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The purpose of this project is to provide an account of the student experience at a higher education institution known for its holistic approach to sustainability education.

A qualitative study was conducted at Green Mountain College (GMC), an environmental liberal arts school in Poultney, VT; 55 students participated in focus group interviews.

Students articulate that the most valuable gains that manifest at GMA are a variety of new capacities for science literacy, anthropological appreciation, the triple bottom line, a sense of place, systems, empathic decision-making and reasoning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and practical techniques supporting self-sufficiency. Prompting these emergent outcomes was a philosophy of practice at Green Mountain College, which included place-based techniques, empowerment, personalization, community ecology and charting polarity. Many students described their seeming metamorphosis as uncomfortable, and some felt isolated from the outside paradigm.

A key implication of the study’s findings is that in a holistic setting, the line between the informal and formal curriculum are significantly blurred and what is implicitly communicated through university practices and values is what most transforms the students’ explicit understanding of sustainability.

Sustainability education is far more than technique, far more than what a lone instructor can manifest in students. While the persistence of individual faculty members is important, this evidence suggests that the fertile conditions for transformation may be more fruitful when faculty members work together with a collective sense of responsibility and a well-articulated paradigm.

The advantage of the present study is that it examines the perceived impact of a focus on sustainability across curricula and school by considering the educational environment as a whole. The experiences of students from many different majors who are involved in a holistic, sustainability-infused curriculum at a university with a history of successful post-graduation job placements in the sustainability field are explored here.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether fashion leadership is an obstacle or catalyst to consumers’ purchasing intention in sustainable clothing product-service systems (CPSS), which include sale of redesigned clothing, clothing repair/alteration service, clothing renting, clothing swapping and style consultancy service.

The present study examined the causal relationship between fashion leadership and intentions to engage in CPSS. By applying the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study also considered self-interest and social values in consumers’ intention to adopt CPSS. A series of multiple regression analyses and structural equation modeling were conducted on data collected from 431 females in the USA through an online survey.

A significantly positive influence of fashion leadership on consumers’ intention to engage in each CPSS retail model was found; and demographics, including age, income and education have moderating influences on these relationships. Furthermore, the results also confirmed positive relationships between fashion leadership with attitude and subjective norms as well as overall intention to adopt CPSS. Several implications related to the present study were discussed.

This study is the first of its kind in several aspects; first, affirming the argument that fashion need not contradict sustainability; second, extending TPB model by adopting fashion leadership as the external factor; third, providing new CPSS retail models advocating less material consumption by increasing product longevity and utilizing intangible services. Current studies mainly focus on the synthesis of general benefits of product-service systems (PSS) and how PSS are operated. Existing studies on CPSS primarily focus on consumer preferences and motivations in only a few exploratory qualitative studies. This is the first time that a quantitative study has been conducted to determine the interrelationship between the individual personal characteristic, fashion leadership and the intention to adopt PSS in the clothing industry.