SFT Distinguished Research Seminar Series on Fashion Design, Business and Technology | Design Collaborations with Plants, Places, People, and Fashion Production: A Generative Approach to Inclusive and Sustainable Design

Drawing upon my design work and research practice, this seminar explores sustainable approaches to textile and fashion production through natural dye techniques, garment construction, curation, and anthropological film. I argue that creative scholarship in the field of Fashion Studies must transform ossified and antiquated approaches to design in order to create new possibilities for a sustainable, ethical, and equitable future. Using examples from my recent fashion collection, Articles of Displacement, along with curated historical fashion exhibitions in the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and documentary films I have directed, I show how the display of fashion can be a form of transformative public scholarship. How might designers and researchers bring thoughtful attention to ethical and environmental concerns in the industry? What role could fashion research and design play in rebuilding connections to the plants, places, and people required in production? What possibilities do inter-reliant approaches, like co-design, offer fashion designers working within and alongside larger systems of production at the local and global scales? My scholarshipbrings anthropology and design together to address these questions, among others, through filmmaking, curation, natural dyeing, fashion design, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork.