Are you afraid of the fish head? Cultural translation in fashion education

ABSTRACT: Culture mediates our worldview and shared cultural norms provide a reference for appropriate behaviours across a range of situations thus, particularly in London, with students from so many cultural backgrounds studying alongside each other, it is important that the imagined communities hosted in our fashion schools foster an appreciation of diverse approaches to education and creative production. Writing in an HEA report on International Students’ Experience at UAL, Sovic (HEA) found an absence of bridges building between international and home students and argued for HEIs to ‘serve as a mediator/facilitator… of students’ transitions to university’. Globalisation is a key feature of the 21st century fashion industry, reflected both in complex manufacturing and distribution networks that span the globe, and also in the emergence of fashion brands that can claim to have an international reach. Furthermore today’s fashion industry is interconnected globally through social media like never before; Web 2.0 technologies allow unprecedented access to global audiences for both major brands and the most remote fashion creatives. Increasingly employers also rank a ‘global mindset’ and the ability to work across cultures as a key factor in employability (Page, 2014). Whether their interest lies in design, production or promotion today’s fashion graduates must take a global approach to fashion and the modern fashion school should seek to create an intercultural creative environment for its students, to allow the diversity of the fashion industry to be reflected in its graduates.

There is no consensus on a working definition of creativity in the UK let alone one that encompasses the international nature of a creative education. Creativity is seen as a vital economic imperative in the current interrelated knowledge economy, yet creativity does not exist in a vacuum, rather cultural norms determine where creative ideas and products arise and how they are judged (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). The majority of creativity research has taken place in the West and much cross-cultural research into creativity in Confucian heritage cultures has utilised Western measures and sought to determine which culture is more creative, based on assumptions about individual and collective societies and perpetuating the antipathy between creativity and conformity (Ng, 2001). Classrooms reflect cultural norms; the internationalisation of education poses challenges and presents opportunities for advancing intercultural creativity. Fleming (2006) argues that the arts provide a medium through which the two key elements of Intercultural Communication may be developed: namely gaining appropriate knowledge of and attitudes towards other cultures and questioning assumptions about one’s own culture (Byram, 1997).

This paper draws on doctoral research with Western and CHC students and staff and the literature around cross-cultural creativity and communication and reviews a series of teaching sessions and seminar activities that introduce the concept of intercultural communication to students, and staff development workshops that highlight the cultural underpinnings of our teaching and assessment practices with a view to informing a wider dialogue around cultural difference and fashion education.

Keywords: cross-cultural communication, fashion, creativity, Confucian heritage cultures