Fashioning Roots and Routes: Safe Spaces for Refugee Resilience through Participatory Fashion and Textile Making

This paper explores how participatory fashion and textile design can catalyse community resilience and connect cultural heritages with lived experiences of migration. Drawing on the ‘Decolonising Fashion and Textiles’ project, conducted in London between 2022 and 2024, this paper aims to examine how designers can facilitate safe spaces and enable refugees and asylum-seekers to engage in collective making practices, explore layered identities, co-create artefacts, and redesign their own futures. Rather than framing culture as fixed ‘roots’, in this paper we conceptualise culture as dynamic ‘routes’ – evolving processes shaped through displacement, resettlement, and an on-going negotiation of identity.

In the participatory action research project discussed in this paper, we used decolonial co-design methods grounded in deep listening and ethics of care, rather than adopting a designer-led problem-solving approach. Throughout the project, we engaged forty-one London-based refugees and asylum-seekers from nineteen different countries, alongside students, art and design practitioners, policymakers, charities and industry stakeholders. In this paper, we specifically discuss diverse spaces of belonging as routes that can help lay new roots in times of displacement. Facilitating a number of these spaces or spheres of engagement with diverse participants, we traced the systemic barriers faced by refugees and asylum-seekers and developed design-led interventions and policy advocacy. The collaborations consisted of co-creation workshops with master’s students and roundtable discussions including policymakers, charities, and industry professionals. We also held workshops with professional makers members of the long-established Art Workers’ Guild in London. These making spaces aided the participants in reflecting on their cultural heritages and lived experiences of migration, while expressing their shifting identities and reclaiming their creative agency.

In this paper, we argue that the act of making, rooted in personal identities and craft traditions, enables participants to articulate hybrid identities, embodied in textile and fashion artefacts that weave together cultural roots and migration routes. Design can open ‘routes’ into meaningful employment: participants’ craft skills align with skills shortages in the fashion industry, revealing a strong potential for design-policy collaboration. However, systemic barriers (in terms of legal status, access to work, prejudice, etc.) demand structural change; hence, creative and political action is needed to support community resilience.

The findings from our research project demonstrate that participatory fashion practice can create spaces of belonging, enable ethical cross-cultural connections, challenge dominant narratives about refugees, and open routes into meaningful work without erasing cultural heritages. In this paper, we argue for design interventions that support cultural sustainability and social justice — connecting cultural roots with migration routes, designing 'with' rather than 'for' displaced populations, and linking making spaces to policy and industry networks. In times of increasing global displacement and disruption, design can act as a powerful force for safe, inclusive, brave and just spaces for transformative learning and rebuilding lives, across cultural boundaries and borders.