De-tooling Fashion: Tape Measures of Brutality

In his history of measurement, journalist James Vincent associates tape measures with brutality; why should this matter to students of fashion design and to fashion design education? Expanding upon fashion theorist Sandra’s Niessen’s term ‘defashion’, there is scope to shift fashion making practices away from standardised, heteronormative, racist uniform classifications created using tools such as tape measures, towards liberatory and inclusive fashion making practices: what might inclusive approaches to measuring mean in fashion education and how could they be created and employed?

This presentation will question how fashion’s making processes are built upon and reproduce dominant colonial concepts of the body that measure, classify and construct bodies as plus size, disabled or petite, for example. Discarding these concepts in fashion education is needed to help create and design alternative equitable, anti-racist and inclusive fashion designs. Such processes could help to question why certain fashion design practices hold authority and to speculate on ways to disrupt them.

The presentation will discuss the challenges for re-thinking fashion design education without standardised measurement practices and rethinking the classification of bodies and persons by speculating against monohumanist concepts of the body and towards using alternative fashion tools to support the creation of new and decolonised fashion practices.