Letter from the Editors: Decoloniality and Fashion

If there are three pressing issues in both the academic study and public debate around fashion at the present moment, they are sustainability, inequality, and cultural appropriation. It is hard to remember a time when issues of academic concern and public debate were so aligned in the field of fashion. From the vantage point of the middle of 2020, environmental collapse, global pandemic, unemployment, and the Black Lives Matter movement dominate the news, our daily conversations, and our private thoughts and anxieties, such to give extra urgency and meaning to our scholarship. In fashion, the exploitation of the environment, the exploitation of people and labor, and the exploitation of cultures are all interrelated and indeed the first two require the third. Without the logic of coloniality, extended in globalization and international capitalism, and their embedded hierarchies, fashion as it currently operates would be impossible. What this special issue seeks to address is the foundational knowledge within our field, at the very heart of our understandings of fashion, that has made possible these exploitations. As there is no modernity without coloniality (Quijano 2007), this provides the very ideological framework for present injustices within fashion and beyond, and this issue seeks not only to problematize this, but to advocate the actions of decoloniality, delinking from the epistemologies of western Europe, and decentering the understandings of fashion.

This special issue draws on the critical, diverse, and exploratory work of the steering committee members of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion (RCDF; www.rcdfashion.wordpress.com). Initially established as the Non-Western Fashion Conference in 2012, an academic platform for disrupting Eurocentric underpinnings of fashion discourse, it gathers like-minded people with a shared discomfort with the way fashion is defined and theorized. Initially critiquing Eurocentricity within the framework of modernity—more in line with postcolonial critique—the conversation started to change in 2017 through the work of, particularly, Rolando Vázquez and Walter Mignolo, who are seminal members, along with María Lugones and Jean Casimir, of the Transnational Decolonial Institute (https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/), as well as the annual Decolonial Summer School (https://decolonialsummerschool.com/). In 2018, we redefined ourselves as the Research Collective, an inclusive community as well as an intellectual home, and diversified our activities and ways of communicating online. As a virtual space beyond institutions, we experiment with other ways of knowledge-building in regard to fashion, through the communal, through acknowledging and listening to a diversity of voices across geographies, age, race, gender, and life experiences. Without any structural or external funding, but through collaborative projects with local partners (Rabat 2012, London 2013, Hong Kong 2014, Antwerp 2016, Tokyo 2019, Maastricht 2019) strongly committed to changing dominant fashion discourse, we aim to diversify the understandings of fashion.

However, although spread out over the world, the majority of our members are Western educated and/or based—consisting of established academics, students, independent scholars, practitioners, activists and people with an interest in fashion—operating within modernity/coloniality institutional frameworks, on the privileged side of the colonial divide, communicating in English, and limited to an English-speaking audience. As Zofia Cielatkowska (2010, n.p.) formulates it, to decolonize is also to recognize privilege, to see the system as well as the individuals (including oneself) in it, to stimulate painful conversations rather than to silence them, to make way for and listen to unprivileged voices, to admit one’s professional position not only comes from hard work but also from the social structural biases that give us myriad advantages at different levels of our careers. By acknowledging positionality, we aspire to operate beyond the colonial difference where every voice is knowledgeable, worthy and safe. Even with this special issue, it has been important for us to turn the logic of decoloniality on ourselves. Part of this was to have each paper peer-reviewed, not just under the usual double-blind academic protocol, which is a way of gatekeeping who gets to produce academic knowledge, but also by multiple reviewers from outside European academia.

While fashion as a verb—the act of fashioning the body—is of all temporalities and geographies, fashion as a noun has come to refer to a temporality of contemporaneity, a system of power and a capitalist industry that was conceived in Europe and exported to the rest of the world through European imperialism and globalization. As such, histories, theories, and definitions of fashion have been and continue to be conceptualized and written in a modernity/coloniality framework (see Jansen in this issue). From the first critiques of Eurocentricity in fashion studies in the 1990s (Craik 1994; Eicher and Sumberg 1995; Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz, 2000) to fashion globalization studies in the 2000s (Rabine 2002; Niessen, Leshkowich, and Jones 2003; Maynard 2004; Slade 2009; Riello and McNeil 2010; Jansen 2014), and cultural, transnational, and postcolonial studies in the 2010s (Kaiser 2012; Jansen and Craik 2016; Gaugele and Titton 2019), other ways and systems of fashioning the body have been invited to join the fashion conversation within the modernity/coloniality framework. Either through their relations and interactions with fashion, as producers and/or consumers, through the incorporation of fashion iconography, or through their “discovery” by the fashion industry, but never in their own right, on their own terms, with their own historical narratives, conceptual frameworks and definitions. This perpetuates the denial and erasure of long, often globally interconnected and dynamic fashion histories outside the geographical and epistemological boundaries of Europe and North America. Decolonial fashion discourse is not about “taking out” the West, but about “being outside” the West, on equal terms, with mutual respect. It is not about assimilating other ways of fashioning the body into Eurocentric fashion discourse, but about correcting modern fashion’s claim to universality and reframing it in its historical and geographical context. It is not about imposing modern fashion’s theoretical and conceptual framework, but about humbling Euromerican fashion’s discourse and listening to a diversity of esthetics and senses in fashioning the body.

All articles in this volume reference the important role decolonial thinking can play in rethinking fashion practice and fashion scholarship. In the first article, Angela Jansen speaks directly to the work of decolonial pioneers, Walter Mignolo and Ronaldo Vázquez, and considers the application of decoloniality to fashion. She critiques the denial and erasure of a diversity of ways and systems of fashioning the body, outside the Euro-American canon, and fashion scholarship’s normative framework which falsely claims universality. Toby Slade explores decoloniality within the historical and contemporary consumer culture of Japan. He seeks to use Japan as an example of how the logics of coloniality and cultural cringe play out in present-day luxury fashion. Discussing the Japanese slow-life movement, he identifies new resistance to lingering colonial systems of taste which position European luxury fashion as a central symbol of “civilization.” Sandra Niessen proposes a revision to the customary framework of sustainability to include non-fashion clothing, usually systematically undervalued and obscured, and characterizes these as the “sacrifice zone” of fashion, referencing her own pioneering work in Sumatra. She writes that only by recognizing and correcting systemic ethnic bias, and thereby eliminating the sacrifice zone of fashion, can the fashion industry achieve sustainability. Sarah Cheang and Shehnaz Suterwalla discuss decolonizing the curriculum in a fashion school in London beyond broadening the canon and revising reading lists. They argue that the dismantling of Eurocentric bias and critiquing of institutional systems involves an uncomfortable unpicking of accustomed structures of knowledge that is both the ground zero and the end goal of decolonial histories. Erica de Greef discusses the curatorial moment in a South African museum that rendered a pair of embellished trousers in a new light. The article follows the complex, largely disavowed social, historical, and political histories stored in the seams of one fashion object—a pair of well-worn and patched jeans—that are activated when recontextualized within the value-laden, knowledge-production museum field. Anne Peirson-Smith and Jennifer Craik approach the issue of sustainable fashion from a decolonial perspective, focusing on attempts to reverse the mixed messages, counterproductive interventions, and often contradictory efforts to transform garment production and the fashion system into a more sustainable and ethical industry. They evaluate attempts to transform sustainable fashion mindsets and behaviors in postcolonial Hong Kong and the impact such approaches have on sustainable practices for fashion players in the Global North.

As part of the active process of decolonial thinking, we have aimed to include a diversity of voices in this issue, with an emphasis on interviews to survey the present moment. In the reviews section, Charlotte Bedford reflects on fashion education in Australia from an Indigenous perspective. Alexandra Crosby reviews Alessandra Lopez Y Royo’s Contemporary Indonesia Fashion. Hazel Clark interviews New York-based artist and photographer, Dario Calmese, about his two stunning portraits of Billy Porter for Vanity Fair’s 2019 Emmys issue. Kate Fletcher poignantly interviews the River Dean, in a way that is both humorous and at the same time about as serious as things can be. Courtney Fu interviews Peranakan Scholar Peter Lee about the guiding principles underlying his collection and curatorial approach to the textiles and inescapable hybridity of the crossroads of Southeast Asia. Cornelia Lund interviews fashion curator and stylist, Beatrace Angut Oola, about connecting the African and European diasporic creative scenes. Sandra Niessen interviews academic and activist, Kat Sark, about her attempts to decolonize fashion scholarship in Denmark and beyond. Okaro Sanem Odabasi interviews environmental and social justice activist, Ngozi Okaro, about founding Custom Collaborative to support immigrant and low-income women launching sustainable fashion careers.

It has become a catchcry of our time that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 2018). There is an urgent need within fashion to deconstruct and unlearn present structures and rebuild them such that the pleasures of fashioning the body can be had in just, sustainable, non-exploitative, and non-discriminating ways and to rewrite the histories of fashion we rely on for our senses of heritage, dignity, and self-respect to reflect the plurality of fashion stories rather than adherence to a single universalizing modernity. And yet all of us have grown up and studied in the world that already is. To extend Neurath’s (1973) simile about the illusion of foundational accounts of knowledge; we are like a boat on the open sea, and while we must reconstruct what we understand as fashion, we can never start afresh from the bottom. Instead, we must recursively revise our understandings and our histories one piece at a time. Decoloniality is a process, unachievable in a single bound. So this volume is not intended as a new history, but a provocation for further overturning of our deepest beliefs about the nature of fashion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toby Slade

Toby Slade is an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and an authority on Japanese fashion and popular culture. He lived and worked for 16 years in Japan and is author of Japanese Fashion: A Culture History (Berg: 2009) and Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). He is a founding member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion. [email protected] M. Angela Jansen is an independent cultural and fashion anthropologist and the initiator of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion. She is the author of Moroccan Fashion: Design, Tradition and Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor with Jennifer Craik of Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). [email protected]