Anti-Racist Design: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Fashion

This chapter outlines a decolonial, feminist, practice-based approach used to develop an anti-racist and culturally progressive anti-capitalist fashion design pedagogy. It will show the value of Black feminist scholarship that calls for the decolonization of pedagogy through the application of nondualist conceptions of design. I will suggest how academic Chandra Mohanty’s idea of the local as a relationally constructed site, rather than a bounded and fixed one, could be taken up by fashion educators to then help encourage students to explore points of connection and disconnection between different cultures and histories. Mohanty’s notion of the relational space could also be utilizsed to foster students’ active awareness of how local and global cultures and histories might be more creatively and progressively interwoven to create a design process that resists stereotyping, appropriation, and racist forms of representation, and so contribute to developing new strategies and resources for fashion educators that can help challenge racial inequalities.