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Abstract
Although eurocentrism in fashion studies has been contested for nearly four decades, the topic is as timely and urgent as ever. While critiques focus on symptoms such as discrimination, inequality and exploitation, the actual “decease,” the modernity/coloniality structure, persists. The way fashion, as a noun, is being defined according to a temporality (contemporaneity), a system (of power) and an industry (of capitalism) particular to modernity, coloniality is inherent to its definition. Whereas fashion as a verb, the act of fashioning the body, is of all temporalities and geographies and operates beyond the colonial difference. Decolonial fashion discourse constitutes a framework that enables to redefine fashion as a multitude of possibilities rather than a normative framework falsely claiming universality, to humble modernity’s narrative by recognizing its own epitomical limits, to listen to and acknowledge an episteme plurality outside of modernity and to decenter the production of knowledge in regard to fashion. It aims to critique the denial and erasure of a diversity of ways to fashioning the body due to unequal global power relations based on modern-colonial order, the Euro-American canon of normativity and the exploitation and abuse of cultural heritages, human beings and natural resources.
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Notes
2 Joanne Entwistle (Citation2000, 3) points out the problematic division between studies of fashion (as a system, idea or aesthetic) and studies of dress (as in the meanings given to particular practices of clothing and adornment). On the one hand, fashion research produced by sociology, cultural studies and psychology tends to be theoretical in scope and does not examine the mechanisms by which fashion translates into everyday dress. On the other hand, studies of dress produced mainly by anthropologists, tend to be empirical in scope, examining dress in everyday life within particular communities and by particular individuals and, since they focus mainly on non-western and traditional communities, say little about fashion. Just as a thinking exercise: imagine studying museum collections and catalogues of early twentieth century France before going there approximately one century later and being surprised that it looks completely different.
3 An important part of field research as an anthropologist is participant observation, where you live with a host family and participate in daily life.
4 For the “dark side/coloniality” of fashion of traditional dress, I refer to Sandra Niessen’s article in this special issue.
5 As numerous “coffee-table books” have been produced on traditional dress in Morocco with beautiful images but little scientific research for the content.
7 “Black British Style” at the Victoria & Albert Museum (Autumn 2004); “Japan Fashion Now” at FIT Museum (2010–11); “China: Through the Looking Glass” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015); “New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America” at Museum for Art and Design (2014–15); “African Fashion Cities” at the Brighton Museum (2016–17); “Voices of Fashion: Black Couture, Beauty and Styles” at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (expected autumn 2020); “Contemporary Muslim Fashions” at the Smithsonian Design Museum (expected winter 2020).
8 See also Angela Jansen, “Decolonising Fashion: Defying the ‘White Man’s Gaze’” Vestoj http://vestoj.com/decolonialising-fashion/
Additional information
Notes on contributors
M. Angela Jansen
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 coeditor with Jennifer Craik of Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). [email protected]