Fashion Education

How fashion education can help create a more inclusive society.
 
Despite the hard-earned successes of body positive, antiracist, and disability rights activists calling for diverse representation, the fashion industry has been slow to evolve. In Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution, fashion educators share their experiences navigating, resisting, and transforming the narrow beauty and body ideals that have defined pedagogy within the discipline. The volume examines their challenges and successes, as well as practical strategies for countering narrow fashion education curricula. Educators share ways to radically redesign courses and decenter white supremacy, fatphobia, ableism, transphobia, and misogyny. Together, the chapters illuminate the critical role of fashion education in systematically eliminating body oppression and building a more inclusive profession.

'If you have been searching for a toolkit to dismantle systems of oppression in fashion education, then look no further, you are holding the definitive guide in your hands. Read, plan, then transform.'

We don’t talk or write enough about the progressive potential of pedagogies and curricula in fashion studies. Based upon a firm foundation in social justice, Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution corrects this problem with remarkable clarity through self-reflexive case studies. The editors’ and authors’ courageous chapters reveal the complex interplay between sartorial and academic biographies, modeling new pathways for transformation. Fashion Education gives me hope for the future!

Dr. Ben Barry is Dean and Associate Professor of Equity and Inclusion in the School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design. His academic leadership, teaching and research aims to confront, resist and transform the fashion system’s narrow ideas and ideals.

Dr. Deborah Christel is a fat fashion designer, size-inclsuive business founder and former professor of plus-size design and fat studies. With over a decade of research examining weight bias in the fashion industry, her goal is to ensure bodies of all sizes have equal and equitable access to clothing they find desirable and comfortable.

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