Vision

The Fashion Professorship aims to contribute to practicing alternative and solidary systems with more agency for human beings in precarious positions and more care for all living beings and living (things that) matter.

Research Vision

The Fashion Professorship starts from a critique on the untenable and inhumane systems at the center of our contemporary neo-liberal market-driven society and consumer culture, in which human beings and other living beings are often reduced to passive numbers, objects, instruments of production, or commodities – at the expense of their wellbeing. In addition, the Professorship critically reflects on the dominant anthropocentric worldview, which has led to the exhaustion and exploitation of nature and natural matter, with human beings enacting power over nature and ‘living matter’.

The Fashion Professorship understands fashion (the contemporary fashion industry) as the prime example of the socio-cultural, economic and political power structures underlying these anthropocentric and capitalist systems. Aiming to develop a critical fashion discourse, the Professorship brings together critical theory, art and design practices, cultural studies, new materialist philosophy, environmental humanities, and fashion theory. In doing so, it creates affirmative theories, critical strategies and embodied practices related to three main research themes.

Core Research Themes

The Fashion Professorship aims to create and affirm more engaged and critical approaches, systems, vocabularies and strategies, using fashion as a tool for systemic change and transformation. It redefines the value systems that underlie the connection between all living beings and material objects to activate post-anthropocentric ethical attitudes for more empathy, wellbeing and solidarity.
The Fashion Professorship aims to move beyond systemic de-humanization, and to contribute to creating more agency and equitability for human beings – and other living beings – in precarious positions. It aims to do more justice to ethical and diverse embodied subjectivities by acknowledging the affective and embodied dimensions of subjectivity.
The Fashion Professorship aims to contribute to creating a different way of engaging with fashion’s matter, materials, and materialities. It considers fashion’s materialities – including the physical matter of experiential and sensuous living bodies – in terms of a continuum of living matter. It aims to practice more care for all living beings and (things that) matter, contributing to healthier, more diverse and balanced ecosystems.