Stitches of Care: Practising Solidarity through Fashion

This inaugural lecture highlights how art, design and critical fashion practice expose the importance of moving beyond the transactional approach of the capitalist fashion industry. It focuses on two perspectives that deserve much more attention in the fashion and sustainability discourse. The first perspective builds upon post- and decolonial theories and highlights the importance of humbling the dominant Western, Eurocentric perspective of industrial fashion, in order to do more justice to the presence of multiple co-existing fashion systems and to affirm and activate a plurality of ways of making and wearing clothes. The second perspective focuses on humbling our perspective as human beings in relation to other species and nature. From a post-anthropocentric perspective, it proposes a practice of interspecies solidarity that helps to move beyond a human-centred focus where the human is superior to ecosystems in nature and/or to non-human entities. This inaugural lecture is a call to open up a pluriverse of fashion systems and solidary practices of making and wearing that have to do with being-with the world.