Fashion is a great teacher – The fashion education podcast

This episode brings you ‘Fashion & Vitality’ – the Provocation Dialogue by Otto von Busch & Christina Moon at The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2023: De-Fashioning Education – A Critical Thinking and Making Conference in Berlin.

Christina Moon is an Associate Professor of Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York. Her most recent project on the wardrobe explores the interplay of image, clothing, text and textile through diaspora, exile, and longing. Otto von Busch is Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design. In his research he explores how the powers of fashion can be bent to achieve a positive personal and social condition with which the Everyperson is free to grow to their full potential.

Editors: Franziska Schreiber & Renate Stauss
Sound editor: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular

This episode brings you ‘Rethinking Made in India’ – the Provocation Dialogue by Anjana Das & Mayank Mansingh Kaul at The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2023: De-Fashioning Education – A Critical Thinking and Making Conference in Berlin. 

Anjana Das heads her clothing label “White Champa” which is operating from a studio in New Delhi. Her expertise lies in bridge-building between India and Europe in the field of textiles and fashion. Mayank Mansingh Kaul is a New Delhi-based independent curator with a focus on post-colonial histories of Indian textiles.

 
Editors: Franziska Schreiber & Renate Stauss
Sound editor: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular

This episode brings you ‘Reconsidering Efficiency as a Priority’ – the Provocation by Sunny Dolat, at The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2023: De-Fashioning Education – A Critical Thinking and Making Conference in Berlin.

Sunny Dolat is a cultural producer, creative director, and fashion curator. As the co-founder of the Nest Collective, he actively promotes art and culture in Kenya. He challenges social and political issues and is particularly concerned in his work with Africa’s place in global and cultural debates and dialogues.

Editors: Franziska Schreiber & Renate Stauss 

Sound editor: Moritz Bailly

Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker 

Graphic by: Studio Regular

This episode brings you ‘De-Fashion: From Fossil Fuel Fashion to a Fashion Pluriverse’ – the Provocation by Sandra Niessen, at The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2023: De-Fashioning Education – A Critical Thinking and Making Conference in Berlin.

Sandra Niessen is an anthropologist and activist who WE interviewed in September 2023 on her perspective of De-Fashion, which informed the conference. Join us now for her passionate provocation in Berlin, her call to action for a fossil-free fashion industry and an understanding of fashion that prioritizes cultural diversity, rejects exploitative practices, and fosters a pluriverse of fashion expressions.

Editors: Franziska Schreiber & Renate Stauss 

Sound editor: Moritz Bailly

Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker

Graphic by: Studio Regular

In this episode you meet Sandra Niessen – anthropologist and activist, who's repeatedly called out both the global western fashion industry for its imperialism and fashion studies for its biases and othering – using her decades of field work among the Batak in Indonesia, to ground her increasingly direct critique. Sandra Niessen recently published a manifesto for Degrowth, which urges a process of De-Fashion.

For The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2023, we've taken up this term for an exploration of De-Fashioning education, a critical thinking and making conference that wants to champion different fashion educational cultures and explore how to unmake global western fashion education, which has co-opted a fashion system in which so much is wrong, so many are left out, and so few profit – to adapt Halberstan.

Fashion is a great teacher talks to her about becoming an activist instructor, and getting angrier with age, the power of connecting the potential and limits of anthropology, addressing the Colonialism in one’s own work and freeing ourselves from the shackles of limitations to our imagination.

Interview: Renate Stauss 

Editorial assistant: Chantz Norris
Sound editor: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular

In this episode you meet Rahemur Rahman, artist, designer, filmmaker, and Joint First Year Leader on the BA Fashion at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has a strong commitment to social knowledge and community engagement, using his platform to give voice to underrepresented communities. He sees himself as a conduit of hope between grassroots and CEOs. He wants to decolonize craftsmanship and show the whole world what Bangladesh can do. Rahemur radiates empathy and urgency at once, and embodies what Paolo Freire called an education for hope.

Fashion is a great teacher talks to him about unlearning taboos and eliminating hurdles, about saving people through care and education, and creating a better world though teaching better, about almost becoming a civil servant instead … and the ambiguity of teaching students for an industry that he thinks is a complete pile of crap.

Interview: Renate Stauss

Audio editing by: Moritz Bailly

Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker 

Graphic by: Studio Regular

In this special edition you will listen to a choir of voices from the last Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education, organized by Renate Stauss & Franziska Schreiber, the conference that asked: What kinds of fashion education are needed NOW? In October 2021, the Multilogue brought together 450 participants from 52 countries. Through a wealth of papers and workshops, provocations and conversations, a student think tank and exhibition, and a live podcasting booth it aimed to inspire mutual learning, collaborative research and shared action – fashion educations for NOW.
This special edition of Fashion is a great teacher brings you a lasting multilogue, a global choir of thoughts, ideas and solutions on what it means to learn and teach fashion at this collective moment, what moves people right now and what fashion education has done and could do

Episode co-editor: Marteena Mendelssohn
Sound editor: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular

Fashion is a great teacher because it provides a fantastic lens to learn about the world and its people, about history, politics and culture. Join Renate Stauss and Franziska Schreiber, professors of fashion theory and fashion design in Paris and Berlin to discover the most inspiring voices in fashion education, their take on the how and why of learning and teaching fashion, their doubts and hopes, their lessons from fashion.

In this episode you meet Tanveer Ahmed, senior lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London. She is also a PhD candidate at The Open University, to investigate how to develop ways to teach anti-racist and non-capitalist forms of fashion design. Fashion is a great teacher talks to her about: education as a space for freedom and raising critical consciousness, about brutal educational experiences, about wanting to teach differently and a decolonial framework of love to reform fashion education.
Interview: Renate Stauss
Audio editor: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular

In this episode you meet Elke Gaugele – a highly political cultural anthropologist, writer, and curator, she is professor for Fashion and Styles at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and head of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research (ACfFR). Fashion is a great teacher talks to her about: intellectual activism, the impact of teaching fashion teachers, how making her own clothes determined her scholarship, and not wanting to reinvent herself as a Marxist.

Audio editing & mixing by: Moritz Bailly
Music by: Johannes von Weizsäcker
Graphic by: Studio Regular