The Critical Fitting

We propose here an alternative method for teaching ‘garment fit’ within fashion design education: The Critical Fitting. This workshop method has been developed through ongoing practice-based research. This project contributes to a growing body of work within fashion design pedagogy that critiques the ‘dominant assumptions of Eurocentric fashion epistemologies’ embedded in the technical practices, skills and tools currently taught to fashion design students (Ahmed, 2022, p.401). Our own experience as educators (teaching design, patterncutting, fashion studies and science and technology studies) informs the development of these workshops. To date, iterations of the workshop have been run at a number of global fashion and science and technology studies conferences, with London College of Fashion students and educators (as standalone workshops and embedded within the students’ design and technical units). We have also run the workshop in collaboration with other fashion schools. In line with many other fashion educators who are ‘building communities of resistance’ through radical and speculative teaching methods, the creativity of the fashion school, or rather its educators and students, provides us with an opportunity to ‘destabilise the self-reinforcing power structures of the twenty-first century fashion industry’ (Gardner & Mohajer va Pesaran, 2023, p.9).

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