Standing in the Way of Control: Relinquishing Extractivist Fashion Design

From Balenciaga’s seminal sari dress from the 1960s celebrated for its innovation, despite decontextualising many of the sari’s more meaningful elements to recent efforts by fashion houses such as Ralph Lauren to ‘collaborate’ with Indigenous designers, coloniality continues to control fashion design. Decolonial scholars stress the significant role that coloniality thinking plays in shaping dominant epistemologies, pointing to extractivist thinking, an approach that separates resources from their original contexts. Extractivist approaches ignore modernity’s roots in decontextualising knowledge systems from their sources; in a fashion context, this extractivist process then commodifies decontextualised fashion knowledges and embeds them with exchange value. Colonial thinking in fashion epistemologies have been used to control and manage subaltern cultures by re-working them into capitalist, heteronormative and elite fashion cultures of the Global North: how might a non-extractive and less controlling approach in fashion contribute towards more justice-oriented fashion narratives? To resist this dominant design process in fashion, this talk discusses alternative liberatory fashion approaches rooted in anti- racist, non-elitist, and non-heteronormative concepts by discussing a community workshop London Unstitched in which the participants shaped new fashion epistemologies and a social justice oriented sewing group that focuses on using design to highlight injustice.