- Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media
About me
Professor Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design at the University of Westminster and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, the UK’s leading research collection dedicated to the material, industrial, and cultural history of menswear.
He founded the Westminster Menswear Archive in 2016 as a national research infrastructure for the study of menswear, encompassing workwear, uniforms, sportswear, and technical clothing. The Archive now holds over 3,000 garments. It supports academic research, museum exhibitions, postgraduate teaching, and industry collaboration, and is used by scholars, curators, and fashion companies in the UK and internationally.
Groves’ work reframes menswear as a system rather than a style. His research examines how clothing operates as infrastructure that organises labour, masculinity, surveillance, and everyday life through standardisation, material technologies, and institutional control. This systems-based approach underpins his writing, curatorial projects, and the development of the Westminster Menswear Archive.
Teaching
Professor Groves uses the Westminster Menswear Archive as a working teaching and research resource, embedding object-based analysis into studio and postgraduate supervision. His students work directly with garments, using construction, materials, provenance, and wear as evidence, and translate that knowledge into contemporary design and scholarly outputs.
He has mentored designers who have gone on to establish influential labels, including Steven Stokey-Daley, Robyn Lynch, Priya Ahluwalia, and Paolo Carzana, and former students work across leading fashion houses, including Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Burberry, and Maison Margiela. He also supervises doctoral researchers working on menswear history, archives, and material culture.
Research
Professor Groves’ research focuses on menswear as an infrastructural system that shapes bodies, labour, and identity. His work combines material culture, archival research, and cultural theory to examine how garments such as uniforms, workwear, and sportswear regulate behaviour and visibility in modern life.
His principal research platform is the Westminster Menswear Archive. The Archive supports research on topics including masculinity, subculture, military and industrial clothing, sportswear, and technical textiles, and provides the evidential basis for publications, exhibitions, and funded projects.
Groves has led and contributed to major research initiatives, including the AHRC-funded Locating the Absent Shadow network, which examined the historical and contemporary relationship between British and Italian menswear, linking London, Manchester, Liverpool and Milan as connected cultural and industrial systems.
His publications include peer-reviewed articles and the co-authored volume Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive (2024).
Publications
For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.