An international fashion research project exploring the 'craft of use'
Clockwise from top: CCA's San Francisco Campus, Student with mentor, Lynda Grose during Local Wisdom photoshoot

California College of Arts

California College of the Arts
(CCA) empowers students to make ‘art that matters’. A leader in arts education for more than 100 years, CCA has campuses in San Francisco and Oakland enrolling 1,950 full-time students. CCA offers 22 undergraduate and 11 graduate majors in the areas of art, architecture, design, and writing. Students at CCA discover cross-disciplinary opportunities, innovative courses with real-world applications, outstanding faculty, successful alumni, and a world-class campus environment. Wherever their art takes them—making films, painting outside the canvas, designing sustainable garments, or working with communities—CCA offers an ideal environment to make it happen. Students develop competencies that will serve them well, both while they are in school and long after they graduate. Our alumni have been successful in a vast range of creative endeavors.

Lead Investigator of Local Wisdom at CCA

Lynda Grose, assistant professor in fashion design, is lead investigator for CCA on the Local Wisdom project.  Lynda’s work in fashion and sustainability has spanned two decades, multiple disciplines and many sectors of the economy.
She co-founded Esprit’s Ecollection in the early nineteen nineties, and worked with Sustainable Cotton Project to develop pioneering communication materials on cotton cultivation issues and viable options.  Her current focus is in developing new relationships between Cleaner Cotton farmers, wearers and supply chain partners to bend away from entrenched commodity cotton systems.

Lynda is a frequent speaker at corporate offices, trade conferences, and universities. Most recently she co-authored the book, Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (Lawrence King Publishers, London), with Kate Fletcher.

Lynda teaches fashion for sustainability seminar and studio classes at CCA, and leads curricula for summer Fashion Sustainability Workshop Series for working professionals.

Identified by London's Financial Times as one of the "green power brokers,"
Lynda is passionate about emergent roles for designers in shaping society and culture.  

Images from last year's photoshoots in San Francisco and Marin City...

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