Prof Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths University, London UK) ‘Micro-enterprises in Times of Pandemic: the need for locality and diversity’

Bio: Angela has taught across many modules including the first year BA Culture and Cultural Studies course, as well as the MA in Media and Communications, the MA in Cultural Studies, MA Culture Industries and MA Gender, Media and Culture.

During 2020 Angela has been completing a monograph from the empirical work for the AHRC CREAte study investigating the working lives of small-scale independent fashion designers in three key cities: London, Berlin and Milan. Co-authored with Dr Dan Strutt (Goldsmiths MCCS) and Dr Carolina Bandinelli ( University of Warwick)  this book will be published by Palgrave Pivot Fashion as Creative Industry: Designer Livelihoods in London Berlin and Milan 2014-2020).

Following from this study Angela has developed two further projects focussing on fashion as urban creative economy, one has crystallised in the Critical Fashion Studies Seminar (with co-founders Dr Jo Entwistle, (Kings College, London), Prof Agnès Rocamora (London College of Fashion) and Dr Jane Tynan (Vrie University of Amsterdam). This Seminar functions as a forum for regular events with the aim of encouraging greater diversity in the field of fashion studies, also to replenish the field with socially engaged younger scholars as well as to foreground issues of labour and working lives across fashion’s global economy.

Prof Agnès Rocamora (London College of Fashion, London UK) ‘Fashion and Digital Media Logic in light of the Pandemic'

Bio Dr. Agnès Rocamora is a Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. Her writing on the field of fashion and on the fashion media has appeared in various journals, including Fashion Theory, Journalism Practice, Sociology, Sociétés, and the Journal of Consumer Culture. She is a co-editor of Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, of The Handbook of Fashion Studies, and of Fashion Media: Past and Present, and a contributor to Fashion as Photograph, Critical Luxury Studies, and Fashioning Professionals. She is also a co-founder and co-editor of the International Journal of Fashion Studies and is on the editorial board of Cultural Sociology, dObras, and Fashion Studies. She is currently developing her work on digital fashion media.

 I am currently conducting some research on fashion blogging (including interviews with fashion bloggers) as part of my wider work and interest in digital fashion media.

Dr. Ben Barry (Ryerson University, Toronto Canada) "Fashioning from bed: Crip dress practices of resistance and resilience"

Bio: As a fashion educator, researcher and activist, I strive to intervene into the fashion system and redesign it to centre inclusion and decolonization – creating a future in which bodies that are currently stigmatized and excluded are instead valued and desired. As a teacher and supervisor, I work with students to confront, resist and transform the fashion system’s narrow ideas and ideals about the body as well as the hierarchical and exclusionary fashion design process. My research program centres the intersectional experiences of disabled, fat, trans, queer and gender nonconforming people and collaborates with them to co-design clothing and media. I also serve as co-Editor of Fashion Studies (with Alison Matthews David) and Director of the FCAD Centre for Fashion Diversity & Social Change. Before becoming faculty, I started the first inclusive modeling agency in the world; for this work, I was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Person’s Case for advancing gender equality in Canada. 

*Ben is the incoming Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, New York.