Chic

This 40th episode is the last part of the season two finale, and I wanted to turn the interview format around and answer some questions about my work, so I asked some friends, colleagues, former podcast guests, and other listeners to send in some questions they would like me to answer on the podcast. I’d like to thank everyone who sent me their questions for this episode. And I want to thank all listeners for supporting this podcast! Chic Podcast will be back after a break for another season.

The 39th episode is the first part of season two finale, and I decided to invite some friends, colleagues, and former podcast guests to send in some questions for me to answer on the last two episodes. I asked them to ask anything about the podcast, my work, anything about fashion sustainability, decoloniality, innovation, or education. Or anything they are interested in and would like me to engage with. So, here are their questions and my responses.

The 38th episode was recorded remotely with Moussa Mchangama, during Copenhagen Fashion Week in February 2022. Moussa is the co-founder of the sustainability consultancy In Futurum, with Frederik Larsen, (whom I talked to on this podcast in the first season, in episode 10). They are based in Copenhagen and are responsible for the sustainability agenda adopted by Copenhagen Fashion Week since 2020. Moussa kindly agreed to join one of my fashion courses this semester and talk about his work, and to help the future generation of fashion students understand how they can bring sustainability and ethics into the fashion industry. In what follows, you will hear a condensed version of our conversation during his guest talk.

The 37th episode was recorded with Tansy Hoskins, who is an award-winning journalist and author, whose work focuses on labour rights and the politics of the fashion industry. Her research has taken her to Bangladesh, Kenya, Macedonia, and other key locations around the world. She is the author of the award-winning Stitched Up – The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (2014 and currently re-conceptualized for a second edition due to come out next fall) and Foot Work – What Your Shoes Are Doing to The World (2020), an exposé of the dark origins of the shoes on our feet. In June 2021, she won the Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award at the Freelance Writing Awards. You can follow her work on social media and subscribe to her newsletter on her website.

The 36th episode was recorded with my dear friend Jason Cyrus, whose new exhibition History Is Rarely Black or White just opened at the Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It will be on display from November 27, 2021, until March 20, 2022. It explores Victorian cotton, slavery, and their ongoing legacies. Jason was featured on Chic podcast last season during the Canadian Fashion Symposium. He has a master’s degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from York University in Toronto and is currently working on his PhD in the History of Art at Warwick University in the UK. He has held research posts at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. In January 2020, he also curated York University’s first fashion exhibition, entitled ReFraming Gender.

The 35th episode was recorded remotely with Angela Jansen, who is the founder of the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF). She is an independent researcher, educator, consultant, curator, and the author of Moroccan Fashion: Design, Tradition and Modernity (2014), co-editor with Jennifer Craik of Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion(2016). She is also the guest co-editor with Toby Slade of the special issue of Fashion Theory on “Decoloniality and Fashion” (2020). Her scholarship grows out of an ongoing critique of Eurocentric fashion. She argues that the way fashion as a noun has come to refer to a temporality of contemporaneity, or a system of inequality and an industry of capitalism particular to modernity, is intrinsic to its discriminating, exploitive, and destructive nature. While fashion as a verb, the act of fashioning the body, is of all times and places. Systems of fashioning “outside of modernity” are deliberately and systematically discriminated against, silenced, and erased. In 2012, she initiated RCDF to experiment with decolonial ways of knowledge-creation and sharing – through conversation, through the communal and coalitional, and through a broad diversity of voices across age, race, gender, education, discipline, and geography.

The 34th episode was recorded remotely during my presentation at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, when I was invited to give a guest lecture on decolonizing fashion education for Else Skjold’s new MA program in sustainable fashion in October 2020. You will hear most of my presentation, but it ends a little abruptly with the question, “where do we go from here?” which I posed to the students during the discussion period, which is not included in this recording. Of course, this is an enduring question that I have been working on in my research, teaching, and publications. So, let’s consider this just the beginning of an on-going conversation of how to make fashion education more just, how to bridge decoloniality and sustainability, and how to reform the fashion industry.

The 33rd episode was recorded at the Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education Conference, where my co-author Tanja Gotthardsen and I organized a workshop on Fashion Paradoxes. As you know, I work in fashion education, and Tanja, who was a guest on this podcast at the end of season one, works very closely with the industry, consulting and educating both the producers and consumers of fashion on ethics and sustainability. Together we have been investigating the Danish fashion industry for the past year, and our research is currently in the process of being published. We have identified and developed 7 paradoxes within the sustainable fashion sector that we outlined in this workshop. Our goal is to create greater transparency and encourage more collaborative work in tackling the current challenges and paradoxes of fashion.

The 32nd episode was recorded remotely with Lea Kress from Extinction Rebellion Denmark. In her academic, professional, and activist life, Lea focuses on many social and environmental issues, including climate justice, global supply chains, women’s rights, and fair working conditions in the global textile industry. She has a master’s degree in Global Studies, and for the past two years she has been working as a sustainability coordinator for a clothing store in Copenhagen. She is currently organizing a student conference on socially-just transformations of the fashion industry for the German NGO FEMNET. As a climate activist, she participates in the actions and working groups of Extinction Rebellion Denmark, which is a part of the global environmental movement.

The 31st episode includes the audio recording of the Justice and Design webinar that I organized in September 2021, with a panel discussion that included:

After brief introductions, we reflected on the Fashion Act Now Manifesto, that was launched and introduced by Sara Arnold and Sandra Niessen at this webinar, and then we invited all the webinar participants to contribute to the discussion on justice and design.