Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion

Dear RCDF community,

We hope this message finds you all well in these troubling times, when innocent lives are lost of especially women and children in the occupied territories of Palestine and the state of Israel. This newsletter may seem insignificant, when war and human tragedies preoccupy our minds, but we believe our work is key in providing hope, solidarity and resilience. It may not solve everything, everywhere, all at once, but none of these issues can be critically addressed without addressing modernity/coloniality and decoloniality. 

This month, we started our first online course on Decoloniality and Fashion with 22 participants, of whom five scholarships. Because we could not formulate any criteria on which to justify a selection, we decided to welcome all applicants. After each session, participants are invited to reflect on the material addressed and to share it on a collective Miro board. Dana Khoury, an artist and fashion designer, agreed to share her motivation to participate in the course.

This month’s Conversations on Decoloniality & Fashion are convened by Nada Koreish and the Fashion Liberation Collective North Africa. Together with North-African fashion creatives she will address the urgency to ‘liberate local identities’ in fashion. “This conversation shall investigate the ‘local vs global’ debate and how we need to pull back our decolonial efforts in order to decolonize locally first.”

Meanwhile, the second edition of the Global Fashioning Assembly is in full preparation and scheduled for October 2024. This time, twenty communities are planning to host the Assembly, with a total of sixty hours, for ten days, over a period of one month. We are very excited that the first edition, GFA22, was selected as ‘an inspiring example’ to be featured in the 2022 progress report for the International Cultural Policy by the Dutch Ministry of Education and Culture. We also continue to share our decolonial practice of decentralising knowledge creation and sharing in global gatherings as we share our experiences at the Fashion in 3D Conference in Rimini (Italy) on 19-21 October.

To enjoy the full newsletter, you can download it here.