Cloth & Conscience
Fashioning a Sustainable Future
Writer Shannon Severson // Photography by Chris Loomis
An Icelandic fisherman hoists a teeming mass of silver-skinned cod from the frigid waters of the North Atlantic onto his wind-tossed trawler — a portion of the more than 200,000 tons harvested annually in this remote island nation. Beyond what is consumed for food, Iceland’s 100% Fish Project’s zero-waste efforts are part of a vision for sustainability that stretches all the way to ASU FIDM, Arizona State University’s fashion school.
Fusion on First is the school’s gleaming 16-story atelier in downtown Phoenix that houses design studios, digital media labs and a textile lab. Here, overlooking the downtown skyline, Associate Professor Galina Mihaleva — an internationally award-winning fashion designer — transforms the carefully cleaned and preserved fish skin into laser-cut modules that create a material nine times stronger than lamb or cow leather. Mihaleva interlocks the circular and amygdaloid pieces to create an entirely new textile that can become a skirt one day and a handbag the next, a material experiment that embodies the program’s sustainability goals.
Mihaleva has studied, taught, designed and created couture fashion, wearable art and technologically advanced pieces with sustainability at their core. She’s lived and worked around the world and now teaches Materials and Techniques at the institution. Her work has earned global recognition: the Tiffany Award at Paris Fashion Week (2016), the Rumi Award in the United States (2016) and the WOW Designer Development Award in New Zealand (2024), among dozens of international exhibitions and red-carpet showings, including regular appearances at the Cannes Film Festival.
One of her primary textiles is polyester — a fabric that can take up to 150 years to decompose but can be stretched, twisted, formed, heated and then reused time and again to create impactful fashion. ASU FIDM is both Mihaleva’s classroom and experimentation lab.
The workstations at Fusion on First are a convergence of curiosities: lasered fish-skin modules cluster beside a stack of vintage wool jackets; a 3D-printed clasp cools next to a boiled-polyester bubble skirt. At one end of the state-of-the-art lab, Mihaleva can print human-cell-sized sensors onto a flexible sheet while across the room, students like recent graduate Isabelle Johnson-Heston lay out portfolios of capstone pieces that read like a syllabus for sustainable fashion.
The $28 million expansion of ASU FIDM into Los Angeles — in the former FIDM building — was designed to put this kind of experimentation and career preparation into one fashion school with two complementary, collaborative locations. The school’s home in downtown Los Angeles boasts the ASU FIDM Museum, with a 15,000-piece fashion collection that serves as a resource for faculty and students, as well as the community.
As Tinseltown glam fuses with desert design, Mihaleva embodies the promise of ASU FIDM. Trained at Bulgaria’s Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree, she learned textiles “from the fiber up.” She learned English upon her arrival in Phoenix, picking up the vernacular of the fashion industry here by earning a fashion design associate degree at Phoenix College, then going on to a doctorate at ASU. She has spent a career folding craft into research.
“It’s about knowing your material — in intimate relationship with your medium,” she says.
That intimacy has produced wearable high-fashion installations — “Tranquility,” which visualizes urban noise via embedded LEDs, and “Sense,” a coral-like dress made from 100 yards of manually twisted fabric that cycles from brilliant color to stark white to represent reef bleaching using 15 years of reef data encoded into the dress — alongside applied projects for hospitals and rehabilitation clinics.
Mihaleva’s work utilizes soft sensors embedded in textiles to detect environmental pollutants, conductive-thread breath monitors that comfort young cancer patients and soft exoskeletons paired with virtual reality therapy to restore muscle movement for stroke survivors. She collaborates with engineers, neuroscientists and technological experts.
“Wearable tech can be hopeful. It can improve people’s lives,” she says.
Her assignments push students to think beyond aesthetics: materials, lifecycle tradeoffs and the social impacts of design become studio work. All begin with a personal story, and the details are negotiated from there.
One student with scoliosis had been mocked for wearing the required medical brace in her native Iran. Mihaleva encouraged her to work with her doctors, body-scan technology and 3D printing to create a fashionable brace that could be worn with pride.
“When she presented it, we all cried,” Mihaleva recalls. “It was something very personal. And with 3D printing it can be affordable. Wearable tech enables a better future.”
Those lessons are exactly what students like Johnson-Heston wanted when she moved from FIDM’s Los Angeles campus—where she earned an associate degree in merchandising — to ASU’s new four-year program and graduated in 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Business and a minor in Sustainability. The transition shifted her perspective.
“I loved my time in Los Angeles, but the experiences that ASU was able to provide for me in such a seamless way — especially being able to go and study abroad in Florence — there was nothing like it,” she says.
Study abroad, she adds, turned abstract brand histories into tactile inspiration: thrift-based workshops that repurposed donated high-end fabric, studio visits to Gucci and Ferragamo, and professors still active in the industry.
The built environment at Fusion on First made a difference in very practical terms for Johnson-Heston. There, everything is at a student’s fingertips to learn, dream and experiment under the guidance of world-class professors.
Mihaleva says she’s a craftsperson who blurs the lines between craft and technology. The atelier’s knitting machines, looms, laser cutters and 3D printers are the best of both worlds — technology is a collaborator, not a replacement for human thoughts and touch.
“We continue the craft and use technology — including AI — to enable us to be faster and more precise,” she says.
For Johnson-Heston, the accessible labs and responsive advising reduced friction: “Seeing Fusion on First — it was immaculate. It has every tool you could imagine. The professors, counselors and staff always had an answer for me on the spot.”
Johnson-Heston embraced the chance to learn the hands-on basics of sketching, sewing and pattern reading after primarily focusing on the business side during her time in Los Angeles.
“I felt like I was learning in reverse, as I was a little bit older than the other students, but my professors were so understanding,” she recalls.
The payoff is craft fluency and market readiness while tapping into collaborative ASU research, internships and study abroad pathways that turn coursework into career-ready skills. Students also gain access to scholarships and industry luminaries. ASU FIDM students earned 10 awards from the prestigious 2025 Fashion Scholarship Fund competition, elevating the program’s national profile.
Through it all, sustainability remains a focus for designers like Mihaleva, who has innovated the reuse of polyester into award-winning couture designs — a fabric that takes 150 years to decompose — whereas wool becomes fertilizer when buried and can even be embedded with seeds. For Johnson-Heston, sustainability became more than just a buzzword.
“It means more than I thought it did,” she explains. “I learned from both programs that everyday life can affect our world. We can make little changes, pay more attention to labels and tags and what we eat and wear. It makes a big difference.”
Mihaleva envisions designers who can prototype sustainably and work across supply chains and professional disciplines.
“The future of fashion is no longer to just produce more, more, more collections,” she explains. “Now it’s ‘What do we produce and how do we help?’ As I get older, I realize that it’s better to meet one more person or help one more child than to make one more dress. What we are doing is changing lives.”
As fashion transforms futures, the work continues. Mihaleva guides her students while maintaining her professional practice: In March, her wearable art took center stage at Scottsdale Art Week’s Opening Night Vernissage, benefiting Phoenix Art Museum. The fashion presentation — part of the international art fair featuring more than 120 galleries at WestWorld — offered Arizona audiences a rare opportunity to witness how sustainable couture and technology-infused designs translate from laboratory to runway.
Meanwhile, Johnson-Heston works in retail management in Minnesota as she pursues internship opportunities and volunteers with Dress for Success, buoyed by the program she says “added confidence” and made her feel more prepared.
The promise of ASU FIDM is an institutional translation: craft practices elevated by research infrastructure that takes shape on a human scale in its meaningful application. The success metrics are simple — accomplished faculty that supports and elevates learning, creates an internship-to-job pipeline and boosts the local economy as Phoenix becomes a central hub of the fashion industry.
As those metrics materialize, the fabric of improved lives and new careers will grace runways and medical rehabilitation facilities, and students will keep learning the art of turning scarcity into abundance. That alone is a useful definition of sustainable education: not the absence of waste, but a program capable of turning constraints into creative systems that endure.