The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices is a creative practice project and a direct response to the profound limitations and complicity of mainstream fashion academia and education. It emerges from a critique of a system that is self-referential, rooted in capitalist and neoliberal ideologies, and which perpetuates a singular, industrial model of fashion. This model, focused on extraction, exploitation, and individual success, is not only destructive but is reinforced by the very literature and archives used to teach it. As Audre Lorde famously argued, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Therefore, this project proposes that to envision equitable, life-affirming fashion systems, we must first break with the canonical tools and build a new, radical library.
Fashion education largely trains students to enter the industrial fashion system, relying on scholarship that takes this system as its sole focus. This dominant scholarship provides a rigid framework that prioritises the institutionalised, Eurocentric fashion industry, thereby marginalising non-Western, subcultural, and grassroots practices. Even when critically acknowledging the industry’s extractive and exploitative nature, this scholarship often remains trapped in a self-referential loop, seeking solutions within the very system it critiques rather than imagining fundamentally different and equitable systems. Consequently, calls to decolonise the curriculum often risk becoming superficial exercises in broadening reading lists without dismantling the underlying structures. The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices argues that genuine change requires a more fundamental rupture.
To build a new canon, the project turns to the principles of radical librarianship. Libraries are not neutral repositories; their classification systems and collections enact political power, reinforcing hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. Radical librarianship, as articulated by figures like Emily Drabinski and inspired by 1970s feminist librarian-activists, challenges this. It reimagines the library as a space of resistance, equity, and social justice, actively working to amplify marginalized voices and disrupt oppressive infrastructures.
The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices materialises this theory. It is a library-in-becoming that functions as both the subject and object of its research; a living archive that investigates critical fashion by creating a platform for it. Its core mission is to platform anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches to fashion, textiles, clothing, and identity. Crucially, it treats the archive not as a site for passive knowledge retrieval, but for active knowledge production. This means reactivating dormant or suppressed histories through acts of (re)publication, translation, transcription, and reinterpretation.
The library operates on multiple levels:
Ultimately, the Library of Unruly Fashion Practices draws on the ancient Greek concept of poikilia—a variegated, pleasing mixture derived from weaving—as an alternative to rigid, patriarchal classification. It seeks to create a library that is a dynamic, interconnected tapestry, where marginalised narratives can be rediscovered and placed in conversation. By doing so, it answers the urgent question: how can we conceive radical propositions for equitable fashion systems if our sources and stories don’t point the way? This library is a proposition to start building those sources and telling those stories, transforming the archive from a fortress of the past into a generative ground for a more just future.
The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices is a Clotheslines Press project, and is supported by the Dutch Creative Industries Fund. Contact us at info@libraryofunrulyfashionpractices.com
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