About Unravelling Fashion Narratives
This Special Issue, Unravelling Fashion Narratives, features the remarkable student work presented at the Unravelling Fashion Narratives symposium, held at Parsons the New School (New York, NY) in June 2024. This event brought together a diverse group of graduate student panelists who presented their research on fashion conducted through a wide range of critical and creative lenses. This event was hosted by the Fashion Studies Network, a collaborative community led by students and faculty from Parsons School of Fashion at The New School and Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Fashion. The symposium provided a platform for emerging scholars to engage with leading voices in the field.
The contributions in this issue examine fashion as an interdisciplinary field, addressing global dress and textile histories, identity and embodiment, accessibility in fashion practice, fashion history, and decolonial approaches to design and representation—ultimately embodying Fashion Studies’ core values as a journal and a fixture in the rapidly growing sector of fashion as an academic field.
Unravelling Fashion Narratives is a student-led mission, from the inception of the symposium through to the publication and launch of this special issue. In keeping with this, Fashion Studies convened our first Student Editorial Board, composed of ten graduate and post-graduate students from institutions around the world. With diverse academic and research backgrounds, the Board played an integral role in the publication process, working closely with contributors and advancing new perspectives in fashion research.
This issue is special in many ways. It brings together emerging and established scholars to interrogate harmful, dominant ideologies and industry practices, explore radical innovations, and celebrate fashion as a powerful form of embodied self-expression and as a space of critical inquiry. Woven throughout are stories that demand to be told—through curatorial practice, material culture, performance studies, the work of dyers, weavers, and other fashion makers, and more. In the field of fashion studies, there remains much to explore. This issue offers an opportunity to spotlight practices of sustainability, equity, and decolonization in fashion, positioning the field as an inclusive, accessible, and critically engaged space for both creation and scholarship.
Finally, to further celebrate the release of Unravelling Fashion Narratives, we have included our first-ever curated playlist to accompany this special issue. With each submission, authors were asked to select a song that reflects the mood and themes of their respective contributions. This offers readers a unique multi-sensory experience, further broadening the impact of this project overall. Listen along with the full Spotify playlist linked below, or find each corresponding track at the bottom of the articles’ webpages. Happy listening!