Fashion From and For All: making fashion fairer

How could fashion be re-invented as an artistic practice based on equality and a fairer system that encourages all humans to flourish? In this talk, I will explore how making fashion a space in which all humans flourish regardless of race, ethnicity, ability, gender, class or sexual orientation, requires a process of making colonial logic visible and learning from those who have challenged societal oppression. How could fashion move away from capitalist modernization?

One approach to create future radical and novel conceptual fashions involves drawing on global socialist visions and theories and past political and socialist experimentation. Addressing inequality is not new, but applying histories of alternative egalitarian non-hierarchical community principles in fashion is. Taking inspiration from the Paris Commune which briefly in 1871 proposed luxury as a shared human right, the concept of communal luxury re-envisions artistic practice as a joy that everyone takes part in, a collective endeavor that forms part of daily life. This approach was applied to a community fashion workshop Unstitched London which explored an inclusive and decolonial fashion design system in which the community led a participatory aesthetic experience to create new fashion concepts.

Tanveer Ahmed is a practice-led fashion design researcher and anti-racist educator exploring ways to expose and re-think how dominant Eurocentric racial hierarchies are used as part of the fashion design process. Tanveer is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins working across the fashion programme to support decolonial fashion perspectives.