Four years after its launch, the “fashion and materials” master’s degree appears like a UFO in the French university landscape. This interdisciplinary program, created by three establishments (Mines, Dauphine and Arts Déco) attached to the University of Paris Sciences and Letters (PSL), welcomes around twenty students with very different profiles: graduates of business schools, Institutes of political studies, engineering schools, scientific masters, art schools… All are working on the ecological, social and technological transition of fashion. “ The idea is to combine skills and intelligence », explains Colette Depeyre, lecturer at Dauphine-PSL University and responsible for this theoretical and practical training.
Workshops are regularly organized so that students can experiment with the material and get their hands dirty. On the program: biomimicry, vegetable dyes or even upcycling (giving a second life to recycled clothes or fabrics). “ These are moments conducive to exchange during which we put on the clothes of the sorcerer’s apprentice, emphasizes Thibaut Ledunois, 25, a graduate in management, who joined the master’s in 2020. We have all developed very strong tropisms related to our original training, we learn little by little to get rid of them. It’s very difficult to put yourself in the creators’ shoes; in contact with them, I was able to see how my language was very “marketed”. »
Overwhelmed by eco-anxiety
The issues addressed range from the supply of sustainable materials to sobriety in marketing, via logistics and transport issues. ” When you arrive, it’s culture shock. Chemists, managers and designers: we are not formatted in the same way at all. The idea is not to become an engineer or designer in one year, you have to give up the idea of wanting to be a specialist in everything, the goal is to learn to work collectively”, argues Léa Belaïd, who joined the course in September, after Sciences Po Aix.
The students selected – on file and after interview – do not have a “ romantic vision of fashion “. “ Some are very committed, they refuse to create new clothes and prefer to invest in associative networks or solidarity businesses; others prefer to try to act from the inside, by helping houses to be transformed”, adds Colette Depeyre.
Everyone is asking themselves the question of their contribution to change, sometimes even if it means being overwhelmed by eco-anxiety. In 2021, a speaker who warned about the ecological footprint of fashion threw a chill, causing a wave of depression among some young people in the promotion. “ They are sometimes distraught, worried about the status quo. Some say they are ready to leave everything to go and live in the countryside,” notes Colette Depeyre.
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