Program

In recent years, the issue of “decolonizing” museum collections has become increasingly important for museum directors and curators. Many museums prominently feature masterpieces derived from global imperial plunder, and a number of countries have long demanded their return. With a few exceptions, such as Montezuma’s crown, these tend not to be items of dress. However, the concept of decolonizing the museum goes beyond the actual theft of objects during periods of overt western imperialism. Museums conserve cultural objects, and also educate the public about these objects. Yet, in western museums, the voices of those whose lands and treasures were stolen are usually silenced. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of diversity within museums. As Lonnie Burch put it: “The museum field is awash in whiteness.”

JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games: What is the Awarding Gap

Like many Universities, London College of Fashion is challenged with a persistent awarding gap. This is racialised (and often class-based), meaning that students from these backgrounds are less likely to be awarded an upper-class degree in comparison to their white counterparts.

Our guiding principles for the coming decade aim “to give students the education they need to flourish in a changing world”*which highlights the need to change how we operate, in order to meet shifting demands. However, what does it mean to flourish? Who flourishes, who does not, and how can we ensure that all students, of all backgrounds, have the best outcomes and experience? These questions are central to social purpose and decolonial practices of delivering a curriculum fit for 21st Century. If, as our guiding principles convey, everyone has the right to excellent teaching and an excellent learning environment1, how do we account for the inequalities of this most persistent of awarding gaps?

JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games: What is the awarding gap and why it exists is a collaborative response to this issue and employs an equity lense for staff and students to understand, identify, and eliminate the awarding gap. This is a collaborative project that brings together expertise from four areas of LCF; Academic Enhancement, Cultural & Historic Studies, Academic Support and Social Purpose. This intervention draws upon contemporary motifs and popular culture offering recognisable entry points into a complex issue. Framed as an initiative to ‘decentre fashion’, JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games, (and its sibling workshop #WeAreTheGap) centre problem-based practice and encourage design thinking to ‘design out’ the problems of awarding differentials and use principles of empathy, fairness, and justice to unpack anti-colonial thinking and practices.

#WeAreTheGap is staff facing intervention challenging the behaviour and thinking that perpetuates the awarding gap at London College of Fashion. It acknowledges that regardless of the varying talents of the student cohorts both pre and post-pandemic, the awarding gap between Black and White students remains stubbornly consistent. #WeAreTheGap takes the awarding gap as a starting point to embedding decolonising practices that make visible and dismantle the barriers students face. This intervention acknowledges that colleagues will need be made aware of the barriers invisibly embedded within the custom and practice of the university and offer creative tools everyone across all job families to use to bridge the chasm.

#WeAreTheGap takes a posthuman approach to creating interventions to support students that fosters co-creation of knowledge, emotional resilience, communication, agility, and the agency needed to negotiate the invisible barriers that restrict access to first class degrees. It moves away from the deficit focused model and challenges staff to use new perspectives and tools to actively eliminate the gap even where it is imperceptible in daily practice but is reflected in the awarding data. This intervention contributes to new pedagogical practices that focus on growth through the admission of unknowingness. The cross-curricular working-groups bring with it opportunities to adopt an unfolding ontological practice and imaginative design-led thinking to design out the awarding gap. The premise is if the custom and practice of the university and its staff unwittingly perpetuate and maintain the awarding gap, then by actively working together to exaggerate the interventions needed to eliminate the gap. we can achieve equity. #WeAreTheGap offers ways of working that intrinsically decentre, decolonises and deconstruct barriers by empowering people – activating people away from former fears and paralysis of tackling race equity by providing an active framework for active anti-racism and parity of awarding degrees.

Fashion history is full of iconic objects which have enabled the construction of a canonic and mediatic narrative of a given culture. The trench coat for the Brits, the Breton striped shirt for the French and the solar suits for Italians for example became sartorial concepts embedded in costume history and in the media representations of the given culture. The present research, based on a collaboration between a fashion theorist and a fashion designer, and developed at MOME, was inspired by Jane Tynan’s book on the trench coat and its cultural history, and seeks to answer two questions. On the one hand, what sartorial symbol defines Central and Eastern Europe - a region where the cultural dressing up from traditional costumes to industrial fashion happened mostly in the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, by trying to avoid an oversimplification of complex cultural and societal processes driving the commodification of clothing culture in this area and the tempting but dangerous process of creating self-colonising cultural parallels, focus was placed on the peasant shirt of Central and Eastern Europe. This garment works with a pleated cut line compared to the tightened sartorial structure of the trench coat. Research on the media representations linked to the trench coat and the Eastern European peasant shirt inspired the creation of pieces of clothing combining pleated and tailored sartorial elements. The research combines an analysis of the media and cultural representations of a garment and a design-thinking method with the aim of creating a sartorial construct based on both pleated and tailored material structures. The garments issuing this process was described by Star and Griesemer’s concept of the boundary object used in technology studies and which, in our view, is applicable to a wide range of contemporary fashion objects.

This paper explores the significance and benefits of incorporating attention to diversity of religion and belief within the decolonising impetus of contemporary critical fashion studies. For a fashion industry and creative arts education sector that often regards itself as default secular, religion is frequently relegated to the exoticised domain of aesthetic ‘inspiration’ rather than recognised as a component of identity and dress practice among fashion personnel and consumers. Religious concerns mostly surface only when brands are called out for religious appropriation or insensitivity – inserting religious cultures into debates most often concerned with the protection of fashion and textile heritage associated with race and ethnicity or nation and community.
This paper re-examines the concepts of choice, cultural ownership, and cultural authenticity that have become foundational in disputes about cultural appropriation by examining an instance where cross-cultural dressing is imposed rather than individually chosen: the wearing of the of the abaya (and sometimes headscarf) mandated for all women – nationals and visitors - by the Saudi state until late 2019. Based on interviews with women visiting Saudi Arabia for work and with Saudi women acting as fashion mediators in guiding visitors in abaya-wearing protocols, I explore if, how, and to what extent concerns about religious cultural ownership are similar or different to other forms of contested cultural ownership such as are expressed concerning ethnicity, race, or/and nation. With the abaya coded contemporaneously by Saudi women and men as a cultural rather than religious garment, the paper explores both the impact on self-actualisation for non-Saudis of wearing a garment that they may indeed regard as religious (including for Muslim women from non-abaya wearing habitus) and the potential of fashion dialogue as cultural exchange.

Although fashion has dozens of siocio-political features, in mainstream fashion brands seems that the cultural aspects are significantly less represented.
The present proposal stems from an ongoing research process in which the author collected and cross-checked factual information to understand how cultural appropriation and appreciation developed in the established structure of global fashion, starting from a period ranging from 2010 when the attention on cultural appropriation grew.
The first results already speak volumes about the persistent problems of the contemporary fashion industry, appropriating other cultures, and the lack of authenticity still finds its place within the hegemony of the Eurocentric and Western-centered market, which does not imply a holistic approach to cultural sustainability. The overall picture that emerged at the end of this work suggests some reflections. There is an urgent need for fashion deconstruction, given the events of Western sellers being called out for racist or stereotypical imagery. From Dolce & Gabbana’s November 2018 “DG Loves China” adv, to the balaclava sweater with red lips that called to mind Blackface imagery released by Gucci in February 2019, companies demonstrated small cultural awareness in their communication. Indeed, contributing to a greater understanding towards little-talked-about topics such as cultural appropriation could lead towards deconstructing fashion dynamics production axes in its complexity.

How can we work towards a decolonized, anti-racist, bodymind loving, non-binary fashion system to shape inclusive ways of teaching and learning fashion? The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated fashion education’s active role in the current global polycrisis, with its systemic roots in the violent histories of colonialism, enslavement and global capitalism. In this practice-led keynote, we build upon our contributions in Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution and amplify the movement of fashion educators who are confronting these ongoing histories of harm through everyday pedagogical practices. We heed bell hooks and engage in dialogue to envisage fashion education as a practice of freedom: we bring together anti-racist and anti-ableist frameworks and pedagogical practices to propose how we might collectively occupy spaces, including our keynote, to orient social justice.

Working collectively, our keynote invites the audience to question the fashion system by taking apart a garment that they have brought with them, unpicking the garment stitches. Through this process of fashion deconstruction, we ask them to reflect on the joy, pain and memories of fashion that both connect and disconnect us from one another. We also share examples from our work as fashion educators—grounding our stories in a humble recounting of our own embodiments and situated knowledges in fashion schools in the U.S. and U.K.

Through the actions of unpicking fashion, we will question how social justice-oriented fashion education practices might emerge from critical intellectual traditions built upon dissent and counter hegemonic struggles of marginalized peoples. We will reflect upon who made our garments; how the fabric was woven or spun, sewn, embellished and worn; and what is at stake for each of us as we work to change the fashion system. We will then ask the audience to write or draw on their unpicked garment, sharing one approach that they commit to doing or to continuing to de-link fashion education from dominant structures of power. Next, as a group, we will collectively reconstruct our garments to create a connected canvas in order to manifest how relationality, community and interdependence must serve as the foundation for mobilizing fashion education as a practice of freedom.

As evident in the themes of this conference, the need to dismantle western ways of framing fashion theory has become abundantly apparent. These western ways include binary and linear biases, including nature versus culture, fashion versus dress, production versus (or “progression” to) consumption, and evolutionary change. Circularity and circuity are among the alternatives to binary and linear frameworks in fashion studies, including the metaphors/models of circular economies and circuits of style-fashion-dress. Recognizing that every metaphor/model has its limits, this presentation aims to analyze the above through the lenses of ontology and temporality. Here, I take “ontology” to mean the study of “reality-making", drawing on indigenous critiques of the western colonialist, positivist idea that there is a single objective reality; and “temporality” to address how people perceive and experience time and speed. I hope to open up further conversations about metaphors/models of reality and time, including how they might be revised or mixed in order to foster understandings of multiple, entangled realities and avenues for knowledge production in critical fashion studies.

The paper intends to overcome the conceptual limitations of the past and present relationships between fashion history and industrial time by integrating the contribution of fashion studies with the current reflections on the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene perspective allows us to reconsider the industrial time of fashion, which is not a void dynamic of change or a postmodern exercise of quotations, but a process that engenders wastes and remains that are in close connection with the historical events and have a significant impact of the future of humanity.
By doing so, the paper aims to tackle the social and environmental responsibilities of fashion history, thus filling an existing gap. It claims that the tasks of fashion history are not only the interpretation and protection the traces of the past, but also the understanding of the multiple layers of times embedded in the concept of Anthropocene. It draws on a ‘polytemporal’ perspective capable of problematise the current ecological crisis and identify new ways to inhabit the Earth.

Many scholars claim that fashion is modern. This often goes together with the claim that fashion is Western. Fashion is said to begin as early as the late medieval period or as late as the 1850s in Paris. But is it possible to think of fashion as rooted in any specific time and place? Fashion has an uncanny, nearly ahistorical ability to transport ideas in a way that seems to smirk at their original context. Every moment in fashion is what Alexander Nagel calls an “anachronic time-bomb.” Being in fashion is like being a revolutionary, bringing what is “out” back “in” at a critical moment. Indeed, the more obsolete or out-of-style something is, the riper it is for a renaissance. The old and the new—the past and the present—seem to collapse in fashion, for fashion constantly jumps out of time and space, especially when it presents itself as “timely.” Yet where and when does fashion stand as it jumps out and in? To borrow from elsewhere, as to borrow from the past, there must first be a past or a “there” to borrow from, and imagining fashion as continually borrowing leads back to the question of its origins: how did fashion begin this process? Where exactly is fashion headed in always returning to where it was before? Is it possible to think of human beings—or even to think—without fashion? And if fashion’s modern arrival is linked to a novel awareness of temporality in changes of dress, what would it mean for such an awareness to begin? Can clothes be conceived as simply clothes without denying the very thing which makes us human? The positing of a pre-fashion (perhaps, pre-human) era and the hope of future immortality may lurk behind fashion’s modern and Western bias.

In 2019 Camera Nazionale della Moda launched the Manifesto "Including Diversity", announcing its unprecedented engagement with a policy of inclusion of "designers of different ethnicities, cultures and beliefs" into the Italian fashion system. Beyond the intent to welcome and support designers, the Manifesto does not posit any self-questioning analysis of the attitudes and modalities that affected previous Italian relationships with non-western vestimentary cultures and their creativity in fashioning the body.

In this paper, I argue for the necessity of exploring from a decolonial perspective forms, visual narratives and editorials that have characterised the Italian fashion representational statute since the 1960s. At that time, the fashion industry did not rely longer upon the Italian cultural heritage as the primary scenario and the undiscussed fabric of its sartorial styles and divulged its image by "colonising" distant and mainly non-western geographical regions whose cultural heritage and modalities of fashioning the body turned into a desirable source of sartorial inspiration. In the wake of the Italian colonial past model, spanning from the late nineteenth century expansionistic ambitions to the Fascist regime, and within the logic of Eurocentric narratives, this paradigmatic mutation triggered attitudes of nonchalant cultural appropriation. If, on the one hand, expeditions, mappings, photographic shoots mainly set in virgin beaches, tropical jungles, dunes, archaeological sites (“We are the land” reads the infamous Christian Dior’s 2019 Sauvage ad), responsive to penetration strategies of a neo-colonial tourism, nurtured the multi-faceted fascination for the exotic on the pages of the most popular domestic and international fashion magazines conjuring up a mythical, undefined and self-perpetuating ailleurs; on the other one, that visual repertoire, instrumental to the exploration/exploitation of territories and the eroticisation of bodies, paralleled the appropriation of sartorial forms that according to the Eurocentric oppositional thinking and evolutionary notion of progress was ossified in fallacious dichotomies like dress versus fashion, tradition versus modernity.

This paper, accounting for the notion of non-fashion as symptomatic of the colonial bias, aims to investigate the surviving forms of coloniality, neo-coloniality and crypto-coloniality that have remained a largely untapped territory of the Italian fashion narratives. It will offer insight into their construction through the comparison of articles from different fashion magazines spanning from “Grazia’s Travels” (Grazia, 1960s) to the all-Italian genre of “Fantacoloniale” (Vogue Italia, 1976), from the controversial “Black Issue” (Vogue Italia, 2008) to the uncanny “Rebranding Africa” (L'Uomo Vogue 2012). From this point of view, particular consideration will also assume the geopolitical roles played by Italian fashion while experiencing the position of being either a

colony or a colonizer. Special attention deserves the Italian relationship with American fashion journalism whose drive for exoticism impacted Vogue Italia editorials.

In addition, and as a concluding step, this article calls for a broader scope in the study of fashion where the practice of decolonisation and the challenging instances of the diasporic agency may open up an egalitarian, inclusive space of fashion inhabitance and provide an alternative epistemological framework capable of intersecting the multiplicity of subject positions.

In the last decades, there has been growing concern about the environmental impact of the fashion industry, which is responsible for water consumption, chemical pollution, CO2 emissions, and textile waste. In particular, fast fashion, a business model based on offering consumers something new all the time in the form of cheap, trendy products, is responsible for the drastic increase in textile production and fashion consumption, leading to greater environmental impact (Niinimäki et. al., 2020).
Among fast fashion companies, Shein, which was founded in China in 2008 under the name Zzko, has since then grown to become a real competitor to leading fast fashion companies such as Inditex and H&M (Curry, 2023). According to Bloomberg, the value of the brand reached $100 billion in April 2022.
The growth and internationalization process includes expansion into three different markets - Europe, the Americas, and India and the Middle East - and completes four rounds of financing (Zhang, Gou, 2021).
Until 2014, Shein purchased its goods from wholesale markets in Guangzhou and then became a "fully integrated retailer" after acquiring Romwe, a Chinese retailer. Today, the company can develop hundreds of new products every day, tailored to different regions and tastes (Liu, 2022). Thanks to a business model that eliminates logistics, warehousing, sales, distribution, and other intermediaries, the company has developed an improved cross-border consumer-manufacturer (C2M) model (Cuofano, 2023). Low cost and differentiation are the key means of creating brand equity, enabling Shein to gain a strong competitive advantage in developing international business and achieving profitability and profit growth. Shein produces and distributes products and services of homogeneous type and quality in more than 220 countries and regions worldwide; thanks to the advantages of Chinese production, garments can be produced in less than three days (usually 5-7 days), which enables Shein to launch more than 50,000 new items per month (Liu, 2022) and adapt products to different consumer preferences, culture, and politics. However, to meet this demand, Shein employs hundreds of unregistered companies in Guangzhou known to regularly violate Chinese labour laws, provide unacceptable working conditions, and pose extreme fire risks, according to Public Eye's report (Kollbrunner, 2021).
Nowadays, Shein, which does not sell in China, describes itself as an international B2C fast fashion e-commerce platform that focuses on women's clothing, but also offers men's clothing, children's clothing, accessories, shoes, bags, and other fashion items. Through a very aggressive use of social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, and the support of many influencers, the platform had targeted Generation Z, but Millennials and older consumers are not averse to buying from it either.
The low prices and the size inclusive catalogue continue to attract customers, although ethical concerns are growing about such an ultra-fast fashion business model that threatens both the environment and workers (Martin, 2022).
The paper presents the results of a qualitative research project aimed at understanding the motivations and possible concerns of Italian consumers when buying from the Chinese fast fashion giant. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with a sample of Shein customers to determine their main reasons for purchase, consumption habits, and sustainability issues.

References

Cuofano, G. (2023), “Consumer-To-Manufacturer (C2M) Business Model”, retrieved at https://fourweekmba.com/[…]/#:~:text=Consumer%2Dto%2Dmanufacturer%20(C2M)%20is%20a%20model%20connecting,quality%20products%20at%20lower%20prices.
Curry, D. (2023), “Shein Revenue and Usage Statistics (2023)”, retrieved at: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/shein-statistics/
Kollbrunner, T. (2021), “Toiling away for Shein. Looking behind the shiny façade of the Chinese “ultra-fast fashion” giant”, retrieved at https://stories.publiceye.ch/en/shein/
Liu, J. (2022), “Research on the Business Strategy and Deficiency of the Fast Fashion Industry to Enhance Development-a Case Study of Shein”, In 2nd International Conference on Economic Development and Business Culture (ICEDBC 2022) (pp. 1794-1801). Atlantis Press.
Martin I. (2022), “Chinese Fast Fashion Giant Shein Hires Former Bear Stearns Deal-Maker Ahead Of IPO”, retrieved at: https://www.forbes.com/[…]/?sh=572b321f1d81
Niinimäki, K., Peters, G., Dahlbo, H., Perry, P., Rissanen, T., & Gwilt, A. (2020), “The environmental price of fast fashion”, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment,1(4), 189-200.
Zhang, L., Gou, Y. (2021), “Value-Creation Strategy of Nanjing SHEIN”, International Journal of Frontiers in Sociology, 3(20), pp.89-94.

Fashion and sustainability are now a couple of concepts that despite to their traditional incompatibility are very often associated in every kind of discourses and practices from both production and consumption sphere. However the concept of sustainability continues to remain vague opening at misunderstanding or misleading interpretations. From one side, fashion brands are trying to build multiple different strategies in terms of production and communication with which, on the other side, generations of consumers – according to their level of consciousness – are interacting and reshaping through their experience.
In order to understand the different perceptions of fashion sustainability, between consumer experiencing and branding strategies, a qualitative research was conducted in 2020-21 by a group of senior students at Sapienza. sustainability, from the perspective of Gen-Z, Millennials and Boomers. The study is based on qualitative in depth interviews, collected in 19 Countries in the world, resulting in more than 200 interviewers.
The interviews have been structured into six different content areas, listed as following:

1. Definition and Meanings Attributed to the concept
2. Consciousness and Information Seeking
3. Consumers’ Behaviors and Practices
4. Pandemic and Sustainability
5. Relationship between sustainability and brands
6. Interviewee Info, focusing on sociodemographic information.

For the purpose of the conference the author intend to present an overview of the results, starting from the definition of sustainability among different cultural repertoires and the level of awareness of consumers in consuming in a sustainable way, also according or in contrast to brands strategy.

The quest for wellness has long been associated with elitist transformational experiences, luxury activewear and exclusive and exotic health retreats. Yoga and other contemporary wellness influencers perpetuate heteropatriarchal ideals of white, young, able, cisgender, athletically thin bodies. This is particularly evident on social media platforms such as Instagram, where wellness aspirational brands profit from the internalization of the patriarchal gaze along with the amplification of modernist fashion and luxury design codes. However, within the culturally and economically significant wellness industry worth $4.5 trillion USD in 2021, there are health and wellbeing activists and influencers challenging the narrative through the adoption of a decolonial mindset and exposure of the systems of oppression associated with the heteronormative healthy and fit body. This paper draws combined insights from social media (Banet-Weiser 2012-2017; Kamis et al 2017; Abidin et al 2019), fashion theory (de Perthuis and Findlay 2019; Featherstone 2007; Rocamora 2017-2022) and gender and queer studies (Butler 2006; McCann & Monhagan 2020) to discuss the representation and promotion of non-normative, queer and marginalized identities in the wellness industry. Through this interdisciplinary theoretical approach, I ground the discussion in the visual analysis of the Instagram feed or grid of three different cases of wellness social media influencers. Specifically looking into the embodied repetitions and rituals of gender performativity through fashion codes, de/reconstruction of gender(s) and intersectional set of relations and tensions of the mind and body of: @veggiemijas: a vegan collective for women, femmes, and non-binary people of color; @uncomfortable_bliss: a black ‘body activist’ size-inclusive socialpreneur and; @decolonizing_fitness led by Ilya Parker: a coach, physical therapist and self-identified “fat, black non-binary trans masculine person” aiming to make fitness more affirming and accessible to all bodies. This paper considers the paradoxes and tensions that emerge
when looking at these social media influencers queering, destabilising, subverting and disrupting heteronormativity and patriarchy through their digital strategies on Instagram and the market value this subversion carries. This paper also discusses how these subversive strategies challenge and trouble heteronormativity through the assimilation or transgression of fashion and luxury codes. In doing so, I contend that these social media influencers call into question ideals around good design, good taste and morality foregrounding how wellness visual social media platforms might be another site for the dismantling of Western-centric fashion, gender and class narratives.

KEY WORDS: Wellness Industry, social media, Queering Fashion Codes, Morality, Troubled Normativity




REFERENCE LIST:
Abidin, Crystal, and Megan Lindsay. Brown. Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame. First edition. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2019.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2012.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Djafarova, Elmira, and Oxana Trofimenko. “‘Instafamous’ - Credibility and Self-Presentation of Micro-Celebrities on Social Media.” Information, communication & society 22, no. 10 (2019): 1432–1446.
de Perthuis, Karen, and Rosie Findlay. “How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram.” Fashion theory 23, no. 2 (2019): 219–242.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. 2nd ed. Theory, Culture & Society (Unnumbered). Los Angeles; London: SAGE, 2007.
Khamis, Susie, Lawrence Ang, and Raymond Welling. “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers.” Celebrity studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 191–208.
McCann, Hannah, and Monaghan Whitney. Queer Theory Now: from Foundations to Futures. London: Red Globe Press, 2020.
Rocamora, Agnès. “Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion.” Fashion theory 21, no. 5 (2017): 505–522.
Rocamora, Agnès. “The Datafication and Quantification of Fashion: The Case of Fashion Influencers.” Fashion theory 26, no. 7 (2022): 1109–1133

The language is intrinsic in configurations and narratives of our world (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) and instrumental to the necessary transition towards a more responsible, respectful, and inclusive fashion system(s). Given the persistent and pervasive extent of the predominant fashion system’s negative environmental, social and cultural impact, it is crucial that we critically analyse the production and reproduction of ‘fashion sustainability’-related discourse(s) to unveil another essential reason-why for the perpetuation of the injustices of the fashion system in its predominant, capital-led form. Central to the production, circulation and dissemination of fashion, the media have a crucial role in the field of fashion, thus the undoubtful need for firm steps “Towards Fashion Media for Sustainability” (Skjold, 2016). Yet, the critical reflection on the fashion media’s symbolic production concerning sustainability remains relatively limited, with some more systemic discourse analyses being undertaken only recently (Baker Jones, 2019; Baker Jones and Hawley, 2017).
Based on an in-depth critical discourse study following the Discourse-Historical Approach, the present contribution builds on that need to critically examine the predominant discourses and focuses on their creation and perpetuation on the pages of one of the most influential fashion magazines Vogue Italia, and its supplement, Vogue Talents. Through a selection of discursive units implying a ‘West and the Rest’ dynamic, it will be shown how the fashion magazine’s symbolic production is implicative of and perpetuating the power dynamics inherited by the colonial and neocolonial era, which under the adjustment and charity programmes have swallowed the pluralities of fashion creation and relation-with practices. It will also be discussed how, only recently, tendencies towards postcolonialism as a form of knowledge incorporating decentralisation, critical thought and activism were traced in brand representations while leaving much room for improvement, especially when the legitimisation dynamics are put in question and deconstruction.

Our expanded and expanding field needs radical, open-access approaches to publishing in order to amplify emerging voices and reach new global audiences. We present the work we have been doing with our journal team to de-centre our field through the open-access, academic, and digitally formatted journal Fashion Studies. The journal is led by a community of global, interdisciplinary voices that include our peer reviewers, authors, creative practitioners, and our editorial board. Our philosophy is collaborative and we propose to co-present as a trio: the publication’s co-founders and editors Dr. Ben Barry and Dr. Alison Matthews David and the managing editor Jaclyn Marcus. As part of its mission statement, Fashion Studies advocates for the democratic dissemination of scholarly and creative work that removes western and elitist barriers and paywalls. Fashion Studies was founded on the belief that open-access publishing is a key tool in challenging these hierarchies, pushing back against the exploitative corporate publishing monopoly that profits from publicly funded and free academic and creative labour.
Fashion Studies published its first special issue, Fashioning Resurgence, on Indigenous fashion on Turtle Island in November 2022 and our recent volume features scholars and work based in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Peru, and the United States. This paper shares key tenets of open access publishing and accessibility in the context of our field, the processes of founding and maintaining a fashion journal, and the diverse disciplinary approaches, projects, voices, and experiences that have contributed to the publication and its success. We confess to the realities and significant challenges of open access publishing, offering an analysis of the trials we have faced. The presentation concludes with a discussion of the potential of journals like Fashion Studies as well as the development of open access publishing in the future. We are hopeful about the role of open access publishing to facilitate connection across the wider field of fashion, offering an innovative and accessible platform to share our work.

This paper will surface the continuities between colonial legacies and the political, economic and cultural effects of current efforts to decentre the fashion canon. In doing so, it makes an urgent call for those who critically examine the constituting practices of the fashion industry to interrogate the unspoken agendas within decolonial projects across the network of fashion design, production, consumption and representation.
Whilst there has been notable scholarly critique spanning decades on the westerncentric standards and conceptions of fashion and dress (Baizerman, Eicher and Cerny, 1993., Lewis, 2003., Niessen, 2020), the murder of George Floyd in 2020 served as a provocation for western fashion studies (Slade and Jansen, 2020: 809 – 810), curricula, design and business (Boyce, 2021: 120) to acknowledge and attempt to confront, the existing hierarchies embedded within their respective traditions, structures and systems in synthesis. Post-BlackLivesMatter, when an alignment with discourse and activities pertaining to decolonisation, deconstruction and decentration is expected, brands and cultural institutions have become well versed in the language of activism.
Yet the disparities in the promises made by the fashion industry and what it ultimately delivered, considered in conjuncture with the complexity of measuring and tracing the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion strategies (Friedman et al., 2021) have raised questions as to the tangible impacts of affirmative action programmes (Ambás, 2022: 17-31) and thus, their credibility. Furthermore, within these purported manifestations of egalitarianism there are failures by the West, where the needs, voices and truths of the very individuals and communities these movements seek to represent and liberate remain neglected and thus, in many cases the inner critiques, acts of resistance, value and perhaps most significantly, the agency (Táíwò, 2022) of the Rest is negated.
Whilst the presentation recognises decolonisation a potentially powerful tool in providing fashion systems which visibly represent our globalised society, it will also locate it as a form of corporate activism and as such, a lucrative new weapon in the artillery of the capitalist fashion industry. Heeding the observations of Sylvia Wynter, who traced the implications of the cooption of liberatory discourse by the mainstream as a catalyst in the subsequent demise of movements for Black creative empowerment and emancipation (Wynter, 2006: 108 - 115), the paper will raise a challenge to the performative patterns of apparent progress. In considering decoloniality through the lens of Afropessimism, which argues, in part, that Black flesh and energy is instrumentalised for liberal agendas that fail to predicate nor prioritise Black ethical dilemmas (Wilderson, 2020: 15) the paper will posit that, in order to impact significant change, true decolonial praxis should be understood as constituted by a transference of power, its task must be healing and reparations and it should be considered imperative to curate a culture of care at its core.
KEYWORDS: Decolonial, corporate activism, Afropessimism, Black Lives Matter, fashion, performativity, value, care.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Ambas, Gabriela, “Corporate Activism in the Fashion Industry: a case study of the Black Lives Matter movement seen through four fashion brands”, in Comunicación y soluciones digitales para nuevos contenidos, Alba María Martínez Sala, Carmen Paradinas Márquez and Daniel Muñoz Sastre. (Gedisa: Spain, 2022), pp. 17 – 32.
Baizerman, Susanne., Eicher, Joanne.B. and Cerny, Catherine, “Eurocentrism in the Study of Ethnic Dress”, The Journal of the Costume Society of America, Vol. 20:1 (1993): pp. 19 – 28, https://doi.org/10.1179/036121193805298291
Boyce, Travis D. “Sneakers, corporate attitudes, and the Black Lives Matter movement: An interview with sneaker expert Sean Williams”, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, Vol: 8:1 (2021): pp. 117 – 123. Available At: https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00063_2
DiAngelo, Robin, “White Fragility”, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol.3:3 (2011): pp. 54-70, https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116
Friedman, Vanessa. et al, “The Fashion World Promised More Diversity. Here’s What We Found”, The New York Times, 4 March, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/[…]/Black-representation-fashion.html
Lewis, Van Dyk, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion”, Fashion Theory, 7:2, (2003): pp. 163 – 190. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270403778052113
Niessen, Sandra, “Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability”, Fashion Theory, Vol. 24:6 (2020): pp. 859-877. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984
Slade, Toby and Jansen, Maria Angela, “Letter from the editors: Decoloniality and fashion”, Fashion Theory, Vol. 24:6 (2020): pp. 809 -814. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800983
Táíwò, Olúfémi, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously.
(London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd, 2022)
Wilderson, Frank. B, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020)
Wynter, Sylvia, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project”, in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), pp. 107 – 169.

In the last few years, there has been an increasing attention to issues of decolonization, institutional racism, cultural appropriation in relation to both fashion education and fashion museums. While fashion scholars have been recently developed conference, publications and educational projects around these issues, museums’ collections and cultural heritage have been at the centre of discussion as they may often be the result, the embodiment and carriers of ideologies of privilege, class distinction and exploitation. This is also the case for fashion museums as historically collections of garments have often (but not only) been the repository of industry’s exclusiveness, privilege and exclusivity.
This paper explores these issues in relation to education practices in fashion museology and present the project ‘Objects in trouble’ developed within the MA in fashion studies at The New School Parsons Paris in collaboration with Palais Galliera - the Musée de la Mode de la ville de Paris. In this project, students were asked to explore an ‘object in trouble’ conserved in the collection of the Parisian museum and propose a critical and alternative interpretation of these artefacts through a performance. Moving away from static and canonical interpretational patterns of museums often based on celebrity culture, authorship and myth creation, the projects highlighted the complexities behind these artefacts focusing on issues of discursive construction of race, diversity, globalisation and national identity. At the same time, this project aimed to reflect on pedagogical practices and the ways theoretical discussion about decoloniality can be put into practice through a more performative approach to fashion studies and fashion theory at large.
This paper will discuss this project to reflect on the current debates on decolonizing fashion education and museums, particularly focusing on issues of performative education and the relation between practice & theory in fashion studies pedagogy. In this sense, the idea of ‘objects in trouble’ will not be applied exclusively to the project but as a key entry to reflect the difficulties faced today by fashion education and museums at large.

Responsible curation during the twenty-first century necessitates an interrogation of motives and narratives—including those of the curator and, in the case of fashion exhibitions, designers and their patrons. The work of fashion curators has been increasingly shaped by critical questions. In what ways can curators discuss “inconvenient” objects, such as those that are culturally appropriative? How can the impact of colonialism on museum collections be addressed and/or mediated within exhibitions?
Recent literature has outlined the significant connections between fashion studies and decoloniality. Although such writings are often theoretical, they have provided a framework for the development of more equitable fashion curatorial practices. Through a focus on two exhibitions—one from the recent past, and another being planned for the near future—this paper suggests tangible strategies for addressing both cultural appropriation and colonialism in fashion exhibitions.
In 2021, I curated the exhibition Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the Nineties for The Museum at FIT, New York. In an attempt to distill an entire decade of fashion into a selection of its most dominant trends, I identified a theme that I titled the “Global Wardrobe.” This referenced an increased interest in fashion from around the world, and showed that European and American designers, in particular, sometimes made sweeping and jumbled references to other cultures in their work. This trend related to a heightened awareness of globalization, and many people—in the fashion world and otherwise—were excited by the interconnectivity that globalization entailed. Yet the resulting fashions are often cause for alarm today, as many would be considered cultural appropriation.
Contextualizing these garments for contemporary viewers proved challenging. Without making excuses for the designers who were “borrowing” from other cultures, it was also necessary to evidence that this was common practice during the decade. An additional complication was the inclusion of work by designers who were referencing and examining their own cultures, which occasionally led to its own forms of controversy. The complexities and benefits of presenting
these narratives are outlined through the discussion of objects that were included in the exhibition.
The second exhibition, a work-in-progress, is a result of my Ph.D. studies on cabinets of curiosities and fashion. Dating from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, cabinets of curiosities were products of colonialism, and it has proven essential to acknowledge this association, even within a contemporary context. The approach to the discussion of colonialism within the planned exhibition has been informed not only by theoretical texts and a study of the history of fashion collections, but also by direct interactions with volunteers in a front-end evaluation survey. Twenty-nine participants were asked to describe their existing knowledge (if any) of cabinets of curiosities, and if they were familiar with their links to colonialism. Participants were then asked if they felt it was vital to address this subject within the exhibition. The responses were overwhelmingly affirmative, and numerous participants provided additional insights that have shaped my curatorial selections.
Toby Slade and M. Angela Jansen’s assertion that “decoloniality is a process, unachievable in a single bound”1 is indisputable, and the translation of fashion theory into curatorial practice is integral to the development of decolonial thinking and its dissemination to a broader public. The strategies employed in the exhibitions I highlight contribute to this critical and evolving discussion.


1. Toby Slade and M. Angela Jansen, “Letter from the Editors: Decoloniality and Fashion,” Fashion Theory 24, no. 6 (2020): 813.

To provide the warmth needed for clothing, Indigenous Arctic Peoples have developed highly specialised techniques for transforming materials such as fish skin into clothing and accessories. These communities have thrived despite colonisation, climate change, floods and fires. Among these Arctic groups are the Ainu, whose economy was based on salmon fishing and manufactured strong, lightweight fish skin robes and shoes. The equitable relationship between the salmon and the Ainu meant that for them fish, man and nature were identical.
International anthropological museums provide knowledge about humans and nature. They contain information about how humans utilise both biological raw materials and material culture from flora, fauna and other elements of biocultural heritage on community lands. They embody Native Peoples’ history, science and Traditional Knowledge. The role of museums in society is at the heart of contemporary museum anthropology and museology. The research presented in this paper has used a museum anthropology methodology, a form of applied anthropology based on the use of museums to make anthropological knowledge accessible and relevant to the public. Museums, as institutions of public culture, have become a forum for exploring contemporary Indigenous issues. They have become spaces of conflict through issues around Indigenous rights, evolving ideas about colonisation, and cultural ownership, questioning their public mission. Museum artefacts were collected by explorers and scientists, sometimes by violent means, and have been stored in museums far from Indigenous Peoples. Their past difficult history has led museums to engage more closely with Natives on the display and interpretation of artefacts. This research aims to discuss museum anthropology and the emerging and inclusive understanding of museum collaborative consultations with Indigenous Peoples.
The paper describes the fieldwork carried by the researcher at Hokkaido National Museums in March 2022 together with Native artists June Pardue, Alutiiq from Alaska and Anatoly Donkan, Nanai from Eastern Siberia. Semi-structure ethnographic in-situ observations of fish skin artefacts and techniques were used at the historical locations where this ancestral tradition had developed, to research the craft and records available in the setting. Using Participatory Action Research (PAR), which lies between traditional participant observation and Native autoethnography, a collaboration was created between myself, as the researcher, and the fish skin artists who assumed the role of co-researchers, being recognised as equal partners and proactive participants, signaling their pivotal role in the co-production of knowledge. The fieldwork methodology opened up the possibility of ethnographic encounters between Native artists from Arctic locations to meet in Hokkaido and helped to analyse how knowledge was negotiated and transformed.
The process of bringing world class Indigenous fish skin experts and practitioners into direct contact with the historical collections and the fish skin artefacts is by itself a way to decolonise museums. Thus, museums cease to be mere repositories of artefacts and become incubators to revive technologies, inspire contemporary artists and contribute to a sustainable future. Connecting museums with Indigenous Peoples on interpretation of artefacts provides revitalization of this long-neglected clothing tradition among circumpolar Peoples. During the process, I sought the participation of Native fish skin artists at all levels of the research, from the fieldwork planning, implementation, museum consultation, analysis, and interpretation of the results to the dissemination of the outcomes through co-authored articles.
The project aims to decolonise and safeguard Indigenous fish skin intangible cultural heritage, through its documentation, preservation, transmission and revitalisation. These potential empowerment and ownership processes can help Indigenous Peoples to tap into their Traditional Knowledge and leadership. This paper further aimes to point out how the empirical use of these museum anthropology concepts in a cultural heritage setting may support further theoretical development. Bringing together Arctic Elders to share knowledge on fish skin collections can also help analysing today's fashion sustainability pressing issues.
Keywords: Arctic Indigenous Peoples; Ainu Indigenous Peoples; Fish Skin; Intangible Cultural Heritage; Traditional Knowledge; Interpretation of Artefacts; Museum Anthropology; Museum Decolonisation.

In the City-State of Singapore, modernization and progress automatically sweeps the landscape clean of historical debris. This panel aims to share the research process behind an ongoing heritage research project supported by the National Heritage Board on the study of fashion shows and fashion media in Singapore from 1950 to 1999, partly as a means of recovering neglected narratives, perspectives, and personalities. As a multi-sited research, fashion shows and fashion media are the primary sites of cultural consumption, production and distribution that highlight the shifting roles that fashion occupies in our society. This paper highlights the sites of fashion the research team has undertaken via archival research into newspapers. In addition, the data collection for this project has also comprised oral history interviews with persons of interest identified as key players during this identified period of Singapore fashion history. This panel will focus on the methodological processes in conducting primary archival research, to uncover the thematic concerns, narratives, and conceptual relationships between the fashion and the city. The panel will also seek to discuss the conceptualization of the project’s fashion history website, as well as demonstrate some of the findings of this historical research into fashion media’s role in constructing and shaping the nation as it is today.

This lecture will discuss several interconnected themes related to fashion-making, particularly in the context of China and its relationship with the broader global fashion landscape. It will evaluate the ways in which its prominent role in global production and trade has challenged the centrality of fashion history. China serves as a key manufacturing hub, a major consumer market, a source of design talent, and a driver of fashion tech. Its economic and political influence has ramifications for the global fashion industry. Trade policies, tariffs, and geopolitical tensions led by China have impacted the fashion industry's operations, supply chains, sourcing decisions, and creativity.

In the same vein, there are convoluted debates about China’s economic expansion, geopolitical influence, and foreign policy as a new form of colonialism. Deconstructing fashion-making in the 21st century reveals the underlying power dynamics, cultural influences, and inequalities promulgated by China. The talk will underline the socio-cultural, political, and economic dynamics between China and other regions in the fashion industry through cultural exchange, globalization, trade, and collaborations. It takes de/recolonizing as a nuanced approach to consider both efforts to dismantle colonial legacies and potential new forms of influence or control in the context of China. Underpinning the established norms, power structures, and historical legacies are the complexities of decolonization and the evolving global fashion landscape.

In our recent book, Understanding fashion scandals. Social Media, Identity, and Globalization of Fashion in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2023) we write about fashion scandals caused by different forms of discrimination: cultural appropriation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism. In this talk we approach the scandal from the perspective of colonization. Like other institutions, fashion also has its colonial past that shapes its present. We propose that the fashion scandal is a call for undoing the colonial past (and present) of fashion. Drawing from theories of postcolonialism and decoloniality (Gaugele and Titton 2019; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012), we discuss how colonization continues and how it could be challenged. We use the concept of “decolonizing fashion” and argue that it can be helpful in overcoming the colonial project of “civilizational fashion”. The fashion scandal calls for dismantling fashion’s colonialism, Eurocentrism, and masculine domination. We propose that the fashion scandal represents a novel kind of politicization: fashion can be a form of political engagement for both brands and citizens as the late Djurdja Bartlett (2019) well argued.

Our examples come from different cultural contexts, where the fashion scandal acts as a Freudian slip to expose colonial wounds. We bring forth examples from brands and designers who challenge hegemonic ideologies and disrupt social norms, systems of privileges and inequalities. It is especially meaningful for historically marginalized groups, e.g. LGBTQI+, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities etc. We call this act as the creation of “Counter Narratives”. We ended our book on designers and up-and-coming small-scale fashion brands who are conscious of the systemic problems that the fashion scandal reveals. They work to make fashion a more just and inclusive. Our inspiration comes from Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton’s (2019) idea of a post-colonial counter-archive of fashion. We created a counter-narrative of the fashion scandal. We show some works and call everyone to join our project through which we believe the canon of fashion can be challenged.

Although we increasingly speak of fashion today as a highly globalised phenomenon, this might be true for consumption, but there remains a notorious imbalance in production due to the fact that the part of the industry linked to the creation and diffusion of imagery and narratives remains anchored in the Global North, while the manufacturing part - not devoid of creativity in its turn, but certainly less powerful on the socio-political chessboard - is still largely concentrated in the Global South.
Creative poles outside the West are exponentially growing and demanding attention and recognition; at the same time, in Europe, thanks to migratory phenomena and the capitals (economic, cultural, social) they move, the fashion scene is also increasingly proposing less traditionally White models. While countries such as France or the United Kingdom have been dealing with the diversity of this cultural industry for some time now, Italy has been faced with this challenge much more recently. On the one hand, this is exquisitely due to the country's history; on the other hand, it is also linked to the decisive presence of an imaginary linked to the concept of 'Made in Italy', strongly linked to that of 'Italian-ness', which is difficult to unhinge.
In particular, the Afro-descendant diaspora, one of the most significant and complex in Italy, is gaining visibility and relevance not only on a creative level but also for its activism in this field. “Afro” suggestions have long been present in the collections of European and Italian fashion designers. However, historically, Eurocentric tendencies caused contradictory attitudes towards everything that came from "afar", relegating it to “costume” on the one hand, but being undeniably fascinated, on the other, in the well known and documented phenomenon called Exoticism. Moreover, it is not always self-evident that “Afro” does not automatically mean “African”. If what is or is not “Afro” is widely debated, there is at the same time the risk of flattening the complexity and peculiarities of the more than 50 states under the “African” label.
It is therefore particularly relevant that, on the digital catwalks of 2020, for the first time five emerging designers of African origin presented their collections at the Milan Fashion Week. This event, promoted by the We Are Made In Italy Collective set in motion a small but significant revolution,
promoting the presence of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) designers in Italy and giving them a chance to contribute with an authentic narration of what “Afro” and “Afro-Italian” mean.
Fashion in Italy, however, is a complex world that originates far from the spotlights; it is rooted in districts and proximity networks, supports individuals through self-employment and micro-entrepreneurship experiences, and gives life to social workshops that encourage healing and learning through the creation of beauty. A field study conducted between 2021 and 2022 resulted in the collection of over thirty non-directive interviews with individuals involved in various capacities in the process of renegotiating the meaning of Afro-Italian fashion. Looking specifically within the Afro-descendant diaspora, it was possible to identify three categories of actors: designers at various stages of affirmation but already known to the public, creative people still in the grey area between formal and informal known as hobbisti, and tailors involved in social tailoring projects.
This complex range of subjects involved made it possible to investigate intricate themes related to exoticism and nostalgic trade, storytelling, and negotiation of shared meanings, in a process that aims at moving forward from a post-colonial mindset toward new cultural imaginaries that have the potential to become gateways not merely to inclusive creativity but also to social inclusion.

This paper questions whether existing theoretical approaches are applicable to the politics and poetics of Japanese fashion practice, mobilising a metaphorical framework of developmental mastery derived from the martial arts disciplines. An introductory section, shu (= uphold), addresses the manner in which a socio-political elite of erstwhile samurai adopted mimetic dress practices as the country underwent modernization. The discussion engages with the ideas of Georg Simmel to analyse certain class-based differences in the uptake of what was might be characterized as a radical manifestation of the domestic practice of koromo-gae (seasonal change of wardrobe).
A second section, ha (= destroy), documents particular aesthetic challenges to the sartorial establishment authored by a cohort of avant-garde designers in the 1980s, which have since entered the fashion lexicon. The discussion unpacks Michel Foucault’s ideas pertaining to the dynamics of power to suggest that Japanese fashion – ranging from the outputs of youthful arbiters of street-styles to that of other creative individuals charged with reviving the fortunes of moribund marques – has achieved a counter-colonization of the fashion landscape of the West.
The third section, ri (= separate), suggests that the outputs of Japanese fashion have been subjected to unique critical perspectives and innovative practices differentiated certain designers from other Western high-fashion labels. The discussion identifies gender-based tropes in representations appearing in the Western print media and, revisiting the work of Pierre Bourdieu, highlights essentialist interpretations by curatorial constituencies.
The conclusion argues that Japan’s non-colonial history underpinned the country’s becoming the ‘first amongst un-equals’, with Tokyo the earliest of a number of sites invited to sit (albeit temporarily) alongside Paris, New York, London and Milan at the high-table of sartorial authority. Accordingly, Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘West vs. Rest’ model no longer accommodates the creative dynamics operating between interacting cultures and a more inclusive construct needs developing.

In this paper, we take a critical view of both fashion history and the approaches to fashion history that are widespread in fashion studies, by recognizing some factors that, although probably known to many at some level, yet are often left out or quickly passed (or even glossed over). We seek to retell (parts of) the ‘European’ fashion narrative by recognising complex trans-regional influences.
The lens we use is that of historical pandemics, namely the Black Death of 14th century Eurasia, the Cocoliztli in central America of the 16th century, and the world-wide Spanish Flu of the early 20th century. All these have had profound socio-economic trans-regional influences on fashion, going well beyond obviously visible and temporary changes only.
Epidemics never treat people equally, and this is certainly so in terms of their effects on fashion phenomena. Pandemics are also always narrated from a point of view, and this point of view is often of those who either suffered less under, or came eventually to gain from the consequences of, the disease. Furthermore, in pandemic times, people like looking back in history, presumably to ‘learn from the past’, but often simply making feeble comparisons, assimilating situations that in reality were and are not similar.
By focussing on structural long-term changes in fashion systems, we seek to avoid the twin traps of focusing on superficial phenomena only, and of making unsound comparisons between pandemics. By developing an account of the interplay between fashion and disease, we attempt to bring new considerations to bear on how fashion history is carried out, as well as to consider how its lessons may be put to work in order to understand in novel manners how global and trans-regional sartorial fashion has come to be the way it is today.

My conference paper, ‘Who Owns Couture?’ explores the fraught history and biases that have created an enduring hierarchy between French and Indian high fashion. In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which French haute couture was founded on, renewed by, and now dependent on the creativity, skill, and aesthetic of India’s fashion industry. I will explore the political, cultural, and legal framework surrounding this history. The work of Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Rahul Mishra, and the House of Worth will serve as case studies for investigation.
The aims of my paper are threefold: 1) to challenge the Western-centrism rampant in the historiography of fashion through the study of South Asian material culture; 2) to demonstrate the complex interweaving of political history with creativity at the core of decolonial fashion study; 3) to illuminate the real-world implications of this work. The dissonance in the valuation of labour, compensation, and working conditions of skilled creatives in India and France is shocking. I will interrogate this chasm by taking a top-down look at high fashion production through an investigation of French haute couture’s relationship with India.
My interdisciplinary research engages studies of postcolonialism, critical race, and British/Indian colonial history to ask: why are some garments designated as haute couture, while others are categorized as ethnic costume?; who creates this distinction?; how and when did hierarchies of value become established within the global fashion world?; what do these hierarchies signal about the value of racialized individuals and their contributions to design, craft, and culture? These questions address a range of practices and discourses, including institutional collecting, media representation, curatorial projects, and taught theoretical frameworks.

The dress that is the object dressed is sometimes the body, being as it is from one perspective itself a dress and cover or exterior for “you,” from another perspective a physical object in a world that expects to find such objects clothed. If those two perspectives belong (respectively) to philosophy and fashion, then I may describe my interest in fashion, as a practicing philosopher,
to include an interest in how fashion and philosophy might understand such a cooperative engagement: how they understand each other, and to what degree, and using what languages, they talk about the body.
A philosophical voice I listen to and have learned from in this connection is that of Karen Hanson, who wrote some decades ago about philosophy’s animus against fashion. Why the mistrust and the skepticism? Hanson blames philosophy’s queasiness about the body, with its
special qualms about the presentations of women’s bodies. I offer my comments today as an effort to take Hanson’s idea further. In what ways and for what reasons does fashion make philosophy queasy about the body?
To stage a conversation between philosophy so understood and fashion (however understood), I have found it helpful to find the words from fashion’s side in Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, and that book’s opening meditations on fashion and bodies. Words from
fashion, I call them; equally, words about fashion; but they can also register as words for philosophy. When Wilson writes, for example: Changes in fashion styles not only represent reaction against what went before; they may be self-contradictory too1 – I am intrigued by how easily such language also describes a philosophical exchange, as the associates of Socrates reported his conversations with fellow citizens and foreigners. A change in one’s conception of piety may represent reaction against what went before but may also be selfcontradictory. An opening might exist here at which fashion and philosophy can be heard by each other.
The second point of contact I find in Wilson’s book is her reference to dress as “an extension of the body yet not quite part of it.”
2 This would enlarge upon Hanson’s explanation for the philosophical animadversion against fashion. Philosophers who want human life not to be about human embodiment will lose patience with the body’s expansion and elaboration in her account.
Still we have to deploy such terms carefully. Why is dress “not quite part” of the body? What is being denied or withheld in that phrase? Maybe that the body dresses your mind or your soul. In other words, Wilson might speak as she does because she wants to block the possibility that the body belongs in a wardrobe. Dress deserves its own category and ontology. And yet Wilson undermines this same opposition between dress and body when she quotes Ted Polhemus: “Can we really assume that the limits and boundaries of the human body itself are obvious?”3
The rival thought that emerges, once you give up assuming the limits of the body, is that dress does not always remain distinct from the body while extending it. Dress can become part of the body. Indeed it is the work of fashion, shall we say the public conversation that is fashion, that erodes the difference between a bodily extension and a body part. In this connection Wilson herself writes regarding the earliest dress – which consisted in adornments: paint, jewelry, scarring, tattooing, binding – that “The bodies of men and of children not just those of women were altered.”4 This is to say that adornments offer new bodies in place of the bodies as given.
The adorned body is an interpretation of the body, thus a claim about what bodies can be.
Body transformations comprise one example of how fashion opens the limits of the body to interrogation. Tattoos, scarification, the circumcised penis, and the bound foot, which all belong in studies of fashion, challenge the distinction between the body and a changeable social world outside it. They open up ways of seeing the body as dress, even if thereby provoking the follow-up question: dress for what? What exactly is dressed in your body? The transformations to the body can be more modest and much more temporary than a
tattoo or scar. More obviously and more quickly fashion influences the length and color and curve of hair, and the tan or pallor in skin; weight and physique too. This is fashion reaching from dress to what you might have classified as just the object dressed.
But a memorable pair of examples arose in the ancient world in connection with circumcision. Celsus, ostensibly practicing medicine in Rome, confronts circumcision as a problem and outlines the procedures for reversing it. Speaking of the glans “acorn” of the penis,
Celsus begins by writing si glans nuda est “if the acorn is nude.” Here the unwanted condition is the condition you would call undressed, as if the body in its pre-circumcised condition wears its skin as clothing.
5 Meanwhile an ancient story told about King David in his bath has David distressed when he imagines himself without any signs of God on his body. Again the unwanted condition is the undressed one. In the naked state David is a bereft creature – until he remembers the circumcision he wears displaying his worship.6 He isn’t naked after all! One culture honorsthe man’s circumcision and the other seeks to undo it. For both, the body’s right state is interpreted as a clothed body.
From another direction Anne Hollander challenges the conceptualization of nude as innocent of clothing.
7 Hollander’s study of modern art-historical nudes brings out the attributes, like the placement and girth of a waist, that reflect the shape of an era’s clothing. Even the undressed body has a nature found and founded by fashion. The meaning that fashion gives to a
body is the meaning of what the body is.
The body’s participation in its own act of dressing itself destabilizes the distinction between the body and the dress it wears, in that dress blurs the concept of the body. This might work as the greater challenge to philosophical thinking. To return to Karen Hanson, I will say that I suspect that philosophy’s avoidance of fashion-theorizing follows less from the fact that fashion is bodily adornment than from the announcement that fashion makes, now on a steady basis, that the human body might become something else. Philosophers would like to be able to take the body as given and to study the social, the ethical, or the mental in contradistinction to the bodily, or as the body’s compelling special feature. When Nietzsche calls soul “only a word for something about the body,”8 he is resting in the assumption that body is a settled thing that does not need further looking into.
What happens in the modern world is then something analogous to what happened in philosophy sometime back, when Socrates effectively sped up an old custom of moral instruction, and by speeding it up made moral instruction serve a new purpose. Children had been asking what poetry is, or how to be brave, for as long as they had anything to discuss with their parents. Socrates asks the same question as a grownup, both wanting to know the answer and wanting to see his interlocutors engage in the effort to define the words they use. They try out new answers. He refutes them all. The conversations end in bafflement, which is known in studies of Socrates as aporia. I am saying that the fashion cycle of proposal and rejection creates an aporia about the body, as in those unforgettable short dialogues in which Socrates’
interlocutors keep offering new definitions for beauty, courage, and holiness. Nothing stands unchallenged as the lone way of conceiving the human. We join in an endless conversation. What is the human body really? This conversation takes place on a large demographic scale. Somewhat as Cicero said that Rome’s real-life progression through constitutional stages showed that its philosophy worked as political action,9 the ongoing alterations in fashion that Wilson focuses on do not need to arise (as she sometimes implies) only among fashion centers, brought about by designers and manufacturers. Many new turns and fresh combinations emerge from the population, and catch on (or don’t), and upon catching on run their course – which is to say, the public grows dissatisfied with their limitations, like Socrates with an inept definition – after which a new proposal comes along. Who plays the role of Socrates in the new ongoing inquiries, and who has taken over as his interlocutors? Here is another cause for dissatisfaction that philosophers might experience.
Everything has been crowdsourced. Rarely can you tell where a new fashion came from. Almost never do you know what failing in that fashion led entire populations to abandon it. Everyone refutes in the old Socratic way, and no one in particular steps in with a new thought about the body. The body is taken over by the social world surrounding it.
If we missed the similarity to Socratic cross-examination – which can be described in the terms I quoted from Wilson: reactions to previous assertions that even wind up in selfcontradiction – I would bet that is not merely because the topic is the body; not even because it’s the ongoing effort to define the body, as if no one yet had found out what makes a human body look right. It’s the possibility that the public is carrying out the conversation. All too often a fashion public is expected to be a passive body. This may explain why people, and philosophers most of all, equate fashion with foreign influence. Seeing fashion as purely social means seeing the social world as thoroughly passive – which means rendering that world incapable of inventing a new fashion. “It must have come here from somewhere else.”
Maybe it was the French. Thoreau says, “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”10 In 1905 the imitative function in fashion would lead George Santayana to call it “something barbarous,” in other words the work of barbarians, and to regret the appeal to “alien standards” in modern society.11 But after all the prophet Zephaniah, living some years before Socrates, was already calling God’s punishment down upon “all who are dressed in foreign clothing.”12 Their bodies were copying Persia.
When the public knows how to involve itself in fashion-development, you don’t have to look over the border to see where the new fashions are coming from. And so the fashion calendar when interpreted as a philosophical dialogue not only gives fashion changes a subject matter, it
enlists large populations in the ongoing investigation of what their bodies are. For the dress that is the object dressed can also make itself a subject for inquiry that is the inquiring subject.


1 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, updated (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2003), p. 5. I am grateful to Stefano Marino for steering me toward this book for such a conversation.
2 Adorned in Dreams, p. 4.
3 Ted Polhemus, The Body Reader: Social Aspects of the Human Body (Pantheon Books, 1978); quoted in Adorned
in Dreams, p. 2.
4 Adorned in Dreams, p. 4.
5 Celsus De Medicina 7.25.
6 Sifre to Deuteronomy 36 on 6:9. M. L. Satlow, “Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity,” Journal of
Biblical Literatures 116 (1997): 429-54, at 438.
7 Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
8 Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra I.4: “Seele ist nur ein Wort für Etwas am Leibe.” My translation.
9 Cicero Republic II.1.
10 Henry David Thoreau, Walden chapter 1, paragraph 38.
11 George Santayana, The Life of Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), vol. III, chapter 7, paragraph 15.
12 Zephaniah 1:8.

The present paper will explore China-Italy exchanges in the textile sector in a period when the world was divided into two ideologically opposing blocs and the threat of an imminent military confrontation pervaded every aspect of human life.
In the framework of China’s alliance with the Soviet Union, the newly introduced planned economy polarized investment into iron and steel production, machineries, oil industry, chemicals, armaments, transportation, aiming at strengthening China’s military potential and self-reliance in a world. Not being perceived as a strategic sector, Chinese textile industry did not attract the same consideration. Hence, technology and production facilities underwent little or no improvement at all. As a result, factories had to make do with pre-WWII obsolete machineries and war damages to keep production going. Regardless of its lack of modernization, textile enterprises remained crucial for the national economy in Mao years. Not only did factories provide for domestic consumption. They also supplied cotton and silk to trade with Western countries in exchange for industrial semi-processed goods.
In the Cold War, Italy sided with NATO in enforcing an economic embargo targeting the countries of the Soviet bloc and the People’s Republic of China. The embargo curtailed or stopped trading goods which had an evident military purpose. Therefore, textile products were only limitedly affected. While competition with other Western and Japanese providers was fierce, Italy had several competitive advantages due to local tradition in textile production and involvement in China’s silk production during the interwar period. Furthermore, throughout the 1950s Italy’s most influential trader with China was textile entrepreneur Dino Gentili. When Chinese textile industry resurged once liberal economic reforms were introduced in late 1970s, Italy actively contributed providing textile machineries and technology.

Media and fashion have a complex, symbiotic relationship. The fashion industry is often a central content in media, but it is also true that fashion makes itself visible through media and sometimes gives rise to original media genres. This relationship is not just conjunctive (fashion + the media), but rather a result of the digitization of communication languages, technological advancements, and social transformations. The concept of mediatization (Hjarvard, 2013; Cottle, 2006), or the inseparability of the media dimension from the social dimension, is crucial in understanding this relationship. Media has permeated daily rhythms and practices to the point of becoming a constitutive condition. In this sense, we can refer to a post-media condition (Eugeni, 2015) to describe contemporary forms of experience: if everything is medial, media becomes an ecological factor of existence.
The mediatization of fashion (Rocamora, 2017) means observing how the production, consumption, distribution, and diffusion of fashion is articulated through media and, especially, dependent on media for its articulation. The central aspect is not that fashion communicates through media, but that fashion is made through media. By analyzing the system of implications between fashion and embodiment, and between embodiment and mediality, this paper will theorize a parallel process of modalization of media, in which fashion as a bodily medium is able to drive and condition the transformation of the contemporary media landscape (D’Aloia, Pedroni 2022).
The transformations induced by digital and the mediatization of the everyday do not produce a dematerialization of embodiment or a disintermediation of sensibility; media - and in particular fashion, which is the most wearable medium - brings the body into the world and the world into the body. Exteriorization and interiorization, extension and incorporation are reciprocal moments of a dynamic in which one aspect implies the other: the more we incorporate a technology, the more we extend ourselves in the environment; the more we extend ourselves in the environment, the more we incorporate it. In this sense, reflection on fashion is strategic to understand many aspects of the contemporary media ecosystem. If fashion is a medium and we live in a post-media era, then fashion as an embodied and extended medium also consists of a basic condition of experience.
By analyzing the relationship between fashion and media, and how they influence each other, we can gain a deeper understanding of how systems of power operate within the fashion industry and how they shape the representation of cultural diversity.
The processes above mentioned will be investigated both theoretically and with reference to case studies, with a focus on Metaverse Fashion Week.

The mediatization of fashion does not mean the communicative ways in which fashion addresses its audiences. The historical period in which the media environment is simply ancillary to the wishes of the fashion industry is outdated. From mere tools, the media have become authentic manufacturers capable of redefining and renegotiating the production, distribution, and consumption of fashion products. Production changes according to what influencers and bloggers choose and communicate; consumption at that point follows production, which is obviously in line with communicative suggestions and is now largely done through digital clicks; distribution, finally, diversifies the way the garment reaches the customer and distribution channels are at once disintermediated to minimize the steps between producer and final consumer but also added to the traditional ones, using the power of the web. All this has a name: Fashionmedia. The important consequences of Fashionmedia can be traced at three levels, namely: at the level of consumers, at the level of producers, and at the level of institutions. At the consumer level we find the emergence of several consequences. Storage, accessibility, interaction, engagement, the advent of storytelling.
At the producers level a first consequence sees the overbearing rise of disintermediation.
On the level of institutions, it is necessary to consider that the new media perform their mass communicators task embedded in platforms. Fashionmedia would not be possible without the platform society and must submit to its rules.The fact that digital media are embedded in platforms introduces the question of the values of the institutions operating.

The ongoing convergence of fashion and technology has given rise to the opportunity for digital fashion to meet the needs of individuals and communities in digital immersive spaces. These spaces, composed of video games and other digital environments where individuals operate, have become increasingly important as fashion brands and tech companies seek to establish new business opportunities. This pursuit, however, raises concerns where many of these initiatives seek to replicate a problematic fashion system in these spaces. Therein lies a risk that burgeoning digital fashion systems might perpetuate the Western fashion system’s exclusionary and unsustainable practices, co-opting the work of individual digital fashion makers who create for themselves and their community, until their representation proves profitable to corporations1. As we contemplate the future of digital fashion, we must understand its intrinsic value and its impact on the experiences of individuals and their communities.
With the increasing demand for fashion for video game characters and avatars, this paper investigates the interplay between the self, avatars (a digital version of the self), identity and digital fashion. This research draws upon ten semi-structured gaming interviews with Gen Z gamers across diverse subject positions to understand what influences their digital fashion choices and the relationship to their identities in various digital spaces. Previous studies have demonstrated the wide-ranging impact of experiences in digital immersive spaces, suggesting
that the player-avatar relationship might extend beyond the parameters of digital spaces into
“In Real Life” (IRL) spaces2. There is a notable gap, however, in understanding the role of digital fashion choices on self-concept, community dynamics and consumer behavior.
The findings of this study suggest a profound and oftentimes intimate relationship between players and their avatars regarding digital fashion. This relationship between the physical and digital self presents implications on self-concept and embodied practices, suggesting that the dichotomy between physical and virtual selves should be rethought. While many digital immersive spaces have limited player-avatar self-expression through industry standards such as “genderlocking” where certain options such as available fashion is limited based on player decisions of their avatar’s gender3, players have often created or implemented modifications4 to make their gaming experience more personal, nuanced, and rooted in community5.
This paper proposes a theory of digital enclothed cognition that deconstructs the “in real life” (IRL) and digital dichotomy to holistically understand the spaces in which wearers operate and the impact of their experiences in these spaces. Drawing up Adam & Galinsky’s theory of enclothed cognition6, a digital enclothed cognition extends this theory into digital spaces,
highlighting the significance of digital fashion and calling for further research at the intersection of fashion and games studies.
Scholars and practitioners might benefit from an expanded perspective of identity and behavior across IRL and digital spaces through a better understanding of the transformative power of digital fashion on individual and community experiences in digital immersive spaces. By recognizing digital fashion as an important aspect of an individual’s identity, it becomes possible to transcend the limitations of the traditional fashion systems in the exploration of nuanced and novel opportunities for creativity, self-expression and cultural exchange. Ultimately, a digital enclothed cognition aims to define the importance of digital fashion as a significant opportunity for the future of fashion and its ability to meet the evolving needs of individuals and communities that demand consideration of inclusion, sustainability world-building across IRL and digital spaces.


1 Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 17-18.
2 Christoph Klimmt et al., “Identification With Video Game Characters as Automatic Shift of Self-Perceptions,” Media Psychology, Vol. 13 (December 2010): 323-338, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2010.524911; Jesse Chandler, Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz, “Online and On My Mind: Temporary and Chronic Accessibility Moderate the Influence of Media Figures,” Media Psychology, Vol. 12 (May 2009): 210-226, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849935.
3 Katie Moncelsi, “Differences of Congruency in Avatar Gender Selection on Motivation to Play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” PhD Diss., (Capella University, 2021).
4 Some players will create their own content for their games called “modifications”, which are game files that add to or change the game’s original content (for example, adding new clothing items). In gaming, modifications are known as “mods” and their creators are known as “modders”.
5 Tom Welch, “The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods,” Game Studies, Vol. 18 (December 2018), https://gamestudies.org/[…]/welch#:~:text=Queer%20 modification%20of%20video%20games%20constitutes%20a%20form%20of%
6 Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, “Enclothed Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 48 (July 2012): 918-925, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008

In parallel to the spread on social media of the “beautification features” capable of influencing body image stereotypes, it is now possible to record an opposite trend. By claiming the right to represent a not artificially manipulated reality, a new movement has banned the so-called “cosmetic surgery” filters, to the point of giving space to digital identities in clear opposition to the dominant standards of excellence and beauty. As a result, photos of celebrities as well as common people edited to better match beauty standards have been joined by snapshots not manipulated, that visually reflect the need for selfexpression, inclusion, authenticity, and respect for diversity in front of and behind the camera. For example, the hashtags #girlgaze, #femalegaze, #inclusion, #diversity, #acceptance, #bodypositivity, #bodypositve movement, #curvygirl, #fataccepance, #normalizacne on Instagram collect millions of posts containing photographic portraits and self-portraits that challenge the society’s unrealistic and Western beauty ideals usually spread by the media.
However, more than the traditional aesthetic canons that guide the representation of women and their bodies are challenged. Alongside the legitimation of different types of beauties (often encouraged by a female gaze that embraces the feminine universe in its infinite complexity without necessarily objectifying or eroticizing it), a counter-narrative takes hold on these platforms in opposition to prejudices and taboos, which led to the exclusion of some people from official narratives on the basis of their age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs, ethnicity, social class, physical characteristics. The rise of social networks, together with the democratization of photographic practice due to the camera phone, has therefore offered self-representation and identity construction tools even to those who were generally excluded from the stereotyped narratives proposed by the mainstream media. It is undeniable that these tools have facilitated the emersion process of individual subjectivity to the point of constituting a viaticum for a potential redemption of a pluralist gaze, which does not exclude but instead includes diversity, normalizing it. It should also be emphasized that they are not only utilized by common users: Instagram is increasingly being adopted in the context of multiple activism initiatives and in related awareness campaigns on diversity and inclusion themes. From this perspective, social media can be considered a fundamental agent of change. A phenomenon, the one just described, which undoubtedly influenced, from below, various cultural and creative industry sectors, first of all, that of fashion communication – as recently pointed out by Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global PhotoVogue and Director of PhotoVogue Festival. In her opinion, Internet users have embodied an ever-expanding inclusivity project that has come to influence even traditional brands and media, which were forced to adapt to a representation capable of considering the complexity of every human being. There is no doubt that in recent years, photographic initiatives such as PhotoVogue Festival or Girlgaze project - which have often used social networks as a privileged promotion channel - have favoured the shifting of the limits of the visible in the field of fashion.
Starting from the analysis of this complex phenomenon, the purpose is to investigate the role of fashion and beauty photography in contemporary social discourses of inclusion, capable of contributing to a critique of traditional politics of representation and, therefore, to socio-cultural change. Specifically, by elevating Vogue Italia as a case study, we intend to analyze the evolution of the representation of women within the magazine from its birth in the 1960s to the present day. Furthermore, through a systematic analysis of the issues of the magazine, its social media, and related initiatives such as the PhotoVogue Festival, an attempt will be made to show how a great deal has been done in the direction of a more inclusive photographic representation of differences. The final purpose is to examine how - particularly since the new millennium - the magazine put into crisis the now leading aesthetic standards and point out the need to increase the representation of minorities, who have until now been excluded in the fashion mainstream media and related narratives of exclusion.

In novels, clothing helps us visualize and differentiate characters according to their aesthetic taste and lifestyle, often highlighting subtextual meanings concerning power relations as well as existential issues.
Belonging to the same generation of writers who developed their poetics from the first decade of 2000s, Teresa Ciabatti, Valeria Parrella and Igiaba Scego share the themes of body and movement, with points of view that get broader as the notion of space becomes increasingly conflictual.
In Ciabatti’s work, clothing has both socio-economic and emotional functions: on the one side, it manifests the different configurations among Bourdesian capitals in the transition between a small town in the Tuscan province and the high bourgeois Roman neighborhood; on the other side, it links the themes of depression and self-destruction with motherhood and adolescence. In Parrella’s novels, clothing dresses bodies in a constant state of emotional tension, mirroring the inner torment of her characters who face existential turning points often sealed by crossing the geographical and social boundaries of the same city. Scego infuses clothing with sentimental value and apotropaic power, underlining clothes’ ability to carry grief, trauma, and memory, in a postcolonial space that constantly goes back and forth between Italy and multiple places of the Global South (Somalia, Argentina).
Through a textual analysis that will reconsider Barthes’ notion of “written garment” from a sociological perspective, and using Flügel’s analysis of the functions of clothing (protection, modesty and decoration), this paper will address the role of clothing in the oeuvres of the three authors, focusing on the ability of clothes to materialize dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and geographical positioning. The aim is not to establish a general structure of fashion statements in novels as Barthes did with fashion magazines (a challenge that would require a more extended sample of novels and writers from different genders and generations) but to understand the meaning and value of clothing in exemplifying a series of physical and emotional movements – repositioning and geographical dislocations inside and outside of Italy – that subjectify the characters of Ciabatti, Parrella and Scego’s novels.
In doing so, it will be possible to trace an emotional map of contemporary Italy, where literature becomes political in ways that are not explicit nor banal, where the very concept of “crisis” goes back to its etymological root indicating the inevitability of transformation, and where identity is constantly displaced.
Keywords
Clothing; body; space; movement; emotion.




References
Barthes, Roland (1990). The Fashion System, Berkley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2010). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London and New York: Routledge.
Flügel, John Carl (2002). Psicologia dell’abbigliamento, Milano: FrancoAngeli.

Research on fat fashion has explored the exclusion, misrepresentation, and marginalization of Fat bodies in the fashion industry, and the impact that it has on Fat wearers To intervene into this context, some Fat people make their own clothing to wear in everyday life. This paper explores the relationship between making and wearing by Fat ewers/wearers and its connection to their construction of their fashioned identities. Our pilot project ngaged four Fat sewers/wearers across gender, race, and other social locations. Our work is informed by Fat Studies and the Fat Liberation movement that centers Fat folks’ lived experiences and embodied expertise.
We used an arts-based methodology particularly taking heed from and expanding previous arts-based research with Fat folks. The four participants in our research took part in wardrobe interviews, participant directed photography, and co-designing garments with fashion design students in an undergraduate course (i.e., Fat Fashion: Fashion Design for Larger Bodies).
Through our analysis, we decentre the maker/wearer dichotomy and present Fat makers/wearers as disruptors of this binary. We illuminate Fat fashion making/wearing as a means of self-empowerment, -expression, and -determination as our participants engage with their ownfatphobia, insecurity, and history of oppression within the context of fashion and dress. This paper highlights three themes that emerged from our research and illuminate Fat sewers/wearers’construction of their fashioned identities.

First, participants expressed frustration at the limitations of mainstream plus-size product
offerings. In the USA, plus- and extended-size options are limited and are most commonly
available from fast fashion retailers. As commercial product offerings remain limited, our
participants were previously unable to have complete agency over their clothing choices until they began sewing. Some of our participants were interested in sustainable fashion and sought garments with longevity in their wardrobes; other participants were more deeply concerned with personal style expression and the limitations of style-driven options.
Second, based on these limitations, participants developed creative interventions into plus-size fashion. They learned and/or enhanced their sewing skills and clothing competencies 9 through Fat making and sewing communities. By doing so, they developed Fat clothing cultures in parallel to the existing plus-size apparel market. However, participants shared that a challenge in their making practice is the lack of availability of plus-size sewing patterns and learning resources.
Third, our arts-based methods demonstrate how engaging the Fat sewers/wearers as creators in both image-making and clothing design expands possibilities of how to design plus-size clothing as well as represent Fat bodies in fashion images. These findings underscore the importance of fully engaging Fat people as active creatives in design for and representation of their bodies, rather than as passive consumers or as only in the limited roles of fit tester or objectified photography subjects.
Centering the experiences of Fat sewers/wearers highlights the radical political act of makingand wearing clothing among Fat people. Fat making was an invention out of necessity but became an exploration of embodiment and self as they made their own clothing decisions, developed new relationships with their bodies, and fostered their own fashion community. Our findings offer insights around inclusion, access, and consumer activism among groups who are excluded by the dominant fashion industry. Through both interview and arts-based methods of research, this paper generates multi-sensory understandings about Fat embodiment that expand the primacy of written text in academic practice. Findings from this paper reveal important connections between Fat activism and fashion creation, suggesting a Fat fashion praxis that fosters new professional and pedagogical approaches that center and value Fatness.


References
Barry, Ben, Calla Evans, and May Friedman. “Fattening Fabulousness: The Joys and Risks of
Troubling Gender through Fat Fashion.” Fat Studies, July 15, 2021, 1–17.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2021.1943157.
Bishop, Katelynn, Kjerstin Gruys, and Maddie Evans. “Sized Out: Women, Clothing Size, and
Inequality.” Gender & Society 32, no. 2 (April 2018): 180–203.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218756010.
Christel, Deborah A., Nicole H. O’Donnell, and Linda Arthur Bradley. “Coping by
Crossdressing: An Exploration of Exercise Clothing for Obese Heterosexual Women.” Fashion
and Textiles 3, no. 1 (May 25, 2016): 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-016-0063-z.
Cooper, Charlotte. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement. Bristol: HammerOn Press, 2016.
Gurrieri, Lauren. “Stocky Bodies: Fat Visual Activism.” Fat Studies 2, no. 2 (January 2013):
197–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2013.779554.
Leavy, Patricia. Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. Third edition. New York: The
Guilford Press, 2020.
Peters, Lauren Downing. “You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat
Identity Formation.” Fashion Theory 18, no. 1 (February 2014): 45–71.
https://doi.org/10.2752/175174114X13788163471668.
Volonté, Paolo. Fat Fashion: The Thin Ideal and the Segregation of plus-Size Bodies. London ;
New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021.
Von Busch, Otto. “Engaged Design and the Practice of Fashion Hacking: The Examples of
Giana Gonzalez and Dale Sko.” Fashion Practice 1, no. 2 (November 2009): 163–85.
https://doi.org/10.2752/175693809X469148.

PANELISTS/COALITION HOSTS:
Doris de Pont, New Zealand Fashion Museum
Aika Alemi, Born Nomads, Kazakhstan
Sonya Battla, Pakistan Collective for Decolonial Practice
Chepkemboi Mang’ira, Own Your Culture, Kenya
Erica de Greef, African Fashion Research Institute, South Africa
Lea Vene, Centre for Research of Fashion and Clothing, Croatia
Angela Jansen, Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion, The Netherlands
Sandra Niessen, Fashion Act Now, The Netherlands
Nada Koreish, Fashion Liberation Collective North Africa, UK
Bee Arthur, Ghana International Fashion Team
Amanda Maples, North Carolina Museum, US
Mi Midrado, Fashion and Decoloniality: Global South Crossroads Collective, Brazil
Mandish Kalsi, Awamaki, Peru

RATIONALE
The Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA) was held over three days from 21-23 October 2022 (it will be exactly one year at the time of the conference) as a coalitional gathering beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries aimed at decentralising knowledge creation and sharing regarding fashion. For this panel we propose a shared reflection on the three-day co-created programme, not in terms of its content, but rather in terms of its form (and formation) as decoloniality in practice, and what this offers towards Decolonizing, Deconstructing and Decentering fashion studies.
Each aspect of the GFA was self-represented, activated and governed, with local stakeholders, communities and audiences equally engaged across diverse locations. Guests became hosts and hosts became guests in an effort to interrupt the conventional colonial power relations often at play in global projects. Each event was separately determined by the coalitions, and given two hours for deep engagement and listening, followed by one-hour discursive sharing councils.

These aspects afforded a different set of fashion knowledges to be shared, and presents a decolonising approach (even method) for unsettling the academic form that continues to exclude marginalised knowledges and voices from conferences, despite best thematic intentions. Yoko Akama and fellow co-hosts of the Participatory Design Conference 2022, similarly reflect, that rather than “discussing decolonising through arms-length theory, we share our endeavours through practice and ontologies of our feeling-thinking, to offer learnings and thoughts towards what is yet still to do” (2022:26). In line with the Global Assemblies organised by the Grassroots2global organisation, we similarly shared their mission that ‘we can’t solve our crises using the same way of thinking that created them’.

We propose a conference panel in three parts, divided not by three separate paper presentations (of 20 minutes each) but rather co-presented by members from the twelve GFA22 coalitions, offering co-authored multimedia reflections as both lessons in unlearning and pathways to future practices. We aim to use the panel to explore what Akama et al equally point out, how the shaping of a conference can “ leverage the organising mechanisms to surface implicit agendas, interrogate normalised approaches and confront tensions and paradoxes of decolonising our own practices” (2022:26).

Part One: Practicing Inclusion will address notions of selection that in the case of academic conferences, can perpetuate the epistemic violence that often conferences (such as these) aim to discuss. The first Global Fashioning Assembly itself was a response to the first Non-Western Fashion Conference that was held in Rabat, Morocco in October 2012, that evolved into what is now known as the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF). Exactly ten years after that first event, the GFA22 was an experiment in decolonial practice, as our own decolonial response to the notion of an academic conference for fashion. Many of us working across academia and critical fashion, have observed how patterns of exclusion are perpetuated within the academic formats of conferences – from who gets to access the calls for participation, to whose abstracts make the peer reviewing selection, to who gets to travel and who gets to write and speak, in which discipline or language or format knowledge is legitimised, etc.

Part Two: Unlearning Form(ats) invites listening across the twelve coalitions as we present selected cutaways from the videos of the GFA22. Notions of listening, humbling and hosting, and questions of time and translation/translatability were all key to developing a programme that practiced decoloniality beyond content, in relation with a network of fashion(ing) communities. As Akama et al. suggest, we also took seriously how conferences can “magnify and ossify hegemonic norms, risking exclusion and displacement of other kinds of ‘designing’ [in our case, ‘fashioning’] that are ontological and situated, so as to heighten sensitivity to a plurality of worldviews (2022:27). The panel draws on our experiences of what it means to practice decoloniality in relation to forms of listening and engagement.

Part Three: Decolonising Fashion Knowledges addresses the need to decentralise knowledge creation and sharing about fashion, stimulating a more inclusive understanding of fashioning systems and practices, especially when they offer different relationships to the environment, to time and to cultural heritages and knowledges. The diversity of the coalitional voices was facilitated on their own terms, in their own languages, and by their own formats, and made accessible through the GFA website. In this final part of the panel, we will reflect on the GFA22 as an archive and as a foundation, to continue creating possibilities for resisting the singularity of the eurocentric fashion canon; refusing the imperative to teach, speak or support the dominant narrative; and regenerating in small ways, cultural diversities and cultural complexities through coalitional approaches to decolonised, deconstructed and decentered knowledge creation and sharing.

Rationale: In his book Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonisation, Achille Mbembe presents a compelling critique of the degradation of decolonisation from its original, revolutionary meaning of a struggle for freedom through a complete overthrow of the structures, institutions, and ideas of colonisation to “a set of discontinuous ‘happenings’ and ‘occurrences’ at multiple and often unrelated geographical sites and loci”. 1 In turning to the work of Guinean anticolonial thinker Amilcar Cabril, Mbembe argues that decolonisation refers neither to a mere transfer of power from Western metropolises to former colonial possessions nor to a sectarian politics of subaltern resistance that is limited to a self-righteous performance of cultural alterity. Rather, decolonisation is an “active will to community and life”, characterised, first, by “a violent, almost visceral refusal of all forms of servitude, in particular those practiced in the name of race”, second, “a carefully calibrated effervescence akin to mystic exaltation and yet totally rational”, and, third, “a promise whose main mode of existence was its futurity”. 2 Decolonisation, in other words, is not about reaching a consensus around identity and culture purified and reduced, wrongly, to so-called “safe spaces” of protection and immunity. Under contemporary capitalism, Mbembe contends, there is no longer any “zone of being” that is insusceptible to “contamination” of “racism and neoliberal intoxication”. The political should, therefore, not be relegated to a “painstaking management of emotionally safe spaces and shared atmospheres”. Indeed, decolonisation does not mean “the sharing of boundaries”; it means “deborderisation”. 3 Informed by Mbembe’s reclamation of decolonisation as a project of “deborderisation” underpinned by the “imperative to reconstruct the world in common”, this panel explores how a critique of the contemporary political economy of fashion can benefit from, and advance, decolonisation as a movement of the reconstitution of humanity and the disenclosure of the planet. In doing so, the panel aims to challenge the persistent disconnect between the vitally important debates on fashion and decolonisation on the one hand and the equally fundamental critiques of the gross, planet-threatening inequalities spawned by the predatory operations of transnational capital accumulation on the other. To achieve this aim, the panel focuses on four interconnected components of fashion’s political economy in the context of contemporary transnational capitalism: capital, labour, sustainability, and fashion education. The departure point of the panel is that a critical analysis of how fashion’s systemic and structural inequalities are generated, and challenged, in these four domains in their relationship with each other should be central to any conceptualisation and practice of decolonisation, especially in order for decolonisation to materialise as an “active will to community and life” based not only on radical sharing and universal inclusion, but also on the urgent necessity of “departitioning the world and bringing together its scattered fragments and isolated parts”. 4 Indeed, and as insightfully argued by Djurdja Bartlett, contemporary transnational fashion, despite being a highly commodified arena of stark inequalities and power differences, can still be defended as a means to “address old and new injustices, not only those of fashion but also of the wider world” precisely because of its worldwide presence. 5 This panel concurs that it is this worldwide presence of fashion—with its internal contradictions, systemic crises, myriad inequalities, and increasingly transnational forms of collective action and solidarity—that makes its political economy so central to decolonisation as, in Mbembe’s words, “a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation”. 6

Paper-1
Title: Where there is capital accumulation, there is appropriation!
Author: Serkan Delice (Course Leader and Research Coordinator in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, s.serkan@fashion.arts.ac.uk)
Abstract: The ever-persistent debate on fashion and so-called cultural appropriation should be taken seriously, above all, because of its emotional intensity, that is, the extent of righteous indignation conveyed by those who expose and oppose what they perceive as acts of appropriation. Such indignation, in most cases, is a manifestation of a wider disquiet in the face not only of the material and psychological legacies of colonialism, but of the myriad forms of dispossession and labour exploitation wrought by the forces of grossly unfair contemporary transnational capital accumulation. Yet the symptomatic value of that indignation is increasingly eclipsed, especially in the volatile, reactive space of social media, by a nationalist and communitarian sense of ownership of one’s “culture”, “cultural traditions” and “cultural heritage” as if culture is a static entity that can be owned, and needs to be defended, by a specific nation or community, as if tradition and heritage are not matters of invention and reinvention. Such reclamation of culture through social media advocacy rarely addresses the fundamental questions of a) whose living labour produces and reproduces culture, and b) how that living labour, rather than 5 culture by itself, is being systemically appropriated by capital to regenerate more capital, “a live monster”, in Karl Marx’s words, “that is fruitful and multiplies”. 7 This paper will first introduce three seemingly disparate cases of denunciations of appropriation that involve individuals, communities and institutions from China, France, South Korea, and the United States. I will then connect these cases to each other by demonstrating how they are symptomatic of a deeper and wider malaise in the face of contemporary transnational capitalism: the fact that the latter is less about increasing the productivity of labour, more about endless, destructive capital accumulation and concentration through dispossession, including appropriation, commodification, privatisation, and financialisation of culture; 8 the consequent devaluing of the labour that produces and reproduces culture, that is to say, the unequal distribution, and general depreciation, of the right to thrive by making and changing the world through culture; 9 and a real sense of being materially and emotionally unsettled, threatened, diluted and diminished by the nauseating speed of capital accumulation.

Paper-2
Title: Fashion’s Reserve Armies of Labour: Ethno-racial capitalism and forced labour
Author: Flavia Loscialpo (Senior Lecturer and Course leader in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, floscialpo@gmail.com)
Abstract: Through the years, tragic incidents surfacing to the headlines, such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in 2013, have offered an occasional window on diffused unethical practices, and working conditions tainting the global supply chains. However, widespread and consolidated exploitative practices are, on one hand, still firmly protected by the “mysteries” and “secrets” 10 that characterise the “hidden abode of production”; 11 on the other hand, they are allowed by the institutionalisation and normalisation of this exploitation. Drawing from theoretical perspectives on racial capitalism, 12 where the colony is conceptualised as “consubstantial” with capital, as well as anthropological studies, 13 the analysis addresses complex and institutionalised forms of labour exploitation within fashion, including cases of forced labour. In particular, it applies the concept of “sacrifice zone” 14 to the discussion of exploitative practices on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, and class, and demonstrates that unveiling forms of exploitation requires an exploration of expanding capitalist and colonial frontiers, which can unmask the corporate staging of social responsibility. Benefitting from the contribution of human rights advocates and fashion activist organisations, the study also highlights the need of new mandatory standards, and addresses transparency as a key pre-requisite of sustainability and as the very foundation of accountability in terms of human rights as well as environmental issues.

Paper-3
Title: Sustainable Fashion in Precarious Times: who shapes sustainable fashion?
 Author: Anna Fitzpatrick (PhD Candidate & Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, a.fitzpatrick@fashion.arts.ac.uk)
Abstract: In fashion the technocentric sustainability discourse is now mainstream. Fashion production, the fashion media, and fashion education all address sustainability, predominantly from the perspective of material specifications, circularity and consumer restraint e.g. Buy less buy better. Yet, despite the consensus, sustainability is more than a technical concept. It is a political and contested term. Given that human impact upon the ecological environment is largely determined by social structures/relations and the material/social relations of people with nature, 15 sustainable fashion needs to reckon with the precariousness of those involved in the production and consumption of fashion. Precarity is no longer an exceptional state, but the “basis for capitalist accumulation that serves social regulation and control”.16 Across fashion, precarity is the norm17 as fashion continues to expand, exploit and accumulate capital. This paper explores how the space of sustainable fashion can be opened up to include the voices of those who produce fashion both materially and symbolically. Drawing on the concept of sustainable fashion as a Polis; a community of people who are involved in sustainable fashion, it asks whose voice is heard, who is shaping what sustainable fashion is and can be? How can sustainable fashion include the precariousness of those involved and in what way might this create potential for sustainable fashion to offer an alternative to the continuous accumulation of capital and enable a form of fashion which recognises planetary limits? The discussion embraces political theory in form of ‘the political’, political agency and Ranciére’s concept of dissensus. Reading sustainable fashion through a political lens, this paper raises questions about the potential of sustainable fashion as way of addressing the political crises of our times.

Paper-4
Title: “Doing” Fashion Politics: Praxical Pedagogy in London Street Markets
Author: Caroline Stevenson (Writer, Curator and Programme Director of Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, c.stevenson@fashion.arts.ac.uk)
Abstract: Fashion education is in crisis, caught between the competing demands of a powerful and reckless industry and a new generation of students with activist mind-sets and progressive ideas, determined to tackle its damaging political, social and environmental effects. Within this context, scholars have rapidly transformed the field of theoretical fashion studies: the intersection of fashion history and culture with politics has emerged as a dominant area of interest in recent years, bringing concerns about fashion in dialogue with the mainstream politicisation of culture, new calls for activism, decoloniality and climate change. The question for fashion educators is this: how can we drive institutional critique of the industry we are training our students to enter? And is a radical, transformative education possible within this context? This paper offers a suggestion by focusing on the role of theory in relation to practice within fashion education. It calls for a return to the origins of fashion scholarship within British Cultural Studies and asks what we, as educators, can learn from the intersections of Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy as a way to “do” 11 fashion politics within our classrooms. With recourse to Lawrence Grossberg’s notion of “Praxical Pedagogy”, 18 it draws specifically on a project I initiated with a group of Master’s students at London College of Fashion, exploring trajectories of fashion and labour through London’s East End street markets as a means to visualise the structural conflicts between fashion and Capitalism, and mobilise fashion knowledge beyond the walls of the classroom. As this project seeks to assemble sets of intellectual resources19 through empiricism, rather than assuming prior theoretical knowledge, it appeals to a fashion education that is directly informed by, but also transformative of the political economy of fashion.

1. Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonisation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 43.
2. Ibid, 44.
3. Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen, “Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe”, New Frame, 5 September 2019. https://www.newframe.com/[…]/
4. Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 44.
5. Djurdja Bartlett (ed.), Fashion and Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 17.
6. Nilsen, “Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe”.
7. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 136.
8. David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession”, Socialist Register 40 (2004), 63–87.
9. Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 1997).
10. Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1., translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, [1867], 1990); Alessandra Mezzadri, The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
11. Marx, Capital Vol. 1., 123.
12. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, [1983] 2000); Françoise Vergès,“Racial Capitalocene” in Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London-New York: Verso, 2017); Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (London: Pluto Press, [2019] 2021).
13. Sandra Niessen, “Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability”, Fashion Theory 24(6) (2020), 859-877; Darren Byler, Terror Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
14. Niessen, “Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability”.
15. George Liodakis, “Political Economy, Capitalism and Sustainable Development”, Sustainability 2:8 (2010), 2601-2616.
16. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity : Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015), 1.
17. Angela McRobbie, “Reflections on feminism, immaterial labour and the post-Fordist regime”, New Formations 70 (4) (2010), 60–76; Giulia Mensitieri, The Most Beautiful Job in the World (Bloomsbury: London, 2020).
18. Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing it All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
19. Stuart Hall, “The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our Times” in Media and Cultural Regulation, edited by K. Thompson (London: Routledge, 1997), 208–236.

In this lecture I will explore how to take off from 3D: how to move on, ahead, or sideways from the ‘de’ in decolonizing, deconstructing and decentering the field of fashion. By now, as fashion scholars we probably know how to do interdisciplinarity. We may know how to go beyond binary oppositions by multiplying and diversifying theories and perspectives in fashion studies. We may recognise how to construct inclusive communities of scholars and practitioners. We are (albeit belatedly) learning to decolonize our teaching and our writing. And yet. We may need to push further towards an ethics of care if we want to achieve a more ethical fashion system as well as more radical and inclusive fashion studies. I suggest to employ the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as a way of achieving such deep processes of change. Mindfulness is understood as compassionate care, loving kindness and openhearted attention. A mindful approach to our practice as scholars will enhance not only our ethical competence, but also the quality of our research work, infusing knowledge production with a distributed and wide-ranging, transnational sense of justice, care and love.

Fashion and technology have always been deeply intertwined in terms of production, distribution, communication, and consumption. The advent of digital technology has presented the fashion world with challenges that have opened the way to new questions, new approaches and new paths of investigation. The current media universe, moreover, is facing a phase of accelerated and not always controlled change, also as a consequence of the pandemic situation: Metaverse, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, are just some of the many factors that are contributing to this redefinition.

In the wake of recent studies on the deconstruction of materiality, the round table aims to confront these challenges and ask questions on how this process is: a) reorienting the paradigms of consumption and production, as well as the creativity behind fashion itself; b) and changing the experiential frameworks that nowadays structures the imaginaries of consumption, production, and everyday life.

Chair and moderator:

Emanuela Mora, ModaCult-Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Speakers:

Silvia Mazzucotelli Salice, ModaCult-Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore:

Michele Varini, ModaCult-Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore:

Diego Gerbino, Deloitte

Laura Puricelli, freelance Digital Strategy & Innovation for Fashion and Luxury

Simone Tosoni, ModaCult-Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Queer and trans individuals have fashioned their bodies in different ways throughout history to embody and negotiate their diverse gender and sexual identities. Negotiating queer and trans identities through dress, specifically gender-affirming dress that supports and affirms one’s gender, is crucial as it can increase safety in public and lead to a positive sense of self, happiness, empowerment, and validation. Although increasingly more dress options in the market were available for queer and trans individuals beginning in the 2010s, significant gaps remain due to a lack of product variety, poor access to products, and product cost. Due to these accessibility issues, some queer and trans folks utilize DIY practices by fashioning customized garments to suit their preferences. Then they share these DIY practices via YouTube, due, in part, to the Internet being an important space for queer and trans people to engage in building community, shared purpose and experiences, and emotional and practical support.

In this paper, we will examine the formal and informal economies in which fashion products are produced, distributed, and consumed by and for the queer and trans communities. We will discuss how 21st century queer and trans fashion brands emerged and then produced and distributed fashion products overtly targeting queer and trans communities. Then, we will examine how simultaneously trans people produced and distributed DIY gender-affirming undergarments via DIY YouTube video tutorials amid the lack of commercial objects available to fashion their sense of self. Through oral histories with fashion brand founders and trans YouTubers, we will highlight how queer and trans community members worked to decenter dominant narratives in the fashion system and produced spaces for authentic fashion aesthetic consumption.

The main aim of this paper is to introduce a new postdoc project I will be conducting starting from November 2023. Funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), the project seeks to explore the relationship between clothing and (non-conforming) masculinities in everyday life and the impact of gendered norms on the articulation, policing, and experience of the dressed male body in public space in Belgium and Italy.

Recent debates in the field of men’s fashion studies, in line with the critical scholarship on multiple and hybrid masculinities, have optimistically welcomed the gradual subversion of the visual and sartorial conventions attached to the gender binary and its effects on men’s fashion in the context of high-end fashion1. However, it appears that on an everyday life level, this optimistic reformulation is still far from permeating everyday dress practices. Indeed, it seems that the emerging European sociopolitical landscape is reluctant to embrace and promote sexual and gender diversity and is increasingly characterized by a backlash towards more inclusive forms of male embodiment and by an anti-gender agenda which aims at reinforcing norms of masculinity and femininity2.

Considering this gap between the positive views on gender-fluid aesthetics fostered by both the industry and scholarship focusing on high-end fashion, and the persistent policing of everyday embodiments of masculinity, this research aims to explore the embodied and life experiences of non-conforming men in relation to their everyday life dress practices and the impact of gendered norms on the relationship between clothing and masculinity.

By doing so, this project aims to advance the idea that the dressed body is one of the pivotal dimensions through which biopolitics, what French philosopher Michel Foucault has defined as the power over life, maintains the gender binary and norms of masculinity alive, a perspective that has been overlooked to date in both the fields of (men’s) fashion studies and critical studies on men and masculinities. Indeed, I argue that putting the emphasis on the relationship between the dressed body, social power, and everyday life allows for the extension of the Foucauldian idea of biopolitics to the realm of dress.

Introduced by Michel Foucault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality3, and further elaborated in following works4, the concept of biopolitics has been applied in different ways and to different fields, including medicine, demography, and sexuality, but it has rarely included considerations of the aesthetic element of life. Since biopower intervenes on the body in a disciplinary and regulatory manner through a productive normalizing force, and considering that dress as an embodied practice5 is one of the primary means in the gendering of the body, I argue that including the dressed body in a biopolitical discussion of gender, the body, and masculinity promises a deeper understanding of the biopolitical operations of gender in everyday life.

In order to understand the impact of gendered norms and normative assumptions of masculinity on the dressed male body in everyday life, the project will investigate the experiences of non-conforming men’s everyday dress practices and how the dressed male body can become the site for fear, shame, and social anxiety, but also for pride and self-determination. Methodologically, this project is based on a qualitative ethnographic approach that bridges material culture and embodied research methods through wardrobe studies, a methodological approach that has proven its merit in investigating the relationship between dress, gender, and sexuality in everyday life6. Hence, this research wants to prioritize the wearer’s perspective and experience in contrast to the widespread purely visual interpretation of dressed appearances.
1 See Vicki Karaminas and Justine Taylor, "Harry Styles: Fashion’s Gender Changeling," in Fashionable Masculinities. Queer, Pimp Daddies and Lumbersexuals, ed. Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy, and Pamela Church Gibson (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2022), 9-25; Jay McCauley Bowstead, Menswear Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry, “Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men’s Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary,” in Crossing Gender Boundaries, eds. Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry (Bristol: Intellect, 2020), 122-36. 2 See Daria Colella, “Femonationalism and anti-gender backlash: the instrumental use of gender equality in the nationalist discourse of the Fratelli d’Italia party,” Gender & Development, 29:2-3 (2021): 269-89; Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte (eds.), Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol.1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 4 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 –1976 (New York: Picador 2003); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 2nd edition (London: Polity Press, 2015). 6 See Ben Barry, “(Re)Fashioning Masculinity: Social Identity and Context in Men’s Hybrid Masculinities through Dress,” Gender & Society, 32:5 (2018): 638-662; Kate Fletcher and Ingun Grimstad Klepp (eds.), Opening Up The Wardrobe: A Methods Book (Oslo: Novus Press, 2017); Philip Warkander, "This is all fake, this is all plastic, this is me": A study of the interrelations between style, sexuality and gender in contemporary Stockholm (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stocholmiensis, 2013); Sophie Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear (London: Berg, 2007).


References

Barry, Ben. “(Re)Fashioning Masculinity: Social Identity and Context in Men’s Hybrid Masculinities through Dress.” Gender & Society, 32:5 (2018): 638-662.

Colella, Daria. “Femonationalism and anti-gender backlash: the instrumental use of gender equality in the nationalist discourse of the Fratelli d’Italia party.” Gender & Development, 29:2-3 (2021): 269-89.

Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body, 2nd edition. London: Polity Press. 2015.

Fletcher, Kate and Klepp, Ingun Grimstad (eds.). Opening Up The Wardrobe: A Methods Book. Oslo: Novus Press. 2017.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol.1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. 1990.

_____Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 –1976. New York: Picador. 2003.

_____The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.

Karaminas, Vicki and Taylor, Justine. "Harry Styles: Fashion’s Gender Changeling." In Fashionable Masculinities. Queer, Pimp Daddies and Lumbersexuals, edited by Vicki Karaminas et al. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2022), 9-25.

Kuhar, Roman and Paternotte, David (eds). Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2017.

McCauley Bowstead, Jay. Menswear Revolution. London: Bloomsbury. 2018.

Reilly, Andrew and Barry, Ben. “Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men’s Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary.” In Crossing Gender Boundaries, edited by Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry, 122-136. Bristol: Intellect, 2020.

Warkander, Philip. "This is all fake, this is all plastic, this is me": A study of the interrelations between style, sexuality and gender in contemporary Stockholm. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stocholmiensis. 2013.

Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. London: Berg. 2007.

The French nineteenth century leans into a certain triumphalist perception of hard-won liberalism and steadfast progress in the fields of culture, industry and politics. However, for France the century opened on a most destabilizing failure. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first defeat of a European nation by its own colony of enslaved people. The loss of the most economically important colony threw French society into turmoil. Historian Robin Mitchell (2020) asserts that the forced return of six to ten thousand white Creoles from the former colony triggered cultural anxiety surrounding French cultural and racial superiority. Starting from this premiss, this paper examines how young men in the mid-nineteenth century challenged ideological perceptions of masculine social hegemony through a subversion of normative vestimentary practices that undermined the growing uniformity in men’s self-fashioning.

Despite the standardization in men’s dress practices, a standardization that emitted a message of normative sobriety and productivity, nineteenth-century French men found ways to subvert ideological impositions on self-fashioning. By examining a cache of mid-nineteenth-century daguerreotypes from the Bibliothèque nationale de France it becomes evident, for the middle-class young men who sat for these portraits, that masculine vestimentary self-representation was not a simple task. This paper sheds light on the crisis in the regime of masculine domination and white supremacy, twin forces deployed in France with and for the development of the modern capitalist system. Stemming from a perceived physical degeneracy in men’s bodies, this feeling of crisis was alleviated by scaffolding these bodies with normative and pseudo-scientific tailoring practices. Ultimately, men’s dress practices in the nineteenth century were expected to mask personal deviations and highlight an idealized classical male form. However, the daguerreotypes that inspired this study demonstrate that the young men pictured found ways to short-circuit this masculine “renunciation.” In these daguerreotypes, the young men photographed used various subtle accessories and embellishments to push back against the dark uniformity of men’s clothing and to demonstrate their own idiosyncratic singularity. By reading this vestimentary play alongside Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the true decentring power of fashion accessories, particularly in men’s fashion in the nineteenth century, is revealed.

Fashion is a visual response to the zeitgeist (Sklar, Autry and Klas, 2021), particularly styles worn by marginalised groups. Yet the voice of the oppressed remains unheard. This paper focuses on black British women’s reclamation of the visible to amplify their collective embodied experience, enabling their voices to be heard.
Significant events such as Brexit and the murder of George Floyd have impacted black British women. Consequently, many are choosing to express their racial identity more distinctly, through visibly manifesting their collective experience using ‘style-fashion-dress’ (Tulloch, 2010) as a form of resistance.
In previous responses to oppression, particular symbols have been attributed to black people’s defiance. White appropriation of political signifiers destabilised the resistance. The dominant group benefited from the visual experiential expression of ‘others’, without understanding the significance imbued within the look. However, the cultural symbols in this contemporary example vary.
I argue black British women’s use of a range of cultural signs is a sophisticated strategy, effectively mitigating dependency on a single sign, preventing essentialisation of their appearance. Simultaneously, they demonstrate understanding of the strategies used to silence opposition, as they talk one way to each other, and are ‘…talking another way to those who have power to oppress…’ (hooks, 2014, p.15). Black British women are using the Western fashion media to reclaim appropriated symbols to communicate intangible meanings to each other.
Through this paper, I aim to deconstruct the prioritisation of the visible as the primary sense used to engage with ‘style-fashion-dress’ (Tulloch, 2010), to go beyond the surface. The immaterial aspect is equally important, it gives voice to marginalised groups who are often silenced. Conceptualised through my research, I contribute a framework to deconstruct visible appearance, enabling individuals to be seen and heard, through articulating the meaning behind the change in black British women’s collective expression.

This paper looks into de-centring the current mainstream anthropocentric western fashion design discourse and practice by investigating the work of contemporary Brazilian indigenous fashion designers. Today, the practices and relationships established by fashion design industry are at a state of transition as we — designers, researchers and wearers — foresee responsible ways to stay with the Earth. Contemporary articulations through indigenous and ancient knowledge systems are seen as an opportunity to reestablish relationships of care and respect. Interested in this opportunity and its possible implementations in the field of fashion design, this paper investigates how contemporary indigenous fashion designers in Brazil challenge western value systems and enmesh indigenous thinking in their practice. The paper starts by laying out discussions on indigenous knowledge systems and its relationships with design. Following, two cases are introduced and analysed through data collected via interviews and desktop research, namely the work of designers Dayana Molina and We’e’na TIkuna. This is done from the perspective of a fashion designer-researcher with roots in Brazil. To conclude, possible more than human directions that challenge the current fashion practices are exposed.

How might new approaches to design rebuild connections to flora and fauna? I explore this question in collaboration with plants, communities, places, and materials through a 32-piece collection, Articles of Displacement (AoD). AoD challenges the regimes that have produced the global climate crisis: mass manufacture, industrialization of fiber production, corporate chemical engineering, and synthetic dyeing/printing. By displacing design approaches that prioritize the needs and desires of humans and corporations, I sought to empower ecologies and materials by including them in relational and collaborative design. Garments were created in response to the fabric’s surface design, anticipated environmental conditions, bodily movement, and other needs. The biobased dyestuffs were sourced from food waste, invasive species, local fauna, and plants grown in small gardens. In this presentation, I discuss and critique the process of decentering and deconstructing entrenched ideas about fashion production. The fabrics themselves grapple with the paradoxical challenges and complexities of sustainable design. For example, many pieces were constructed of silk or nylon. Considered twin polyamides, these two fibers share similar chemistry, but have a dramatically different impact on the environment. Petroleum-based nylon was the first commercially successful thermoplastic polymer and shaped the landscape of industrial manufacturing in the mid-20th century. Unlike silk, which is easily weakened by ultraviolet light, heat, and abrasion, nylon is one of the most durable fibers and therefore lengthens the lifespan of a garment. By using one of the culprits of climate change, the collection addresses the challenge of escaping industrial manufacture and products innovated under late capitalism. By rebuilding connections to plants and other raw materials required for dyeing, creating inter-reliant systems of production through co-design, and employing some of the products of the plight, AoD imagines a future where design is a collective, material, embodied, inter-species, place-making, and communitycreating endeavor.

The growing phenomenon of fungi’s influence in the cultural debate – and most predominantly in fashion, due to their increasingly diffused applications – supports the rooting of what Ghazoul formulates as cultural ecology.1 An ecology that interrelates more intimately people, non-human livings, and the planet, by breaking the boundaries between science and environmentalist interpretations, to provide guidance on how to exploit resources preventing long-term catastrophes. Fungi, for their specific modes of action and interaction, have come to symbolize the possibility to reconfigure the ecosystem balance in a dangerously anthropised world, and to promote connectedness. Subject of study of mycology, branch of biology which – like fashion studies – is often considered marginal, they appear capable of opening fashion to a critical scenario. As a result, the proposal describes an experience whereas fashion design education plays a central role. Which presents fungi as mediators in the redefinition of the relationship between designer and product, pushing the design process towards interdisciplinary and interspecies2 entanglements. Interspecies design has been set within urban studies by Roudavski,3 and within collaborative art and design – as technologically mediated method – by va Pesaran.4 Yet it has not been explicitly, nor fully translated or applied, into a concrete fashion practice.

Specifically, the proposal analyses the realization of the experimental workshop entitled Interspecies fashion. Designing with fungi. Held in 2022 at Università Iuav di Venezia with a group of Master students in fashion and visual arts, as part of my on-going doctoral research investigation. This was conceived in collaboration with the Italian material R&D centre Pangaia Grado Zero that streamlined and sells the mushroom-based leather called Muskin that was provided for the occasion. It also involved the Venetian Society of Mycology and the conservators of the Natural History Museum Giancarlo Ligabue in Venice, where the students’ results were presented and

discussed. The collaborative and interdisciplinary material-driven exploration mixed scientific and design methodologies to develop garments and accessories prototypes. According to Woodward’s methodological book, the empirical and applied research did not come after theory but instead developed, adequated and verified by hand pre-existing theories.5 Therefore, in the same way that wild pedagogies refuse to teach things in abstract,6 I decided to engage students in a parallel mushroom cultivation, to acquire consciousness towards the microorganisms that shaped the material they were supposed to turn into a design piece. The goal was to test if and how the care in the maintenance of the organism would affect the outcome of the project, which was possible by delivering a final survey. The hereby experience is hence framed within the concept of wild pedagogy, which rests on two premises: that anthropic lifestyles are putting a strain on the planet’s natural systems; that only starting from the transformative potential of education it is possible (and necessary) to reverse this trend. Wild pedagogies rely on approaches that are not predetermined in terms of what learners will acquire, but rather leave space for the uncontrolled, to develop learners as agents of change.7 Apparently opposed to this idea of ‘wilderness’ is the study conducted by Dunn, who invites to manage nature in order to complement our lives acting with more care and nuance.8 Drawing from Woodward’s ‘material methods’, the double approach is used as tool to trigger the process of provocation.9

Thus, the questions posed by the paper are: can interspecies fashion design be interpreted as a type of wild pedagogy? If so, why choosing fungi and which are the effects? Even more so, what is the potential of fungi in stimulating fashion interdisciplinarity by entering the realm of biological science? By answering these questions, the proposal intends to critically observe the whole experience and to review the results obtained so far. The exercise aims to be a first stage of a wider project, thought to be a repeatable and adaptable format.

1 Jaboury Ghazoul, Ecology: A Very Short Introduction (EPub Edition: Oxford University Press, 2020), 42–55. 2 For further information see: Ghazoul, 52. 3 Stanislav Roudavski, ‘Interspecies Design’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, by John Parham (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 147–62, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683111.010. 4 Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, ‘Interspecies Collaborative Design’ (Everything and Everybody as Material: Beyond Fashion Design Methods, Borås, Sweden: RMIT University and The Swedish School of Textiles, 2017), 81–92, https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/[…]/9921886340101341.
5 Sophie Woodward, Material Methods. Researching and Thinking with Things (EPub Edition: Sage, 2020), 92. 6 Bob Jickling et al., Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 7 Jickling et al., 65. 8 Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today (EPub Edition: HarperCollins, 2011), 16. 9 Woodward, Material Methods. Researching and Thinking with Things, 94.

This paper discusses the emergence of small, distributed, and autonomous fashion centres beyond the dominant industrial fashion system (de Vries 2022) in Norway. This emergence provides a case for approaching fashion as cultural production and mediated matter, and as hybrid forms of art and craft in a country without a strong fashion history. Enabled by digital media platforms and established cultural institutions, such as museums, galleries, artistic merit, and cultural production are positioned as driving forces in building new fashion cultures. It investigates the role of small-scale independent fashion practitioners, including critical ones (Geczy & Karaminas 2017), and their own mediations of their practices. The partnership between the National Museum of Norway and the International Library of Fashion Research and ongoing fashion research into the role of small-scale independent fashion designers’ own mediations of decentralized fashion practices provide empirical background, as does a series of qualitative interviews with independent Norwegian Fashion designers. Digital mediation enables connections between centre and periphery, and plays a prominent role in the formation of a network of independent fashion practitioners across institutional and geographical boundaries.

The case is unpacked in terms of decentralization, and its actors are cast as nodes in a dynamic network. In this network, the formation of new distributed fashion nodes is enabled by mediation through digital platforms (Skjulstad & Eritsland 2022). Through digital mediations, fashion practices in the periphery hold potential to reach beyond geographical and institutional boundaries, connecting designers positioned in rural areas to the international fashion discourse. Whilst Norwegian independent fashion designers tend to approach the fashion industry reflexively, often with a critical view on the industry, they contribute to bring marginalized voices, cultural beliefs, and deep relations to place to the forefront in modes of fashion beyond the fashion industry.