2025

“CRITICAL FASHION” BOOK / AN INTRODUCTION

The “Critical Fashion” conference was held from 5 to 7 June 2024 at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. 
While preparing for the conference, I realised I had a sort of personal anniversary associated with it. I worked as a curator when MACRO first opened in the early 2000s, and for several years, I organised a lecture and talk series called “Art Highlights”. Its third edition, entitled “Show and Display”, ran through 2003 and 2004 and explored the ways in which architecture, design, or fashion can be exhibited in a museum context. 
Then the artistic director of Issey Miyake, Naoki Takizawa, was one of the speakers and gave a lecture on the exhibitions Miyake and his team set up in various museums, highlighting “Art of Making Things,” held at the Cartier Foundation in Paris in the late ‘90s. Takizawa’s lecture opened the road that led me to the present moment. Twenty years later, I found myself again in MACRO, curating “Critical Fashion,” a series of talks and lectures through which I brought together a group of friends, colleagues, and creatives whose work I admire and find inspiring. 

In 2004, following the Takizawa conference, I was invited to join a faculty formed to launch a course in Fashion Studies at Sapienza University in Rome. For several years, I lectured there on the intersections of art and fashion, and during that time I began researching emerging designers and creatives to present in my classes. I was particularly fascinated by students and alumni of Antwerp’s Royal Academy, such as Yuima Nakazato, Andrea Ayala Closa, Andrea Cammarosano, and others from the same generation. 
In 2008, I became interested in fashion curation, a relatively new term I wanted to explore through conversations with some of the pioneering figures in this then-niche domain. Linda Loppa, a founding director of MoMu in Antwerp and, at the time, director of Polimoda in Florence, was the first on my list. 
The encounter with Linda was another significant moment in a journey that drew me closer to the field of fashion, particularly to something that could be called fashion-related artistic research. 
Thanks to Linda, I met Clemens Thornquist in 2015 and became fascinated by his ideas on the science of fashion and his methods for teaching it. 
These encounters with Linda, Clemens and others formed threads that, over the years to come, started to interweave, becoming an expanded fabric of relations, collaborations, projects... to do or to aspire to do together in the future.   

“Critical Fashion” emerged from a desire to reconnect some of these threads, bringing together different generations of researchers, curators, educators, and artists... just to be together, talk, show, and brainstorm...
It was the first step in what I hope will become a larger platform, titled “Experiments in Fashion and Art” [https://efa.community], inspired by “E.A.T. - Experiments in Art and Technology”, a kind of community of like-minded people working at the intersection of disciplines, industries, and institutional contexts. 
This publication is both a track and a product of the three days spent in Rome, in a bit of a “Lynch-like” red conference hall of MACRO. 
Its three thematic blocks correspond to the contributions brought up during the conference, and also reflect diverse formative backgrounds and professional profiles of participants: Romana Andò, Manora Auersperg, Matteo Augello, Anna-Sophie Berger, Ivana Conte, Christina Dörfler, Laura Gardner, Matthew Linde, Linda Loppa, Diego Manfreda, Yuima Nakazato, Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, Karisia Paponi, Szymon Owsiański, Elise by Olsen, Iris Ruisch, José Teunissen, Clemens Thornquist, Tenant of Culture, Jeppe Ugelvig, Natascha Unkart, Alessandra Vaccari. 

The conference, through its title, “Critical Fashion”, and its subtitle “Can it be taught? Should it be bought?”, wanted to allude to paradoxes and difficulties of carrying on fashion-related artistic research, since it often slips between systems of fashion or art, and their respective institutions and economies. 
Critical fashion, just as a combination of terms seems a bit of an oxymoron, since conventionally, fashion is expected to be affirmative, captivating, enchanting, and commercial... As a term, Critical Fashion has already been discussed in relation to references to philosophy, psychology, and other “serious” knowledge-production fields by fashion designers working within brands such as Gucci or Dior, which are part of dominant luxury conglomerates. 
My perspective on critical fashion was more aligned with my tentative research through the “Transfashional” [https://transfashional.com] exhibition-in-progress that I organised collaboratively with several educational institutions, contemporary art museums, and other supporting partners across Austria, the UK, Poland, Sweden, and Italy between 2016 and 2020. 
The question of whether criticality can be taught arose from the encounter with teaching methodologies and approaches practised in universities and institutes with which I had an opportunity to collaborate, either as a lecturer or as a curator: Polimoda and Istituto Marangoni in Florence, UAL - London College of Fashion, Die Angewandte in Vienna, Swedish School of Textiles in Borås, and some others. 
In these contexts, I recognised different takes on what I considered “criticality”, both in the work of students and professors. Criticality, expressed as an awareness that fashion is a very exploitative and polluting industry; criticality as an analytical approach towards material or semiotic aspects of fashion-making or consuming; or criticality as a sheer urge to experiment, exercise creative freedom without compromising for the commercial success of proper production. 
My question was: if educational institutions foster a more experimental, conceptual, and even ethically engaged approach to fashion production and consumption, will emerging generations of creatives coming out of them bring about the structural and paradigmatic change needed in today's world of fashion? Or will they create an alternative system? Or will they move away from the industry, becoming artists, or “in-betweeners”, hybrid creatives working on the fringes of the art world, and possibly of the fashion system, too? 
Considering all these previous passages, it was now important to bring together practitioners and thinkers and to start the conference with Linda Loppa and Clemens Thornquist, who, in different yet somehow also very similar ways, guided schools and shaped educational agendas. 
For the conference, Linda and Clemens came up with a set of slogans about boosting inventive and critical spirit... a sort of “haiku” instructions for anyone who wants to do something creative. 
I see their contributions to this publication as a continuation of these “musts” through which fashion creation can be reinvented. 
Therefore, their essays open the first part of the book, entitled “Rethinking Fashion: Basis and Alternatives”. This part of the book addresses whether and how critical fashion can be taught. Additionally, it situates the work within the temporal perspective of the younger generation of fashion practitioners and educators, who have built upon some of Clemens’s postulates about methodological foundations and ontological questions to pose about the processes of fashion-making. 
Some of these “alternative”, experimental, “unorthodox” methods came together in the publication edited by Laura Gardner and Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran “Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods”, which was presented on the panel which involved, besides the editors themselves, also two contributors: Matthew Linde and Alessandra Vaccari. 
This chapter closes with an overview of the work of Yuima Nakazato, whose career I have been following from the very beginning. I find his creative approach fascinating since he seems to be challenging himself with “impossible” questions. Like, “how to make garments without a needle and thread?”... And he comes up with the answer through a “Freedom” collection, which inaugurates a whole set of alternative ways of thinking and making garments. 
“Tries and errors”, about which he speaks in our conversation, give us the idea that educational methods which foster experimentation, self-challenge, and inventiveness can really form creatives capable of rethinking fashion from the basis, and even building a brand in the realm of haute couture, which is sustainable and independent. 

The second question in my subtitle, “Should it be bought?”, was a kind of allusion to the status and careers of the creatives, researchers, and practitioners who studied fashion design but moved toward art. 
At first, I wanted to pose this question to collectors or benefactors who would sustain systematically fashion-related artistic research. Unfortunately, the only one I knew of and managed to reach replied that his attention and support had moved towards other fields. 
“Should it be bought?” implies the question of value, affirmation of “critical fashion” and a possibility of thriving creatively and existentially of those who are making it, artists and “in-betweeners” working on the fringes of the worlds of art and fashion. In some cases, their work also has practical, functional, and wearable qualities, but mainly it produces a discourse about fashion channelled through objects, artefacts, and, of course, artworks. So it comes spontaneously to question the status of these productions and the contexts in which they belong. 
Anna-Sophie Berger's work can serve as an indicative example, as some of it prompts us to reflect on the object and the context in which it is presented. 
Perhaps her sensitivity stems from her background, as Anna-Sophie is trained in both fashion design and transmedia art.
So, rather than re-proposing a binary option for an object to be “artwork” or “fashion item”, her work implies more subtle considerations about the meaning that the same object can assume when presented in different contexts. 
For example, a white silk shirt, a blue woollen coat, a green soft-shell jacket ... they all can look like a part of a season’s collection. Yet, when they are given a title, like “She Vanished 1” or “Four Seasons”, they acquire another semantic connotation. They become carriers of a narrative, potentiated by a display: hung on the wall, or left lying on the floor. What was a garment, a product, a part of the fashion production/promotion chain, becomes something that looks like a picture or a sculpture. They are given the status of artworks the moment they receive a title and price, and are installed in the art gallery, but they can easily revert to being clothes if mass-produced, commercialised, and worn.
Anna-Sophie Berger's early work addressed these ambiguities, highlighting the role of the institutional and economic systems in which an object is situated. Tenant of Culture operates in a similar manner, as she was also trained as a fashion designer and currently works mainly in the art world. 
These types of analytic, conceptual operations, for me, seem closer to what “critical fashion” might stand for than to occasions in which a collection is presented by a mainstream brand during fashion week, citing a philosopher as a reference or source of inspiration. 
Connected to the question of a context in which “critical fashion” can find its place, visibility, and recognition, the third part of the book, “Critical Fashion: Spaces and Practices”, discusses the topic from the perspectives of curators, editors, writers, or practitioners. 
The State of Fashion in Arnheim, as a platform and an international biennial event, is one of the spaces where various forms of “criticality” have been showcased. Starting with José Teunissen’s “Searching for the New Luxury”, and continuing with subsequent editions of the biennial—such as “Ways of Caring”, curated by the Fashion Revolution team and NOT____ ENOUGH Collective in 2022, and “Ties that Bind”, curated by Rachel Dedman and Louise Bennetts in 2024—it has provided a space for a multitude of voices expressing need for rethinking fashion-making and consuming. Thus, I wanted to invite this reality to be a part of the conference through the participation of José Teunissen and Iris Ruisch, both of whom are actively engaged in ongoing efforts to make State of Fashion an open space, relevant, innovative, and responsive to the urgent issues the fashion industry and society at large are facing.  
In addition to this activist approach, I sought to explore how contemporary art institutions can serve as spaces for critical and fashion-related artistic research. 
During Luca Lo Pinto's tenure as Artistic Director, MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art was the only institution in Rome to consistently and programmatically showcase practices that fuse the languages of art and fashion. This, of course, was the reason I chose to organise the conference in collaboration with MACRO and to involve some of those already associated with its program, such as Anna-Sophie Berger and Jeppe Ugelvig. 
Yet it is independent curatorial work and various forms of un-institutional spaces that have provided the largest platforms for this experimental, conceptual, and often playful work that expands the notion of fashion and merges it with other linguistic forms. 
Therefore, the overviews of the curatorial and editorial work of Matthew Linde and Jeppe Ugelvig are particularly valuable in this context, providing insight into how diverse and coherent those artistic practices can be, which might be described as “critical fashion”.
Finally, the contribution of Elise By Olsen, in conversation with Carolina Davalli, provides an overview of what it means to create a space within an institutional context in which research can be carried out critically, among other topics. Located in the National Museum of Norway, ILFR is both an educational and an inspirational space. In a certain sense, it symbolises a nexus of vocational and institutional categories necessary for experimental, artistic, expanded, “unruly” forms of fashion research to thrive. 

Possibility to partly summarise and partly build up on the traces that the encounter in Rome left, though this publication is very significant for me. 
It really is a part of the “Experiments in Fashion and Art” domino structure, as it is co-edited with Szymon Owsiański, to whom I am extremely thankful for his effort and enthusiasm in translating something that might have remained as an ephemeral event into a tangible trace - a book. 
The conference itself was created a bit like a domino, thanks to the intervention of some of the invited speakers, who were interested in spreading the word and expanding the range. In particular, I am thankful to Jeppe for bringing in Elise, Laura and Daphne on board, as well as to Diego Manfreda for inviting Matteo Augello and Manora Auersperg to collaborate with Natascha Unkart. 
This choral principle of curating I am re-proposing now, while preparing a second edition entitled “Science Fashion”, which will take place at MACRO and some other sites in 2026, in the form of a conference, exhibitive events, screenings and workshops. Some of the names that appear in this book are advising, collaborating and co-curating the upcoming meeting, making our community move and expand as circular ripples.