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Prestige, Parity, Pedagogy and Purpose: Exploring Sustainable Prosperity (and lack thereof) in Historical Fashion Networks
No full textStudies of fashion employing a sustainability lens are becoming increasingly prevalent. It is clear to researchers (alongside practitioners and consumers) that fashion must change its profit-centric focus, yet how to achieve this remains undecided. “Sustainable prosperity” approaches which account for the personal, cultural, societal and environmental and define success beyond profit, have increasingly come to the fore (Williams et al., 2021). Yet, these frameworks often fail to consider historical developments which have created today’s global fashion industry. Focusing on businesses established before the rise of fast fashion, this paper explores how we can employ a “sustainable prosperity” approach to examine the equity and prosperity of historical fashion businesses, industries, international networks, and their practices. It questions how prosperity might historically have been understood beyond financial success, exploring cases within fashion firms and sectors outside of traditionally successful and well-studied haute couture brands and international conglomerates.
This approach provides a broader view into the state and success of historical fashion sectors and networks accounting for the source dearth issue which often plagues those studying historical clothing and fashion businesses. Utilising examples from the 19th and 20th centuries, this paper suggests that business history of fashion methodologies should increasingly employ broader definitions of prosperity which acknowledge social, environmental, reputational, and collective as well as economic and technological success.
The paper examines two associated cases, the German and British fashion industries during the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. These two sectors were selected due to their extensive historical textile and fashion industries which feature mid-tier businesses engaged within international fashion networks, their comparable relationships to the global fashion capital Paris, the strong community ties that bind them together facilitating trade and movement, and the challenge that a lack of sources poses to the analysis of their sectoral success. Using contemporary industry reports, trade press editorials, articles and advertisements alongside secondary research from fashion history and labour history as sources the paper demonstrates how key sustainable prosperity measures have been integrated into business, sectoral and international practices
Lives of Your Smartphones
Get PDFShinji Toya presented his artwork Lives of Your Smartphones at the xCoAx conference and its exhibition. A paper about the artwork was published in the proceedings.
Information regarding the conference proceedings is below.
xCoAx 2025 - Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X
Edited by Miguel Carvalhais, Mario Verdicchio, Luísa Ribas & André Rangel
427 pages
ISBN: 978-989-9279-05-6
Source: https://2025.xCoAx.or
In and Out of London. Afterall as Transnational Platform
Get PDFProviding in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts on its various publishing and research platforms, Afterall’s trajectory from 1999 to 2019 has been described as one moving from a position of ‘criticality’ to one of ‘decoloniality’. Where does the project stand now and how does it anticipate what is to come?
In this presentation I will retrace the history of Afterall, introduce recent issues of the journal related to East and Southeast Asian art histories and contemporary art practice, and discuss Afterall’s ongoing Art Writing and Publishing in Southeast Asia Writing Workshops series
The Everyday Algorithms
No full textThe Everyday Algorithms exhibition (21 February - 17 April 2025), curated by Shelly Knotts at the NewBridge Gallery, highlighted the active role humans play in creating code and designing algorithms and data structures. It focused on under-recognised narratives within this field. The artworks showed how algorithms can be used to support human needs, for care communities, safety, and autonomy.
The exhibition featured the Human-Computer Counter-Choreographies website, which features 12 scores that expose various facets of online tracking. It included a video projection of the author Joana Chicau performing 12 scores
Designing the Environment of Self-Management: Marxist Theory and Architectural Discourse in 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia
No full textThis book chapter explores the emergence of environmental design methodology in Yugoslav design through the lens of Marxist theory
The Artist as Subject-Object and the Myth of Artistic Freedom
No full textThe figure of the artist has functioned as a cypher of freedom in modernity. The promise of a creative existence outside wage labour has served as a horizon of emancipation and a justification of exploitation. For Lukács, however, the artist’s freedom is no different to that of any commodity-producer, equally beholden to the rules of the market, which requires at least a semblance of freedom. The artist, is therefore, a kind of manager of their own labour. In this respect, artists are split off from the proletariat, giving rise to the kind of demands made in Walter Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” for a more reflexive engagement with means of production. Within post-Fordism, however, the creative freedom of the artist has been subsumed within labour in general, as workers increasingly become entrepreneurs of the self, managers of their own human capital. A post-Fordist productivism might indicate useful points of solidarity between artworkers and workers in other fields. Instead, we find much contemporary art, depleted of the material foundations that afforded art any special status or exemption, turning inwards. This takes two seemingly opposite forms: asserting incommunicable modes of subjectivity and seeking identification with the non-human. Both, however, reaffirm the artist’s freedom from social constraints, reasserting the subject as the locus of a privileged insight into something otherwise inaccessible. This tendency mirrors the irrationalism described by Lukács as providing comfort through an illusion of personal autonomy, while maintaining subservience to the reactionary bourgeoisie. Unlike the artist who withdraws into the pure subjectivity of intuition, Lukács understands the proletariat as possessing a unique standpoint as subjects whose subjectivity is constituted by their objectification. In this paper, we consider how including artistic labour in this standpoint might form the basis for dismantling the structures through which the artworld reifies the artist’s subservience
Fashion From and For All: making fashion fairer
No full textHow could fashion be re-invented as an artistic practice based on equality and a fairer system that encourages all humans to flourish? In this talk, I will explore how making fashion a space in which all humans flourish regardless of race, ethnicity, ability, gender, class or sexual orientation, requires a process of making colonial logic visible and learning from those who have challenged societal oppression. How could fashion move away from capitalist modernization?
One approach to create future radical and novel conceptual fashions involves drawing on global socialist visions and theories and past political and socialist experimentation. Addressing inequality is not new, but applying histories of alternative egalitarian non-hierarchical community principles in fashion is. Taking inspiration from the Paris Commune which briefly in 1871 proposed luxury as a shared human right, the concept of communal luxury re-envisions artistic practice as a joy that everyone takes part in, a collective endeavor that forms part of daily life. This approach was applied to a community fashion workshop Unstitched London which explored an inclusive and decolonial fashion design system in which the community led a participatory aesthetic experience to create new fashion concepts
DIG: Imag(in)ing Bigbury Camp
No full textDIG Imag(in)ing Bigbury Camp is a cross-university research project with colleagues from Kingston University and the Royal College of Art in response to Bigbury Camp in Canterbury, Kent. In March 2025, Leah Fusco, Mireille Fauchon and Gareth Proskourine-Barnett presented a creative visual exploration of an Iron Age hill fort located in Howfield Wood, Kent. The site was occupied from about 350BC and may have been stormed in the one of the first engagements between the local peoples and the legions of Julius Caesar in 55BC. The exhibition moves between the ancient and contemporary, natural and artificial concepts of light to speculate on the relationship between technology and perception in historic landscapes. This project is the first in an ongoing collaboration as the Documentary Imaging Group (DIG).
3D scanning has transformed the way archaeologists are able to preserve fragile artefacts and reconstruct ancient architecture of historical significance. For his work in this exhibition, Gareth has employed technological tools used in modern archaeology, turning them onto a series of metalworks excavated from Bigbury Camp in 1962-63 to produce a new moving image work. As technical images (or objects) the metalworks enter into a complex system of duplications that distort and destabilise the original, where they can be remade as a futuristic and fertile ruin, forging ahead with the future rather than looking back to the past
Transforming Collections Information at Tate: The Case for an Embedded, Artist-Directed and Object-Centred Ethos
Get PDFPublic art institutions in the United Kingdom have been critiqued for emphasising socio-political interpretations of Black and brown artists’ works over their aesthetic and art historical significance. This article examines how these tendencies shape cataloguing and interpretation at Tate, drawing on research from the projects Black Artists and Modernism and Transforming Collections. Through case studies on Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper and Tam Joseph, it explores shifting institutional approaches and argues for an object-centred, artist-directed ethos that foregrounds formal qualities, influences and artists’ voices to fully acknowledge their contributions to art history