Defashioning Education: A conference by Berlin University of the Arts

FAN members are excited to be attending this two day conference that graples with the notioning of defashion. This conference is currently has a call out for collaboration. Head to their website for more info. 

"Fashion has been framed as ‘the favourite child of capitalism’ [1]– particularly in a dominant discourse in the global West. Its industry has aligned itself with the economic system, obscuring and obliterating other fashion systems and clothing cultures[2]. While fashion is a global, creative and connective force, in its industrialised form it is largely exploitative and imperialist. A deregulated global hyper fast Fashion system presents itself as the necessary other of deregulated hyper capitalism. Just as capitalism, it relies on exploitation and exclusion. Both are incompatible with racial, social, economic and climate justice. While education has enabled these systems, it has also challenged them. The classroom can be the most radical space of possibility. To change a culture, you change its education. To change a system, you change its education. To change the Fashion system, you change how fashion is learnt and taught, perceived and practiced. De-Fashioning Education takes the notion of de-fashion [3] as a provocation to reconsider how, what and why we are learning and teaching fashion. To de-fashion is "to dismantle the current Fashion system and replace it with a pluriverse of clothing systems that are fair, local, decolonial and profoundly respectful and nurturing" [4]. What does a de-fashioning of education look like, and what could it do? De-Fashioning Education aims to provide a space of exchange and collaborative action to explore the relationships between fashion, education and degrowth, a planned green reduction [5]. We can draw on a wealth of unacknowledged ways of learning fashion, undervalued diverse cultures of learning and leading learning – that are all part of fashion education. De-Fashioning Education is an open-access conference, a collaborative contemplative space to consider contradictions and develop shared action. It invites us to re-imagine how we can learn for interexistence and interbeing – fashion education for the pluriverse [6]."