British designers in graphic design and fashion seem uniquely equipped to distil into products and images an essence of the everyday matter surrounding them, turning what happens on the street into published culture. A glance at the work of Vivienne Westwood from the 1970s through to 2003 is as clear an indication as any of the social challenges and changes that have taken place in Britain over the last thirty years, from teenage rebellion through luxury and decadence to globalisation. A new generation of designers – from Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Shelley Fox in the early 1990s to the emerging talents of Emma Cook, Hamish Morrow, Preen, Sophia Kokosalaki and Boudicca in the 21st century – continue to explore fashion as a mirror held up to the concerns (economic, political, social, philosophical, technological) of their contemporaries.

Formal education plays a part in this. Britain’s art schools, revitalised in the post-war years, produced a generation of artists and designers whose work made Britain a creative hub in the 1960s. That many of these colleges encouraged and still encourage collaboration between disciplines has proved crucial to the flowering of British design. Creative networks continue to operate in the UK’s major cities today – art, design, architecture, music and photography are as intertwined now as they have been since the 1950s. This pattern of cross-influence is the strength of Britain’s “creative industries”. Magazines like i-D (whose 21st anniversary exhibition Smile i-D we are currently touring), The Face and Dazed & Confused have been vital in both inspiring the creative process and reflecting the way in which it works in the UK. Music, literature, art and film rub against the pages of fashion that publish the powerful message of Britain’s creative hybrids.

Fashion is relatively easy to produce – at it’s most basic, all it requires is imagination and skill with a sewing machine. It’s possible to produce some semblance of fashion with much less infrastructure than, for example, products that require extensive tooling, or architecture which doesn’t benefit from economies of scale in the same way. For this reason fashion has the potential to be a fertile medium for cultural expression in many countries less developed than Britain. And fashion is as dominant an economic force in many countries around the world as it has proved to be for the UK (fashion and textiles is the fourth largest UK export). But many of those countries experience a dislocation between design (the creation of fashionable garments and related iconic and desire-inducing imagery) and production (the making of garments). The UK suffered from this dislocation for the most of the 20th century. In sharing our expertise in redressing that balance – best practice in manufacturing and design, design education, art direction, styling, photography, publishing, fashion journalism – we are able to present the UK as a vibrant and valuable partner both creatively and commercially.

The tour of Graduate Fashion Week’s Gala show, and all the educational workshops we organise annually, demonstrate the very significant and liberating experience that British design education is for most people, equipping them with the tools to realise their inspiration in a unique way.  The Royal College of Art’s Head of Fashion & Textiles, Prof. Wendy Dagworthy told us recently, “I have visited a lot of other colleges all over the world and we just teach it in a very different way in Britain. I think it is because we believe in self-expression and not doing what you think someone else wants. You do what you think they should have.”

Our new Inspire film (itself inspired by the student exchange projects in Hong Kong, Indonesia and China) illustrates the processes by which Britain’s fashion designers translate diverse visual and cultural experience into new and exciting propositions of dress. Our workshop series Fashion Machine, piloted in India, focuses on the skills accessory to design and production (photography, styling, art direction, show production, journalism) that turn garment production into that bigger phenomenon called fashion.

In our exhibitions 21st Century Dandy and POSH we illustrate the power of design to transform traditional manufacturing. POSH assesses the impact that design has had on a number of traditional British industrial sectors including fashion. 21st Century Dandy in part assesses a parallel impact on Britain’s tailoring heritage. Like Inside Out: Underwear & Style in the UK (our fashion exhibition from 2000), Dandy also aims to communicate the significance of cultural, historical and social ideas – what Peter Ackroyd describes in Albion as national “imaginaries” – to the development of a uniquely British design language. This language affords us an excellent means of communicating the vitality and diversity of contemporary Britain. alice.cicolini@britishcouncil.org

The new video Inspire is available from Design Department. The London Institute is preparing educational materials to accompany it and enhance it as an educational tool.