The Ethical Imperative: The Responsibilities of the Fashion Curator in an Era of Global Inequality

This contribution interrogates the ethical responsibilities of fashion curation amid intensifying global inequities, cultural erasure, and environmental devastation. From our position within fashion curation and cultural studies at London College of Fashion, we recognise the field as historically anchored in aesthetic display yet increasingly required to confront complicity, selective preservation, and structural inequality.

Drawing on Françoise Vergès's (2024) critique of the museum as 'battleground' and Stuart Hall's (1997) theorisation of 'selective tradition', we examine how fashion curation consecrates certain histories as heritage while marginalising others. This dynamic is reinforced by blockbuster exhibitions privileging luxury houses and corporate sponsors while systematically excluding fast fashion - the sector most implicated in environmental degradation and exploitative labour.

Building on bell hooks's (1989) theorisation of the margin as 'space of radical openness', we propose the margin as methodological stance for reconceptualising curatorial practice. Examining projects - from Buzigahill to The Nest Collective - that mobilise waste, circulation, and storytelling, we argue that curating from the margins reconfigures exhibition-making itself, cultivating spaces where inequities become visible, and where margins and centres can meet on new terms.

• https://www.iuav.it/it/eventi/fringes