Ben Barry

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.