Textile Autobiographies: Crafting shifting identities with refugee communities

With the rising mass displacement of people, addressing the needs and aspirations of refugee communities and honouring their diverse cultures is urgently needed. Historically, the textile heritage of minorities has often been subjected to cultural appropriation practices or undervalued and ‘othered’ as ‘non-fashion’. Designers are often ‘parachuted’ into marginalised or disadvantaged communities premised on bringing their own knowledge and expertise to solve other people’s problems. However, there is growing recognition of the need to ‘decolonise’ such dominant design approaches. The paper discusses a participatory action research project engaging London-based refugees and asylum seekers with the aim to understand what cultural sustainability and community resilience mean in this context. The project provides a safe space for participants to reflect on their shifting identity and grow self-confidence while rebuilding their lives in a new place as the societal and legal upheaval in their life settles. Through a series of storytelling sessions and textile-based co-creation workshops, the project led to understand the reality of refugees, map ways to build resilience within the local community, and collectively frame sustainable future visions. The paper highlights the research’s contribution to shifting narratives around refugees, amplifying the participants’ voice and agency, re-examining research methods, and foregrounding a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and sustainable fashion system. The paper outlines the need for further research into ethics of care, effective impact evaluation methods, ways to infrastructure legacies within communities, and design approaches fostering regeneration of cultures and respectful representation of shifting identities, especially considering the on-going refugee crisis.