On the afternoon of December 18^th, Professor Tao Hui was invited to deliver a keynote speech entitled ‘Cross-cultural Thinking in the Development of a Sustainable Fashion Education System’ at the ‘4^th International Conference on Sustainable Technologies for Industry 4.0 – STI 2022’.

Professor Tao Hui’s presentation was divided into four aspects. First, she discussed the necessity and educational value of cross-cultural thinking for sustainable fashion development in the context of globalization from the perspective of transcultural thinking. Secondly, Professor Tao Hui analyzed the current situation of sustainable fashion education in China based on the results of a survey conducted by the research group on clothing colleges and universities across the country. In the third part of the presentation, according to the survey results, Professor Tao Hui then proposed several suggestions: first, establish a sustainable curriculum system covering the entire industry chain, to cultivate design talents with a complete understanding of sustainable fashion; second, people should use more and more advanced digital technology to successfully implement the advantages of online education, break the traditional teaching method, increase the intensity and measures of open schooling, and establish a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and cross-border interactive teaching system that combines online and offline; the third is to emphasize that the role of sustainable fashion educators should be redefined and they should be an activist for the connection between education and social development as well as a promoter of sustainable theory and practice. In the concluding part of the presentation, Professor Tao Hui shared some exploration and achievements at the School of Fashion of Wuhan Textile University in fashion sustainable design education.  

In the speech, Professor Tao Hui especially emphasized that the reason for putting forward the concept of intercultural is to emphasize sustainable development in the context of globalization and to ‘thinking outside the silo’, not only across languages, countries, and regions but also across disciplines and historical nodes, through the establishment and formation of cross-cultural thinking, break self-management and innovate development models, which is also the focus of sustainable development of global fashion. Professor Tao Hui’s speech motivated the interest of the participants, and during the question-and-answer session, she interacted online with several professors and the Vice-chancellor from Green University of Bangladesh Professor Dr. Md. Golam Samdani Fakir. He acknowledged his gratitude to Professor Tao Hui and appreciated his delightful visit to Wuhan Textile University in 2014. Finally, the conference also awarded Professor Tao Hui a speech certificate.

For more than ten years, the School of Fashion of Wuhan Textile University has adhered to the educational concept of ‘cultivating people with virtue’, actively responded to and implemented the ‘Two Mountains Theory’ proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping and the ‘Double Carbon’ strategic goal proposed by the state, and strongly promoted sustainable fashion design education, which has formed six aspects: (1) Establish a sustainable curriculum system throughout the entire industry chain to cultivate design talents with complete cognition; (2) Carry out international joint teaching to cultivate international design talents with cross-cultural thinking; (3) Increase university-industry cooperation to promote transformation of theory and practice; (4) Building an education-government cooperation platform to increase the ability to serve the balanced development of the local industrial economy; (5) Integrating traditional culture into fashion design to enhance cultural self-confidence; (6) Strengthen the core competitiveness of personnel training by enhancing the development of educators. The university will also strengthen fashion sustainable design education during the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ period, and contribute to the knowledge and strength of textiles to cultivate more outstanding professionals for the sustainable development of China’s clothing industry.

(Note: The STI Conference is an international conference technically sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society in the United States, hosted by the Green University of Bangladesh in 2022, and the number of participating countries has increased from 20 countries in 2019 to 35 countries in 2021, which is an international academic exchange platform to promote innovative research on Industry 4.0.)