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Martin Margiela
No full textFashion futurologist Belgian designer Martin Margiela was a central figure in fashion’s deconstruction movement, which emerged from the postmodernist revolution. This book will explore how Margiela’s disobedient fashion collections of ‘low culture’ provide spaces to reconsider histories, residue materials of commerce, and how repositioning the excesses of fashion creates experimental, subversive and practical solutions
Starting from Ground Zero
Full text linkThis autobiographical essay reflects on the methodology of surviving violence in the world, arising from personal struggles sublimated through a dark imagination and sense of humour
Introduction
No full textRome became a vibrant cultural centre in the postwar period and was a popular destination for abstract artists from around the world, many of them women. As this Introduction shows, these women artists working with abstraction came to Rome from different places around the world, not only the US and the UK, but also Turkey, Brazil, and former Yugoslavia. Given that they stayed in the city for various periods of time, travel is taken as the shared characteristic of this “affective community” of women artists, allowing for the inclusion of women artists and critics from Rome who also travelled to study, or develop their work, in the same period. As they outline here, this approach allows the editors to produce a focused study of a previously under-researched group of women artists, which developed distinct approaches to working with abstraction and formed an important transnational network for the exchange of artistic ideas on a global scale in the period between the 1940s and 1970s
Touching Sounds: ASMR as a Digital Remedy
No full textContemporary media cultures are characterised by an overflow of stimuli. The constant need for connection leads to calls for disconnection and recuperation. What if some of this digital exhaustion may be undone through digital remedies? The emergent genre of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is composed of videos, often shared and found on social media, that brings together visual and aural aesthetics to evoke a tactile response, arguably undoing some of the dispersing effects of digital media. This chapter explores the remedial potentials of digital media in countering the pathos associated with the (over)use of social media, computers, and smartphones, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by examining the modes of connections offered by ASMR. It does so by analysing the formal similarities of media of disparate effects in their mode of dissemination and consumption but underscoring the different types of connection at stake in this techno-cultural context. The analysis will be directed at the aesthetics of ASMR videos on YouTube such as the channels of ASMR Darling and Gibi ASMR, with a particular emphasis on videos in which they perform in medical scenarios. The aesthetics of these videos articulated here extend from one explicitly about identity and performance to one that concerns a range of sensory experiences associated with this genre
Revolutionizing textile manufacturing: Recent advances in the synthesis of chitin derivatives and their application in sustainable processing and multifunctionalization of textiles
Full text linkThe textile industry is recognized as a significant environmental polluter due to its reliance on numerous non-biodegradable and toxic petroleum-derived chemicals and polymers for textile processing. A considerable portion of these substances is discharged into the environment as effluent, resulting in significant pollution. To mitigate this reliance on petroleum-based chemicals and reduce environmental harm, a comprehensive approach is necessary, emphasizing the use of alternative feedstocks, enhancing energy efficiency, and implementing principles of a circular economy. In this context, chitin derivatives show great promise as substitutes for many of the chemicals and polymers currently utilized in textile processing. Recent advances in chitin derivatization have allowed for its derivatives to be employed in various applications: as a sizing agent for cotton warp yarns, a shrink-resist agent for wool fabrics, a mordant for dyeing textiles with natural dyes, a modifier for cellulosic fibbers for salt-free dyeing, and a finishing agent that imparts antibacterial, UV-protective, wrinkle-resistant, antioxidant, and fire-retardant properties to textiles. Chitin offers several advantages, including being renewable, non-toxic, biocompatible, and extractable from biomass. Nevertheless, challenges remain, such as high costs, scalability issues, and performance limitations, which hinder its broader application in textile manufacturing
Redistributive Imaginaries: How do digital platforms shape meanings and practices of redistribution in Europe's mixed economies of welfare?
Full text linkRedistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (2022-25) is a collaborative research and knowledge exchange project delivered by a consortium of five universities located in the UK, Finland, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. The project investigates meanings and practices of redistribution in the context of the digitalization and platformization of voluntary transfer. This report presents key European-level findings from the project
State of Play
No full textLarkin Durey is delighted to present the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Mushtaq’s work explores notions of nationhood and identity through the lens of her home country of Pakistan. Contradictory histories are exposed in a painting process that oscillates between disclosure and disintegration, emphasising the fallacy of memory and the ease with which images can be manipulated.
Working in series, which are often revisited, Mushtaq investigates what it means to bear witness and the ways in which an archive of images can disseminate narratives of totalitarianism, nationalism, colonialism and their consequences. By breaking down images through cropping or reframing and painting these objective views, Mushtaq creates new narratives that expose the mechanics of political control. Her paintings become acts of resistance: vessels of memories and instinctive knowledge from a life lived under despotic rule.
This exhibition presents a body of work examining the language of governance in Pakistan. By isolating imagery from historic and contemporary posters, television and film, Mushtaq reveals the common language of propaganda. Despite changes to government and policy, the theatre of politics, of putting on a good show, remains constant. Figures on stage, their mouths open in song or speech could be politicians or pop stars while the audience is both passive consumer and potential mob. Power and agency shifts again and again as we are pulled into and out of the arena; one moment close enough to see the glint of a man’s glasses, the next held behind a barrage of TV screens.
As the series was being developed, tension between India and Pakistan nearly erupted in nuclear war. An atmosphere of hysteria, fear and paranoia can be detected in the paintings, with every gesture seemingly under scrutiny, faces frozen or unravelling and the palette taking on toxic hues. The works speak together of this feverish contest of patriotism whose shared language calls into question the legacy of a colonial border
SAFE
No full textPostcard designed for Visual AIDS New York, ‘Postcards From the Edge’ auction 2026. Purchased for private collection
Shaping the Future of Fashion: A Research Companion
No full textThe book is a research-led companion for anyone seeking to understand how fashion futures are already being made. It brings together a curated collection of conceptual, empirical, and practice-based chapters that reflect fashion’s complexity while remaining grounded in rigorous and reflexive research.
Organised around four interconnected themes: Innovation, Ecosystem, Education, and Values, the book explores how technological change, circular systems, community practices, pedagogy, and ethics collectively shape fashion today. Chapters explore innovation as a multidimensional process, rethink fashion as a network of relationships, position education as a driver of systemic change, and foreground values such as justice, care, and cultural accountability. Across the volume, dominant narratives rooted in extractive, exclusionary, and short-term thinking are critically challenged.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book is designed for fashion educators, researchers, students, and practitioners who want to think critically while remaining oriented towards action. Each chapter analyses current transformations and offers future research agendas or critical questions to support reflection beyond the page. This book benefits readers by providing intellectual depth, global perspectives, and practical inspiration. It serves as both a snapshot of contemporary fashion research and a catalyst for shaping more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable fashion futures
Affective Impingements in Nina Cristante's The Richest Man in Babylon (2024) and Ilona Sagar's Correspondence O (2018)
No full textFocussing on two case studies: Nina Cristante’s The Richest Man in Babylon (2024) and Ilona Sagar’s Correspondence O (2018), this chapter explores how affective life in neoliberalism harnesses body and psyche to an extractive system. The chapter explores how artists’ moving image installations might generate moments of intensity, or what philosopher Brian Massumi calls ‘affective impingement’, that might evade or unsettle this harnessing. I examine affective impingement as being both hysterical and critical in a changing climate of neoliberalism in which the notion of emotions as commodities to be controlled and exchanged as capital has transmogrified into affects as diseased residues that metaphorically leak out of a resistant body