The Talking Through F/fashion Seminar series provides a collaborative and intellectually rigorous forum for interdisciplinary researchers to explore how fashion shapes the narratives through which individuals and communities construct their personal and collective identities.
This annual series showcase both established and emerging scholarship, encompassing diverse historical periods, geographical contexts, and methodological approaches—from empirical studies to theoretical frameworks and practice-based research. Our goal is to foster international dialogue and partnership among scholars interested in examining and critically engaging with fashion’s role in identity formation and storytelling.
If you would like to be involved in future editions of the Seminar, please reach out via email: fashionnarratives@mmu.ac.uk.
2026/2027 seminar schedule
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24 September 2025 1600-1700
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Dr Morolake Dairo (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Enduring Fashion: Care, Connection & Creativity in Fashion Sustainability
20 October 2026 1600-1700
Fashion endures as a system despite chronic overproduction, overconsumption and underuse of clothing. Extending garment lifetimes through maintenance, repair, reuse and responsible disposal requires people to care about their clothes. Wendy’s PhD investigates how we can foster a more caring relationship with clothes and what that could mean for sustainability in fashion. Informed by theories of emotional durability, ecopsychology and care, Wendy’s methodological approach combines practice-based methods with wardrobe studies. Alongside her own creative practice, the research uses participatory practice through shared acts of creativity, discussion and reflection, which enable participants to understand the unique narratives embodied within their clothes.
Wendy Ward (Sheffield Hallam University) is a practice-based PhD researcher exploring enduring connections with clothing and their role in sustainable practices. Drawing on professional experience as a fashion designer, sewing teacher and author of five best-selling books, her research examines how meaningful relationships with clothes can support sustainability.
Sustainable Fashion Exhibitions: Shifting to an Inclusive and Interactive Approach in Sustainability Education
12 November 2026 1600-1700
The talk responds to a growing need for taking an intersectional approach to the knowledge production of sustainable fashion. It investigates to what extent museums in Western fashion capitals advocated for artists, designers, and fashion brands with circular design practice and social sustainability in mind. Adopting a design history approach, this talk will compare two case studies: “Fashioned from Nature” (2018–2019) at the Victoria and Albert Museum and “Knowing Cotton Otherwise”(2022–2023) at the Fashion for Good Museum.
Amber Kim (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) is Research Events and Communications Coordinator at the V&A. She facilitates the effective management and delivery of the V&A Research Institute, National Art Library and Archives’ diverse portfolio of research events and associated project programming. She is also an edu-curator and an editorial board member of the Fashion Studies journal by Toronto Metropolitan University; an academic journal that aims to decolonise fashion studies by increasing accessibility.
We Need a Better Way to See: How Fashion Makes Culture Visible
29 January 2027 1600-1700
Fashion is often approached through its most visible forms: garments, images, silhouettes and trends. This talk instead considers fashion as a cultural system through which social values, historical references and collective imaginaries are produced, negotiated and contested. Drawing on the concept of Zeitgeist, Roland Barthes’ semiotics and selected contemporary visual controversies, it examines how fashion images acquire meaning within cultural contexts, how certain codes become normalized or destabilized, and how representation participates in broader processes of social interpretation. The talk argues for a more historically and culturally situated mode of reading fashion, attentive to the structures beneath its visible surface.
Marianna Fioretti (Polimoda Fashion School) is an art historian, cultural researcher and lecturer working across fashion sociology, visual culture, museums and contemporary memory. She is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where her research examines how cultural relevance is produced through images, archives, institutions and communities today.
Who Gets to Call It Fashion?
10 March 2027 1600-1700
A film screening of Chola Dora and the Sewing Needle with discussion. What happens when fashion is understood not as a modern, global industry, but as an everyday practice of making and fashioning the body? M. Angela Jansen argues that dominant understandings of fashion are entangled with modernity, coloniality, capitalism and Eurocentric systems of knowledge. A decolonial approach therefore recognises multiple ways of dressing, making and knowing. Chola Dora and the Sewing Needle begin from this possibility, following the making of the chola-dora, an intergenerational garment of the Gaddi community in the Himalayas. The film approaches the chola-dora not as a disappearing artefact, but as a living practice through which identities, skills, relationships and memories are sustained.
LOkesh Ghai (Manchester Metropolitan University) is a researcher and design educator working with traditional Indian craft practices and under-represented communities. He received the 2022 Karun Thakar Research Grant from V&A Museum, London, followed by an Indian Foundation for the Arts research grant. He is currently pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD at Man. Met.
The Ethics of Witnessing: Affective Lives of Fashion Narratives
15 April 2027 1600-1700
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who coordinated the mass deportation of Jews during the Holocaust, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that it was ‘sheer thoughtlessness’ that predisposed Eichmann to commit crimes against humanity. His blind obedience, presumed neutrality and failure to think critically did not make him any less culpable. Rather, for Arendt, such ‘thoughtlessness’ may be even more destructive than outright evil, as it erodes the capacity for judgment and undermines the ability to bear witness to what is in grave jeopardy: the shared world constituted through human plurality.
In this seminar, we will explore how engagement with survivor testimonies of catastrophic displacement that reference textiles, dress and fashion can revitalise the affective capacities required for ethical witnessing, with a comparative focus on the Armenian Genocide and the Palestinian Nakba, including what several human rights and academic organisations have recognised as genocide in Gaza.
Rather than treating Arendt’s account of thinking and judgment as a prerequisite for witnessing, we will ask whether witnessing might instead be understood as an affective capacity that is at once embodied and politically mediated. Drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Lauren Berlant and Achille Mbembe, we will consider how this capacity might be renewed and expanded through sustained attention to the affective intensities of narratives of dress and fashion. We will also investigate how such narratives can be read thoughtfully in ways that resist administrative detachment and the normalisation of non-witnessing, whilst remaining alert to the risks of aestheticizing suffering or substituting care for justice.
Dr Serkan Delice (London College of Fashion) is a Course Leader in Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion. His research critically examines the relationship between contemporary capitalism and the global fashion industry, exploring postcapitalist ways of understanding and practicing fashion. His recent publications include the co-edited book Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities: Sociopolitical, Economic, and Environmental (Routledge, 2024) and a chapter titled “Fashion, Capitalism and the Difficulty of Reparations” in Fashion in Theory (Manchester University Press, 2025).
F/fashion and The Children’s Book
3 June 2027 1600-1700
Children’s literature over the centuries has had plenty to say about fashion – little of it good. (Noel Streatfeild, one time model and actress and acutely ‘clothes conscious’ throughout her life, notably swims against the anti-fashion tide in Ballet Shoes and her many other works for children). Scholars are starting to take note of the opportunities presented by a dress-based approach to literary works for young readers, but what might F/fashion have to say about children’s literature? Although homage and veneration would seem the most obvious modes and results of fashionable engagements with children’s books, might they not also contain some reciprocal element of critique and condemnation? To probe these questions, I’ll examine some notable F/fashion treatments of children’s classics (specifically Carroll’s Alice books and Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince) which can certainly be read as undertaking corrective work from queer and/or decolonising perspectives.
Kiera Vaclavik (Queen Mary University of London) is Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary University of London and directs the Centre for Childhood Cultures. Her work brings children’s literature studies into dialogue with fields including classics and costume history, and regularly involves collaboration with high-profile organisations across the creative and cultural industries including the V&A, Liberty and most recently the London Symphony Orchestra. She is the author of Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll’s Icon, 1860-1901 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and is interested in developing further work on the fashionable child and the place of the child in (relation to) F/fashion.
25/26 Seminar series
- Dr Paddy Lonergan (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Transient Consumption: The Future for Meaning, Value & Experience’.
- Alice Paisley-Carruthers, ‘A Philosophical Blueprint for Behaviour Change: Value & Sustainable Fashion’.
- Dr Shaun Cole (University of Southampton), ‘Locating Men’s Underwear’.
- Dr Alexander Hoppe (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, WZB), ‘The Role of Emotions and Networks in Global Fashion Production’.
- Dr Karin Grömer (Natural History Museum Vienna) and Dr Benjamin Wild (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Fashion as Narrative? – From Pre-history to the Present Day’.