Beyond North-South-South-North Binaries:Towards Insurgent Cosmopolitanism Fashions

My starting point for my provocation is that Universalist thinking, the idea that there is one dominant concept that constitutes what fashion is, denies the idea of multiple fashions and erases local differences. But significantly, universalist thinking exists in the global north and south, its in the big cities, its with the privileged and elite and it silences critique of fashion: critique of profit driven capitalist models, critique of the lack of waste in fashion or critique of low wages for factory workers/ And worse, universalism enables those silences to be created and maintained. So, the question for me is then: how can we work towards an understanding of global and cultural differences based around non-universal local differences? Recent developments in fashion theory and practice focused on decolonising narratives place limited emphasis on the relationship between racial hierarchies, epistemicide - a term used to describe the murder of knowledge - and the shaping of racist paradigms. Is the task simply to create more representation of the global south in the north or is it a lot more complex? So, to counter universalist fashion knowledges, I will argue for the need to centre subaltern forms of fashion knowledge, the knowledges from those who have been colonised: the fashions of the protestors to the fashions of the poor, the indigenous – the outsiders - as a way to extend and pluralise fashion design in a way that moves beyond simplistic north/south/south /north binaries