Mission

The Fashion Professorship initiates theoretical and practice-based research projects to incubate and develop a body of knowledge, concrete practices and relationships that contribute to transforming fashion’s Ego-system into healthier, more diverse and balanced ecosystems. With an interdisciplinary community, the Professorship researches the underlying changing values and meanings of fashion to collectively affirm critical practices of making, wearing and embodying fashion.

From Ego-systems to ecosystems

The Fashion Professorship believes that the realization of the vision can only flourish when it is first and foremost a shared vision that is lived by the community. It is committed to collectively – together with a diverse and interdisciplinary community – developing new insights and knowledge, while making that accessible to foster change across a broader and international community.

The Professorship is committed to developing intellectual and theoretical frameworks that allow for in-depth interpretations of current developments in the field of fashion. Through bringing together theory and practice, it develops critical tools to think through and act upon the cracks in the current fashion system and to rethink the role that fashion could – should – play in relation to urgent socio-cultural, environmental and political developments in contemporary society. In doing so, it aims to:

evoke, affirm and curate new ways of thinking and alternative approaches and vocabularies that help to move beyond mechanisms of systemic de-humanization, while doing more justice to the affective and embodied dimensions of subjectivity;
explore, envision, analyze and critically reflect on the relationship between human beings and natural matter, to practice more care for and to re-engage with living (things that) matter.

The Fashion Professorship plays the role of a facilitator for bringing people together. Finding a balance between theory and research and at the same time practicing/doing. In any case, it shows an alternative picture: showing that there are different possibilities, and within that the freedom to show the stories and practices.