Brazilian silk production is amongst the five largest in the world. Nonetheless, there is no life cycle assessment study on silk cocoon production and its upstream processes, pertaining to the mulberry production (fundamental upstream process for silk production), in the existing literature. The objective of this study was to identify opportunities to improve the environmental profile of mulberry and silk cocoon production under Brazilian conditions. To that end, a life cycle assessment was conducted for the core processes of mulberry and silk cocoon production and upstream processes of raw material production, using the ReCiPe method for life cycle impact assessment using nine impact categories. Overall, the mulberry production showed greater impacts than the cocoon production for the impact categories analyzed. A few opportunities for improving the environmental profile of mulberry and silk cocoon production under Brazilian conditions included replacing the Kraft paper used to cover the rearing beds, replacing the standard tractor used to fetch mulberry leaves, replacing light bulbs, conducting a more sustainable mulberry and cocoon production, and setting a reverse logistics system for plastic and paper packaging waste. Nevertheless, many of these measures are long-term strategies. Besides, many of them need further economic feasibility assessment.

Gender equality is a central human aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals. Among its multiple and complex issues, this research highlights gender-based violence as a domain that affects women’s empowerment and the guarantees of an effective equality on numerous levels. To address such a complex structure, which perpetuates inequalities between men and women, generating multiple effects and jeopardising social changes, social design can provide contributions on cultural and social levels. To achieve social systemic changes, one needs to activate profound cultural transformations. Thus, how can we change culture without rejecting the need to empower women and promote equality? The Montréal Design Declaration (2017) recognised social design’s potential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), to contribute to global challenges, and to accept a calling for stakeholders’ integration and agency promotion. This review explores how social design can provide contributions with regard to SDG5 and gender-based violence, presenting relevant domains that actively contribute to cultural transformation to address interventions in this systemic phenomenon.

Fashion Design is a complex sector, formed by scattered consumers and companies, by non-linear models of production and by dynamic information flow. Sustained by technology pervasiveness fashion designers and fashion consumers create content around fashion brands, beyond the formality of products. New models of consumption fashion push new models of fashion design and should be pushing new models of learning. What kind of learning model can better prepare future professionals to contribute to the sector? This paper hypothesizes that online collaborative environments represent a valid alternative to recognize fashion designers, as fashion consumers, as 'lifelong' fashion learners. We confronted the results obtained in previous studies with recent data gathered from providers about consumer behavior on global online and mobile usage and penetration, fashion design sector in Europe and fashion design 'e-commerce' worldwide. The results demonstrated that although fashion figured as the most significant eCommerce segment in 2017, fashion design higher education programs offered online are either non-existent or merely transpose the traditional lecture-based education models to online settings. This paper also presents heutagogical principles for fashion design higher education, demonstrating how they could collaborate to bring together fashion consumption, fashion design development, and fashion design learning.