Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Chinese inspired’ designs of the late 1970s, Ricardo Tisci’s AW 2015 ‘Chola girl’ runway show; bindis worn at festivals, baby-curls and ‘braid bars’ - fashion has always borrowed from non-western or socially marginalised cultures. These creative strategies have increasingly been criticised, particularly online, for their insensitivity to, and exploitation of, the colonised, the economically underdeveloped, and the geopolitically subaltern. The term ‘cultural appropriation’ is now a popular idiom that describes this act of so-called creative borrowing from the non-west. It is closely associated with the use of exoticism, the ‘Oriental’ Other and varieties of racial stereotyping and micro-aggression in fashion design and image making.

 

Fashion, Race and ‘Cultural Appropriation’: A Conference at Central Saint Martins will address the representation of race and ethnic identity in fashion design and associated media through the framework of cultural appropriation. This one-day event seeks to locate race, ethnicity, borrowing and appropriation within intellectual debates arising from postcolonial theories, critical race theory, whiteness studies and cultural and historical studies. Design takes inspiration from all things, but how can we understand borrowing and appreciation, the embodied conventions of genre in a globalised economy and digital cultural environment? Is one consumer’s beauty another’s racism and white supremacy? Walter Benjamin talks about the ‘rag-picker’ as a mode of modern creative practice. In our contemporary geopolitical environment, does rag-picking hide more complex dynamics of inequality inherent to fashion consumption? How can we explore these ideas without dictating to creatives and consumers, admonishing them for their choices? Our current media environment holds creativity up to intense scrutiny. Is it the job of design to challenge clichés, stereotypes and white supremacy? Are image making and fashion ever truly separate from geopolitics?

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PROGRAMME (download)

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9.30 Registration

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10.00: Welcome and Introduction, Dr Royce Mahawatte (CSM, UAL)

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10.15-11.00: Opening Keynote: Dr Sarah Cheang (Royal College of Art)

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11.00-11.20: Break   

                                                     

11.20-13.00 SESSION A

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PANEL 1 (Room A002)

 

Approaches to Cultural Appropriation: Pedagogy and Psychology

 

Tanveer Ahmed (The Open University), Rethinking Fashion Design Pedagogies in the Era of Globalisation

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Teleica Kirkland  Decolonising the Curriculum: Developing the study of Race and Fashion

 

Jessa White (UAL) Cultural Appropriation and the Need for Cognitive Closure

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PANEL 2 (Room A116)

Fashioning the Legacies of Orientalism

 

Elizabeth Brauders (UAL), Orientalism in Fashion: Perfume Advertisements

 

Dr. Christopher Koné (Williams College), Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2007 Haute Couture Collection for Dior: Or the Pharmakos to Cultural Appropriation

 

Babette Radclyffe-Thomas (LCF), Vogue China: From Karl Marx to Karl Lagerfeld

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PANEL 3 (Room E002)

Objects and Geopolitics

 

Dr Wessie Ling (Northumbria University), A Bag with Many Names: The Geopolitics of Asian Street Culture

 

Benedetta Morsiani (University of Westminster), Transcultural Body Spaces: Re-inventing and Performing the Headwrap Practice among Young Congolese Women in London

 

Dr Kirsten Scott (Istituto Marangoni, London), Borrowed Cloth: Whose story is it, What does it mean and Where do we go from here?

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13.00-13.45: LUNCH

 

13.45-15.20 SESSION B

PANEL 4 (Room E002)

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The Body and Postcolonial Dynamics

 

Kamaira Anderson (UAL), Reframing Appropriation in Contemporary Hip Hop Dance Culture

 

Stacey Balfe (UAL), Going Back to the Roots of the Problem: Fashion and Black hair

 

Emmanuelle Dirix (Leeds College of Art), “Feast of Fools”- #Festivalready-style, appropriation and online identity

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PANEL 5 Room A116

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Decolonising Design

 

Dr Rina Arya (University of Wolverhampton), Wearing the deity

 

Donatella Barbieri (UAL), A Change of Costume? The Lived Experience and the Reclaiming of Intercultural Practice through Dress and Performance.

 

Valerie St. Pierre Smith (Independent Scholar), Connective Threads, Inspiration, Appropriation and Design in the Global Village

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15.20-15.35 BREAK

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15.35-16.20:  (Room E002)

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Closing Keynote: Dr Serkan Delice (LCF, UAL) Cultural Appropriation: Symptom or Diagnosis?’

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16.30: Close

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General enquires to Dr Royce Mahawatte, Cultural Studies Programme, Central Saint Martins (r.mahawatte@csm.arts.ac.uk). Proceedings will be developed into an essay collection.