Lynda Grose

Lynda Grose cofounded ESPRIT’s ecollection, the first ecologically responsible clothing line developed by a major corporation and framed an impacts approach to fashion and sustainability which became adopted industry-wide.


As a practicing designer and educator, Grose has worked with clients across sectors of the economy; from private businesses to nonprofit organizations and governments and from designers to artisans and farmers. She is a frequent speaker at corporate offices, conferences, universities and museums, and her work has been featured in scores of magazines, books, and periodicals, including Fashion Today (Colin McDowell), Design + Environment (Helen Lewis and John Gertsakis), Eco Chic (Sandy Black), Beyond Green (Jan Brand et al.); Elle, Metropolis, Textile View, and Business Ethics, among others. Grose is a contributing author to Opening Up the Wardrobe (Novus Press), The Routledge Handbook on Sustainable Fashion (Routledge), Sustainable Textiles: Life Cycle and Environmental Impact (Woodhouse Publishing, London), and Sustainability in Fashion and Textiles: Values, Design, Production and Consumption (Greenleaf Publishing).



Grose coauthored Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (Lawrence King Publishers, London). The book connects ecological theory and fashion practice and explores how a new aesthetic that emerges when sustainability values are embraced as a core design directive has the potential to transform the fashion system as well as the innovators working within it.
Grose currently serves as professor and Chair of Fashion Design at California College of the Arts. She developed curricula for fashion and sustainability seminar and studio classes, curricula for CCA's Fashion Sustainability Workshop Series for working professionals, and helped identify ECOTAP courses, to enable students to preference ecological content in their class selections, leading to a minor in sustainability.


Grose was lead investigator, West Coast USA for the international fashion research project, Local Wisdom. She is currently collaborating with Danish colleague, Dr. Vibeke Reisberg of Design School Kolding, Denmark, and Dr Timo Rissanen of Parsons The New School on speculative concepts which explore the 'Craft of Use' and garments designed to evolve over time.
She currently serves on the board of Goodwill Industries San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties.
Grose sees design as a force that can help give form to a sustainable society and is passionate about emergent roles for designers working in this context.