (i.e., generalized self-efficacy, public self-consciousness, state hope, and self-esteem), clothing selection (i.e., clothing that expresses individuality, clothing that improves the emotional state, clothing that camouflages the body), and life satisfaction…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to obtain a shared understanding of entrepreneurship education and to evaluate the effectiveness of employability and enterprise division in current fashion courses and amongst the students between a British and a Chinese university (UClan and SCAU). Design/methodology/approach: It is a three-stage…

This article describes a 9-month community action project that took the form of an art studio located in a thrift store. The purpose of the project was to creatively reduce clothing fabric waste from unused donations, and also to document the social justice and ecological issues involved in clothing production and distribution. Collaboration with…

In recent years, the issue of the extent to which an individual has or should have the right to religious freedom, and to manifest that freedom by wearing particular items of clothing, has become very contentious. Some nations have seen fit to ban the wearing of particular items of clothing thought to have religious significance, at least in some…

In postmodern scholarship there has been a temporal shift to thinking of the body as malleable rather than fixed, which has opened space for the remaking of the self via the remaking of the body (Featherstone, 1991; Giddens, 1991). Among men, this process is thought to interact with shifting understandings of masculinity. In this study, 14…

This review of the 5th International Conference held by the University of the Arts London's Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, 12 and 13 April 2010 at the Novotel, Tiergarten, Berlin, briefly summarizes the contributions of three keynote speakers, and considers some of the issues they raised. (Contains 1 note.)