Mrs. Deborah Wills-Ives
Details
Department: Fashion & Textiles
Campus: City Campus Australia
deborah.wills-ives@rmit.edu.au
ORCID: 0000-0001-7463-301X
About
Dr. Deborah Wills-Ives is a fashion academic at RMIT University whose scholarship interrogates the evolution of fashion design education and how the value afforded to designing and making fashion shifts according to the curricular and institutional systems in which it is situated. Her creative practice draws on the fashion archive, engaging with historical ideologies of care, repair, and remaking through slow design principles. This critical approach informs her pedagogy, fostering innovative strategies that expand possibilities for reimagining fashion design practice through making.
Teaching interests
Dr Wills-Ives is a studio-based lecturer who teaches Core and Option courses in RMIT’s School of Fashion and Textiles. She currently co-coordinates Fashion Design Industry Techniques, a first-year Core course in the Bachelor of Fashion (Design). The course adopts an industry-engaged approach to teaching and learning, with material resources donated by second-hand-sector partners. Dr Wills-Ives introduced the use of donated materials to support student learning in 2022, and this approach continues to inform the creative outcomes developed by students.
She also co-coordinates Fashion Design Partnered Project, a second-year Core course that develops studio-based projects with external partners, including Melbourne Fringe (2025) and the RMIT Design Archives’ Hall Ludlow Toiles project.
Drawing on her specialist knowledge of tailoring techniques, Dr Wills-Ives coordinates Custom Design Industry Techniques, an Option course focused on the construction of the classic tailored jacket. She also delivers workshops in Fashion, Textiles, Place and Story, drawing on her interest in collective craft-making, using the English paper piecing (EPP) method, working solely with discarded materials to explore cultural connections.
Research interests
Dr Wills-Ives is the lead investigator of a six-month pilot study in 2026 exploring how creative practices involved in making fashion and textile objects can encourage young people to make more sustainable fashion choices.
Using a combination of qualitative and practice-based methods, the study will investigate how fashion and textile making can foster self-reflection, social inclusion and a sense of belonging—practices that are increasingly important in responding to the climate crisis. The research will involve three on-site, co-designed initiatives with young people at Viewbank College, informed by Manzini’s (2014) approach to co-design.
The study addresses two central questions:
- How do young Australians relate to fashion and express their identities through dress?
- How can fashion-making practices deepen young people’s understanding of fashion and sustainable consumption?
The project has been developed by the Making Fashion Change group within RMIT University’s CO: MADE Research Centre. The group brings together interdisciplinary fashion researchers to examine the role of fashion and dress in advancing social inclusion, belonging and sustainability.
