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Snapping Suits: Whitewashing Extractive Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon
No full textIn 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana B. Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Merrill was assigned under the premise that he must capture the speed and “progress” of its concluding stages, chronicling the hasty developments that would support U.S. and British economic interests in the face of media reports detailing the monumental loss of human life that had garnered public attention. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on fashion – what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail.
This paper digs beneath the whitewashed surface of the streamlined white suits sported by the North American administrators in charge of the railroad, which were used to generate a visible hierarchy of race and rank deep in the jungle. Tailored, tucked in, streamlined, and pristine in appearance, these men were the ideal sartorial ambassadors for the unfettered progress of the project. Merrill’s camera amplified the symbolic qualities of whiteness; by capturing a momentary state that could be preserved for posterity in the photographic record, he smoothed over the lived and material realities of fashion by ensuring that these bodies remained, in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘literally but also figuratively enlightened’ (Dyer 1997, p. 101). Yet white clothing was also easily soiled, difficult to maintain, and required frequent laundering by the Caribbean women who toiled in the Steam Laundry on site. This paper foregrounds their hidden labour to yield new insights into fashion’s histories as well as those of photography at its intersection with global extractive capitalism
The Power of Maybes: Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures
No full textIn a world of endless predictions and precision algorithms The Power of Maybes offers a daring new way forward.
What if uncertainty isn't a problem to solve, but a gift? This book reclaims hesitation, ambiguity, and not-knowing as powerful tools to resist the rigid control of digital systems. The Power of Maybes explores the radical idea that embracing uncertainty is essential in our age of planetary computation. Where machines seek to lock down knowledge, capture potential, dictate futures, and foreclose possibilities, The Power of Maybes argues for the cultivation of doubt, ambiguity, and un-knowing as forms of resistance.
By reframing the unknown as a powerful resource, The Power of Maybes presents a bold approach to living and thinking alongside machines without surrendering to their grip. Blending philosophy, design, and critical tech studies, The Power of Maybes challenges dystopian fears and utopian hopes about technology, and champions new ways of being open, ungridded, unscaled. It's a call to cultivate the unknown and nurture potential.
For those ready to reclaim their agency in an algorithmic age, this book is a guide to living with oceanic uncertainty -and finding power in it
Special Issue Introduction: Reflecting on TikTok Creators and Digital Economies
Get PDFFrom global trends to record-breaking growth, TikTok provides new playgrounds for popular culture, low barrier participation in public life, and new forces of creator labour that are reshaping cultural trade and economic life. TikTok’s popularity and platform architecture heightens tensions between commodification and creativity, visibility and voice, performativity and authenticity. This special issue addresses these tensions by focusing on creator practices, identities, and communities and their ‘digital economies’ which have come to stand for the production, circulation, and exchange of cultural, affective, and symbolic goods. The articles that follow were curated through a global symposium on TikTok Creators and Digital Economies, held in October 2023 as a satellite event of the TikTok Research Cultures Network and the Digital Cultures and Economies Research Hub. This introduction offers a reflective review of the current state of research on creators and digital economies. We argue that TikTok is a complex entity, at once an app, company, market, community, and a cultural producer of cultural producers. While creator visibility is prioritized over voice, and monetization over recognition, TikTok’s digital economies includes many parallel economies – such as affective, creative, platform – and we must now centre meaning making alongside money-making, exchange, and values
Understanding the psychology of fashion: Demographic, personality, and fashion factors underlying everyday clothing choices in the UK and USA
Get PDFFashion is one of the most common (aesthetic) activities, yet aside from a select number of works, systematic studies of clothing preference remain relatively rare. This study aims to extend this line of research by offering a more generalizable understanding of the predictors and descriptions of everyday clothing preferences. Samples were drawn from two English-speaking cultures (i.e., the UK and the USA; Ns = 402 and 400 respectively) and a range of demographic, personality, and fashion-related variables (e.g., general fashion interest, formal training/education in fashion, & perceived function of clothing) were examined. The results revealed a six-factor structure of clothing preference, which was invariant across UK and USA samples (i.e., the Updated Everyday Clothing Preference Factors; ECPF-2). Path analysis indicated that general fashion interest and demographic variables (e.g., gender) are key predictors of one’s clothing choices. Moreover, while a general positive relationship between liking and owning clothing was found across the entire sample, further analysis revealed individual differences. Additionally, the work includes analyses of culture-invariant factor structures for perceived clothing functions and clothing descriptors. The present study opens up exciting avenues for exploring the dynamic relationship between clothing preference and its underlying motivations
Re-Play Fashion Show: Community, Creativity, and Collective Research Culture
No full textThe Re-Play Fashion Show represents an institutional commitment to research and education that is collaborative, inclusive, and socially engaged. Conducted within the College’s diverse postgraduate community, the project demonstrates how creative practice can serve as a vehicle for building community, fostering intercultural dialogue, and advancing sustainable and regenerative values through design.
Project Aim:
This project aims to strengthen the community through creativity by positioning fashion as a pedagogical medium — one that connects people, cultures, and disciplines. It seeks to create a collective space for students and alumni to explore identity, belonging, and sustainability through shared practice and critical reflection. This project highlights the College’s dedication to cultivating a research culture grounded in participation, care, and interdisciplinarity.
Developed in collaboration between Goodenough College residents, alumni, and partners from the London College of Fashion, the show integrates live performance, design, and community engagement as forms of action-based research. It reimagines fashion not as an industry showcase but as a social experiment in inclusion and creative learning.
This initiative reflects the College’s broader institutional contribution to knowledge exchange and creative education. By using fashion as a medium of collective authorship, the project redefines how creative outputs can embody the social dimensions of research — bridging the arts, humanities, and social sciences in meaningful and accessible ways. It provides a model for how residential and educational environments can act as living laboratories for research-led learning, where students and practitioners co-create knowledge through shared experience.
Ultimately, the Goodenough College Fashion Show exemplifies the College’s commitment to nurturing inclusive research environments that empower diverse voices, encourage experimentation, and strengthen the link between creative practice, pedagogy, and community impact
Ça Dépend: Essai sur les contingences de l'architecture
No full textFrench translation of Architecture Depend
Records of Waiting: Visual Models of (Human and non-Human) Duration
Get PDFThe disconnect between a situational, lived experience of waiting and the linear and repetitive measured time of the clock opens up gaps for imagining and imaging new temporal models. This essay explores the wood-carving marks made by Polish shepherds as a form of records of situational waiting
"They Refuse to Keep Quiet": Thirty years of the Women's Design + Research Unit
No full textThe Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture, 2025 at St Bride Foundation, London.
With soundbite contributions from: Lorna Allan, Jonathan Barnbrook, Audrey Bennett, Rhona Breeze-Lawlor, Neville Brody, Chrissie Charlton, Tony Credland + Glenn Orton, Catherine Dixon, Steven Heller, Kali Nakitas, Amy Papaelis, Rick Poynor, Naomi Rado, Andrew Slatter, Elizabeth Resnick.
Within the contemporary context of social, political, and economic uncertainty the importance of having a voice for change is increasingly urgent and necessary. Thirty years ago, the Women’s Design + Research Unit (WD+RU) was formed in response to the male-dominated design and typographic industry. The voices of women working in the field were noticeably absent from the profession and in the emerging canons of graphic design history.
As educational activists, WD+RU sought to raise awareness of women working in visual communication through activist means such as posters, research projects, actions and events. WD+RU has never operated as a design studio; rather as a collective based on feminist principles (including care and collaboration, in tandem with undertaking projects that advocate for design and social responsibility). In their talk, Siân Cook and Teal Triggs, reflect critically upon their extensive archive of work from the 1990s to the present day, and ask the question: what comes next
Take Care (of that archive)
No full text“Take Care (of that archive)” It is important that graphic ephemera is included as part of the HIV and AIDS visual culture legacy. The materials produced, from local activist organisations to regional health authorities, help build a more complete picture of the epidemic. These tangible visual reminders, combined with lived experience, bear witness to how we attempted to inform and look after our friends and communities, especially during pre-digital times. ‘Take Care’ is a phrase that can be applied in different ways to HIV transmission, people living with HIV, but also archival practice itself.
Presentation and Q&A.
Contribution to a programme of events supporting:
Viral Intimacies, Berlin, 2025.
Panel: Archival Practices in Berlin and the UK’s HIV/AIDS Visual Culture
Panel moderator: Samuel Perea-Díaz
Other panel presenter: David Aaron Swart