09. Juli | Elke Gaugele & Monica Titton (Wien): Fashion & Postcolonial Critique: An Introduction.

At present we witness an epistemological turn in fashion research.
Fashion theory is increasingly concerned with the project of a critical global fashion and design history that takes into account a postcolonial fashion perspective. This lecture provides a significant overview on the different modi of postcolonial fashion critique and proposes five programmatic subjects for the re-visioning of fashion studies and the emergence of a contemporary postcolonial global fashion theory: the de-colonizing of historical fashion narratives; de-colonizing concepts for fashion research; fashion archives, imaginaries and media; a critical revision of key postcolonial theories; critical global fashion histories and the analysis of global migration. These fields of knowledge are exemplarily expounded from historical decolonizing fashion critique in La Revue du Monde Noir (1931-32) and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visual Sociology of de-colonial counter archive up to the postcolonial imaginaries of the contemporary renaissance of print magazines that eschew the received categories and orders of fashion.

Elke Gaugele is a cultural anthropologist, professor for Fashions and Styles and head of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Monica Titton is a sociologist and culture critic. She is Senior Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and post-doctoral researcher at the Austrian Center for Fashion Research.

Ort: Institut für Kunstgeschichte - LMU München Zentnerstraße 31, Raum 004
Zeit: 18-20 Uhr