This fall, students at Portland State University will crack open their course catalog and see courses listed under a brand new minor being offered by the College of the Arts: Sustainable Fashion. As part of the rollout for this program, PSU @psu_textilearts is hosting two events during Portland Textile Month: Origin Stories that highlights the varied facets of the curricula, from studying the history of maker-based, indie fashion in our own city to applied experience with the practices of naturally-derived pigments and dyes. We sat down with Alison Heryer, Sue Horn-Caskey & Charles F. Caskey Professor in Textile Arts & Costume Design, to talk about the minor, these events, and the future of textile study at Portland State.
The path to the Sustainable Fashion minor kicked off in 2019 with the addition of a handful of textile arts classes to the curriculum in the Schnitzer School of Art, which filled up with eager students immediately. Around the same time, the Oregon College of Art and Craft closed its doors, resulting in an influx of looms and other equipment that allowed PSU Textile Arts to provide a high-level technical environment for its students. “What I tried to do with that particular curriculum,” Heryer says, “is create the program I would have liked as an undergraduate that didn’t really exist, which is, how do I sort of take the skills of weaving, surface design, sewing construction, learn those types of maker skills thoroughly and meaningfully, and then allow students to apply those skills wherever they want.”
As students took part in those classes, Professor Heryer noted that an interest in fashion came up repeatedly in classroom discussion. “It’s not just ‘I want to do fashion,’ but ‘I want to do fashion in a way that’s not like what they teach at the normal fashion schools.’ The discussion is much more about alternative form from the mass-produced approaches, and instead thinking about clothing that is one of a kind, a site of individual expression.” In this way, the Sustainable Fashion minor took shape as a program that gives students the skills where they can go and succeed in the fashion industry while thinking critically about clothing that is created ethically and sustainably. “How can we,” Heryer proposes, “start to engage people as makers of their own garments, from within their own wardrobes?”
While the Sustainable Fashion curriculum is rooted in the School of Art and Design, with the perspectives of the artisan-maker that develop from that environment, there are two programs within the School of Business that students can pair with the minor. If the student is interested in going to work at, say, Nike or Adidas, there’s an Outdoor and Athletic Apparel certificate program that includes classes in marketing and retailing. For the student that is more interested in starting their own business, there’s the Social Entrepreneurship Certificate, which focuses more on independent, freelance/small business management. Being a minor, though, Sustainable Fashion can combine with any number of majors within PSU in ways tailored to the student. “My background is in costume design,” Heryer says, “so I think about how students over in film or theater can take these classes and apply the questions we are asking to the entertainment industry.”
As part of the inauguration of the minor, PSU will be hosting an exhibition, Portland Fashion in the Aughts, at its AB and MK Galleries, opening Tuesday October 1st. The show, curated by Marjorie Skinner and Jessie Vickery, originated in the archive of material Skinner has kept from her time as a writer and editor on the fashion beat for the Portland Mercury. “This is such a great tie-in to the new minor,” Heryer says, “because the designers and artisans featured in the exhibit really embody the kind of maker spirit inherent to the culture of the program. Portland is ad has been a special scene in terms of fashion, it has that small-batch, DIY ethos, with people working sustainably, with repurposed materials.” In capturing a pre-Instagram era of “fashion at a remove from fashion’s capitals,” the exhibition will explore how those styles “rarely referenced the dictums of the global fashion establishment, instead focusing more on expression than commerciality.” Tying into Portland Textile Month 2024’s theme, this show could be seen as a depiction of Portland’s “Origin Story” as a global source of inspiration for maker-based fashion and aesthetics that culminated in the decade-and-a-half following the aughts. If you have your own memories and photographs from this era that you would like to add to the archive in the lead-up to the show, you can visit the exhibition website at: https://www.portlandfashion2000s.com/
While Portland Fashion in the Aughts showcases the fashion history side of the program, PSU will also host another event during Portland Textile Month that speaks towards the applied production side of the curriculum. On October 9th, at 5 PM, three speakers will take part in a roundtable discussion titled “Color Origins: Pigment to Product.” This panel discussion, coproduced with Sator Projects and featuring Julie Beeler, Trish Langman, and Alicia Decker, looks at ways artists and designers work with naturally derived pigments toward more sustainable applications in art, textiles, and fashion. This event is also tied into Julie Beeler’s show Take Root, opening September 7th and running through November 2nd at Sator Projects, which features new solo works tied to her work as author of The Mushroom Color Atlas @mushroomcoloratlas (coming out on September 3rd from Chronicle Books, and viewable as a website at https://mushroomcoloratlas.com/) Alongside Beeler on the panel, Trish Langman and Alicia Decker both teach courses in the Sustainable Fashion Curriculum (Decker in Sewing Construction and Textile Design and Langman in Sustainable Fashion Practice) and have deep experience in working as sustainably-minded designers and textile producers.
This is only the start, the “Origin Story,” if you will, of the Sustainable Fashion minor at Portland State, and there is much to look forward to as the program comes into reality. Of particular note is the new arts building that PSU is breaking ground on soon, which will bring together the various factions of the School of Art, currently spread across campus, under one roof. As part of this new building, Textile Arts will have a sizeable increase in space, and with that, the ability to add more state-of-the-art machinery and studios. “With these new facilities,” Heryer says, “it’s going to provide students with a lot of opportunities to dig into these processes. And with the new space, it’s my goal that we can have new ways of engaging with the wider textile community, and become even more of a hub of textile innovation on the West Coast.” The new arts building is expected to open in Fall 2026; until then, we can look forward to the great programming that PSU Textile Arts is providing to coronate Sustainable Fashion, as part of Portland Textile Month 2024: Origin Stories.