Instructor: Robin Sackin
Course Title: FM 324 OL1 Business of Licensing
Lesson title: Impact of Toxic Textiles
This course is to teach how to conduct the business of licensing. In the final project, students thought about a larger, long-term impact of licensing operations in the fashion industry. Students watched a documentary film like The True Cost (2015). There are other related documentaries. Students thought about ethical issues involved with fast fashion.
For example, this paper by a law student named Emma Ross (2021) summarized issues in a succinct manner.
There are activist groups like “Collective Fashion Justice” based in Australia for the rights of indigenous peoples in relation to fast fashion.
Students were asked to watch the following documentaries. This was the final case study for the online class. Students will watch the film and have a discussion on their reactions to it. They will also have to comment on how the film discusses counterfeiting and the impact to licensing. They must respond to at least two of their classmates’ posts regarding this topic. Further, students were required to find research articles, textbook passages, or testimonials from interviews to back their information in the case study. Most students did.a very good job with their own research. Overall students could have done more with researching the related topics like working conditions and labor laws in fashion.
The True Cost was a 2015 documentary film by Andrew Morgan. It focuses on the fast fashion industry and its impact on the global supply chain.
Fashion’s Dirty Secrets is a 2018 documentary presented by Stacey Dooley. She goes to the Aral Sea, a large lake at the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It is an endorheic lake, which means that the water only evaporates or seeps into the ground without any flow into and out of the basin. The Aral Sea used to be the fourth largest lake in the world and has almost evaporated with desertification. This is also related to the growth of fashion fashion according to the documentary.