Professor Andrew Groves

Andrew Groves, course leader's profile photo

Professor

Westminster School of Arts

(United Kingdom) +44 20 7911 5000 ext 65937
Harrow Campus
Watford Road
Northwick Park
GB
HA1 3TP
I'm part of

About me

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design at the University of Westminster, and the director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, which he founded in 2016. It houses over 2,000 examples of some of the most significant menswear garments from the last 250 years, including designer fashion, streetwear, everyday dress, sportswear, workwear, and uniforms. 

Recognising the relative lack of menswear in other fashion and museum collections, the WMA was established to create a significant teaching collection centred on men’s garments that could be used for object-based research by both design students and the fashion industry. A further key aim was to facilitate and publicise the knowledge and understanding of menswear as a distinct design discipline through public engagement and exhibitions.

The collection holds over 2500 menswear garments from 1780 to the present day, with a primary focus on post-1940s British men's dress - clothing produced, designed, worn, or sold in Britain. It includes designer fashion, streetwear, everyday dress, sportswear, workwear, and uniforms. It receives over 800 visitors annually and is utilised for research purposes by students, academics, and designers in industry. It is inspired by Italian garment archives, specifically the Massimo Osti archive which was non-hierarchal, housing military, utilitarian, industrial, and fashion garments together.

In 2019, Groves co-curated Invisible Men: An Anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive, the United Kingdom’s largest menswear exhibition to date. It investigated the invisibility of menswear as a result of its inherent design language, which focuses on iterations of archetypal garments intended for specific functional, technical, or military use. It demonstrated how designers have disrupted this by making small but significant modifications to produce results that both replicate and subvert their source material.

In 2021, Groves co-curated the exhibition Undercover – From Necessity to Luxury: The Evolution of Face Coverings During COVID-19. It explored how face coverings evolved over the period of a year, from being a functional PPE object in short supply to becoming an everyday object worn by millions. The WMA collected over a hundred examples of face coverings between April 2020 and April 2021, and the exhibition displayed 52 of these face coverings arranged chronologically to examine how the fashion industry rapidly adapted production, manufacturing, and online marketing to meet shifting consumer demands.

He is currently the principal investigator of the AHRC-funded network project, Locating the absent shadow: exploring connections and encounters in British menswear. This international network is designed to investigate the cultural and industrial connections between London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Milan, Italy, and how they have influenced the production, display, and consumption of British menswear. 

Teaching

Groves' pedagogical methodology focuses on facilitating the formation of communities and places that create the optimal conditions for students, tutors, and industry to co-locate so that the most transformative learning experiences can occur. The most notable example is the creation of the Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA), which serves as a link between academia and industry. Groves founded the WMA in 2016 to support the object-based research practises of students and designers; consequently, the garments selected for the collection are chosen primarily for their technical and functional details, their process of construction, and their materiality. As a result, the collection contains a diverse array of menswear garments, including workwear, military and civilian uniforms, utilitarian clothing, as well as mass-market and designer menswear. This singular combination of objects in the WMA has allowed the WMA to subvert the orthodoxy of most dress collections by promoting object parity and rejecting a design hierarchy. This non-hierarchical approach has created new knowledge about existing historical menswear objects and demonstrated their transformative role in the development of original design-led outcomes. It has also enabled students and academics to engage with the material culture of menswear and use it as a primary source for research analysis and reinterpretation to generate new knowledge that can inform design processes. Researchers from industry include Burberry, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Dunhill, Bottega Veneta, Rapha, Versace, Umbro, and C.P. Company.

In 2018, Groves aligned Westminster's BA Fashion Design programme with the international fashion calendar, making it the first undergraduate programme in the world to exhibit during London Fashion Week. In 2016, he founded the MA Menswear course, the only two-year menswear programme in the world. 2018 marked the debut of its first graduating class, which included LVMH Prize winner Priya Ahluwalia.

Groves has taught several designers who have gone on to establish their own businesses, including Steven Stokey Daley, Priya Ahluwalia, Robyn Lynch, Liam Hodges, Claire Barrow, and Ashley Williams. In addition, he has educated a generation of designers who are now employed by companies such as Louis Vuitton, Kenzo, Burberry, Celine, Stone Island, Balenciaga, Loewe, C.P. Company, Mulberry, Tom Ford, Kenzo, Balmain, Calvin Klein, Paul Smith, Maison Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Lanvin, Versace, Jacquemus, and JW Anderson.

Groves has served as an external examiner for several universities, including Central Saint Martins, Kingston University, Manchester Metropolitan University, the London College of Fashion, the University of Brighton, De Montfort University, Robert Gordon University, and the University of Salford.

Research

Groves’ research focuses on the material culture of menswear and the application of object-based research to generate new knowledge about its design processes, functionalities, and cultural significance.

Historically, fashion research has focused primarily on designer womenswear created for or owned by the elite. This approach has been echoed by museum collections of dress and fashion, which remain highly gendered and almost exclusively focused on elite womenswear to understand the fashioned body. By establishing the first major new teaching collection of the twenty-first century, the Westminster Menswear Archive was intended to rectify this disparity.

The archive includes garments from A-COLD-WALL*, Ahluwalia, Aitor Throup, Alexander McQueen, Aquascutum, Austin Reed, Barbour, Belstaff, Blades, BodyMap, Bukta, Burberry, Burton, C.P. Company, Carol Christian Poell, Christian Dior, Comme Des Garcons, Craig Green, Gieves, Harrods, Irvine Sellars, Jean Paul Gaultier, Joe Casely-Hayford, John Stephens, Kim Jones, Lewis Leathers, Liam Hodges, Martin Margiela, Martine Rose, Masimo Osti, Meadham Kirchhoff, Michiko Koshino, Mr Fish, Nigel Cabourn, Palace, Paul Smith, Prada, Stone Island, Tom Gilby, Tommy Nutter, Umbro, Vexed Generation, and Vivienne Westwood. Researchers from industry include Burberry, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Dunhill, Bottega Veneta, Rapha, Versace, Umbro, and CP Company.

Groves ongoing research has been concerned with the dress practices of football casuals and their subversive bricolage approach to dress as a means of constructing and negotiating shared masculine identities. This was explored in the paper A Casual Obsession: Inside the British Sock Fetish Council and also with his ongoing work exploring the work of Massimo Osti, Stone Island and C.P. Company. 

His pedagogical research includes the paper Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive: A case study of garment-research as a pedagogical practice, which examines how the archive has inspired a fundamentally different approach to pedagogical practice for students, replicating contemporary industry methods while also reflecting on how industry engagement with the archive has influenced the archives collection policy.

Publications

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.