Beyond Extractivist Epistemologies in Fashion Histories

Balenciaga’s seminal sari dress from the 1960s is celebrated for its innovation, yet this design selectively uses some aspects of the Indian sari whilst decontextualising many of its more meaningful elements. To further explore this dominant design process in fashion, this talk sets out to explore the role that knowledge plays in the construction and maintaining of hegemonic thinking and practices in fashion histories, many of which lead to ongoing systemic racist, body ableist, classist, sexist and heteronormative concepts. 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 and 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. Extractive epistemologies in fashion raise important questions regarding the nature and extent to which colonial logic operates to produce racial hierarchies and racist fashion design epistemologies: how might a non-extractive approach in fashion contribute towards more justice-oriented fashion narratives?