Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion

Dear RCDF community,

Before you go on a well-deserved summer break (for those of you the global north) or work your way through winter, we are happy to send you a few updates of what has been keeping us busy at the Collective. We are excited that, after four years in the making, we are finally initiating our very first online course on Decolonial Fashion Discourses and Praxis in the fall. Organised around six topics, convened by some of the most exciting decolonial + fashion thinkers like Sarah Cheang, Erica de Greef, Angela Jansen, Sandra Niessen, and Benjamin Wild, the course examines some key problems that the contemporary fashion industry is facing today and their roots in the modern civilization project.

The new format of our bi-monthly Conversations on Decoloniality & Fashion has been reaching exciting new communities due to the alternating system of conveners located in different places around the world. Make sure to take a look at the recordings from Daniela Goeller and heeten bhagat in March on ‘Fashion Impacts,’ Sonya Battla and the Pakistan Collective for Decolonial Practice in May on ‘Decolonizing Cotton in Pakistan and Erica de Greef and Francesco Mazzarella in July on ‘Crafting Encounters in Contested Spaces Through Fashion Activism’ on the RCDF YouTube channel.

With the Global Fashioning Assembly, we continue to share our decolonial practice of decentralising knowledge creation and stimulating self-representation and self-determination in global gatherings. As such, we shared our experiences at the Russian Fashion Theory Conference in Yerevan, Armenia in June, of which the recordings are now available online.

As always, we are also sharing updates from our communities around the world on projects, publications, podcasts, etc. If you want to stay updated, make sure to subscribe to the RCDF website, YouTube channel and Instagram.

We hope you enjoy the full newsletter, which you can download here.

The RCDF team