Re-imagining Fashion Histories: Enacting Decolonial Commitments in Institutional Spaces

This chapter explores how decolonial commitments are enacted and contested in institutional spaces, and the possibilities and tensions this can generate. It examines as a case study the ‘Re-imagining Fashion Histories: Tracing Parallel Cosmologies’ module co-taught at Central Saint Martins, London on the MA Fashion Communication course in 2024/25. This module foregrounded the otherwise in fashion historiography to animate and interrogate ‘imagining’ as a practice that constitutes and reinforces coloniality but simultaneously forges decolonial potentialities. ‘Imagining’ acts to define the suppositions, assumptions and representations that have shaped the canon of fashion history, but simultaneously to re-imagine alternative fashion futures beyond an Anglo-Eurocentric and anthropocentric bias. We employ time as a theoretical entry point into discussions concerning power and coloniality. Our contention is that to re-imagine is not to go backwards, but to radically undo, unravel and delink from the worlds and beings forged through colonial imaginings, and actively build alternative futurities and otherwise cosmologies from decolonial voices and methods. By tracing the resistant fashion practices and empathetic pedagogies that shaped our decolonial praxis in action, as well as the challenges we encountered in the classroom, we situate our re-imagining curricula within a broader reflection of ethical responsibility, global crises, positionality and institutional power.