Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion

The Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF) is an experimental platform beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries established in 2012. Its main aim is to critique the denial and erasure of a diversity of fashioning systems due to eurocentricity, unequal global power relations based on the modern-colonial order and the Euro-American canon of normativity materialised in modern aesthetics.

Each of the activities is in line with our vision to work towards a politics of redress, a politics of aesthetic and epistemic restitution and repair, a politics of transitioning from a logic of representation and owning that is key to contemporary fashion to a logic of reception and owing and a politics of giving back a place in the present, of hosting and emplacing what has been denied and erased.

In 2024, we organised seven Conversations around a recurring topic ‘Designing Goods, Crafting Communities: What is Really BeingLost?,’which was addressed by different moderators and their guests, from different parts of the world.

In May 2024, we organised our third Annual General Meeting 2023 (AGM23) as an opportunity for the Boards to share their updates and for the community to connect, reflect and project. It also included a roundtable conversation on ‘Exploring Decolonial Options in Fashion’ and the third edition of the Third Decolonial Fashion Film Festival (DFFF24).

In June 2024, we organised a second edition of our six-week online Introductory Course on Decoloniality & Fashion. Once again organised around six topics, the course was convened by some of the most exciting decolonial + fashion thinkers.

In October 2024, we also organised the second edition of the Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA24) with twenty hosting communities from six continents over a period of one month, for a total of forty hours of programming and twenty hours of Sharing Councils. We have published a paper on the GFA in the Russian Fashion Theory Journal and presented several guest lectures.

The Collective continues to share its experiences, world, knowledge-creation, and networks through presentations, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts and publications. We have started a new partnership with the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (NL) for their to share their updates and for the community to Fashion & Textile Material Fellowship, starting 15 January 2025

The RCDF Team