“All about Love”: How would bell hooks teach fashion design?

This paper introduces a PhD project which draws on theories from Black and Women of Colour feminists to develop anti-racist fashion design pedagogies. These pedagogical experiments demonstrate the value of Black and Women of Colour feminist scholarship for fashion design education through its call for the decolonization of pedagogy. Feminist scholarship emphasises the role of everyday life and ordinary experiences which can have the potential to disrupt hegemonic thinking. Such experiences could help shape new fashion design pedagogies and culture. I will suggest how using bell hook’s conception of “love” could also be taken up by fashion design educators to encourage students to explore points of connection and disconnection between different cultures, histories and experiences. hook’s notion could, I will also suggest, foster students’ active awareness of how local and global cultures and histories might be more creatively interwoven to create a design process that resists stereotyping, appropriation and racist forms of representation.

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