Fashioning the not-self: speculative non-human fashions

How should the fashion community speak out against ongoing systemic sexist, racist, body ableist, classist, heteronormative and unjust design practices to expose the coloniality of fashion and racist patriarchal capitalism: should we try to reform these systems or propose something entirely different using an alternative starting point? For fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson, dress is defined as the space between the self and the not-self, with much of fashion focusing on the rich narratives of identity and selfhood, but what of the not-self? Could recentring the not-self in fashion open new dialogues for systemic change in fashion? To explore the not-self, I will apply the Black feminist and women of colour feminist radical concept of the non-human, most recently discussed by sociologist Akwugo Emejulu in the book Fugitive Feminism, into a fashion context. This approach aims to reclaim non-human from its category of exclusion based on race and gender, and instead assert the non-human’s rights to existence and, so I will show, validate the not-self in fashion.

Using the format of a ‘life drawing’ class, the audience will have the opportunity to depict the not-self in fashion by exploring non-human transgressive subjectivities and lived experiences. Here drawing will be used as a form of speculative conversation to imagine not-self possible futures in fashion, restore hope in fashion and situate fashion within a new liberatory politics based on antiracism and decolonial feminism.