A one-day, in-person conference that examines how fashion constructs, reflects and challenges ideas of bodies, identities, labour, care and collective life.
What is Fashion? 2 is a one-day, in-person conference that examines how fashion constructs, reflects and challenges ideas of bodies, identities, labour, care and collective life. At a time when fashion is increasingly discussed through technologies, systems, supply chains and ecological crisis, this conference asks what happens when the human is placed back at the centre of fashion research.
The programme examines how fashion constructs, remembers and challenges ideas of embodiment, labour and identity. Together, we will approach fashion as a material and cultural practice through which bodies are shaped, protected, disciplined, archived and imagined, offering sharper methods for understanding fashion’s human work.
Programme
The programme interrogates bodies, identities, labour and collective life across six strands:
Bodies, fit and representation
Fashion shapes, enables, disciplines and excludes bodies. This strand examines body politics across fashion media, retail, education, design practice and cultural discourse.
Making, practice and embodied knowledge
Fashion design is a craft-based discipline in which making can operate as research and where the boundaries are ever shifting between fashion, art and craft. This strand examines practice-led methods, embodied knowledge, material knowledge, the relationship between hand, machine, body and object, tacit skill, material experimentation, sampling, prototyping, reconstruction and practice.
Menswear, authority and the public body
Menswear is often framed as functional, ordinary or resistant to fashion, yet it is central to how bodies are organised and read in public. This strand examines menswear as a system of authority, labour, class, protection, respectability, concealment and collective identity.
Fashion pedagogy and fashion knowledge
This panel examines how fashion knowledge is taught, preserved, and interpreted. It explores manufacturing expertise, participatory pedagogy, and worker led visual methods, revealing how fashion theory and practice are reshaped within contemporary educational and labour contexts.
Archives, collections and absence
Fashion archives and collections do not simply preserve garments. They preserve, produce and sometimes distort ideas about people, bodies, taste, identity and value. This strand examines public collections, personal wardrobes, commercial archives, brand archives, digital archives and archival image culture.
What we got wrong about menswear
Ten Years of the Westminster Menswear Archive
The Westminster Menswear Archive was established in 2016 at the University of Westminster to support the teaching of fashion design and to address underrepresentation of menswear. At the time, the problem appeared to be one of absence. The collection now contains over 3,000 examples of menswear, ranging from sportswear and uniforms to industrial workwear, military clothing and designer fashion.
Over the last decade, collecting this material has reinforced that the problem is not simply what is missing, but how menswear itself is understood. Its significance often lies not only in the garment, but in the systems in which it is produced, regulated, worn, and understood.
Menswear has often been studied through existing frameworks and gender biases for fashion that privilege designer authorship, spectacle, aesthetics, and surface. Yet much of menswear is better understood through function, regulation, labour, belonging, and use.
Drawing on ten years of research, collecting and exhibitions, this keynote asks what happens when we stop making menswear fit inherited frameworks and instead examine how it actually works.
Workshops and demonstrations will be offered alongside University of Westminster Menswear Archive tours.
Cost
- Early bird: £60*
- Academic: £75
- Student: £40
- Industry: £75
*The closing date for early bird tickets is 23 September 2026.
What is Fashion? 2 contributors
Andrew Groves is Professor of menswear Systems, and Danielle Sprecher is the Curator of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. They have co-curated several notable exhibitions, including Invisible Men: An Anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive (2019), Undercover (2021), and Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion (2024). They are co-authors of the book Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive, published by Bloomsbury in 2024.
Joseph Altieri is an adjunct professor in the Production Management Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and principal consultant of Joseph Altieri Consulting. With more than thirty years of experience in apparel manufacturing, sourcing, quality systems, product development, and supply chain operations, he has worked with organizations ranging from entrepreneurial startups to large-scale manufacturing enterprises. His teaching, consulting, and writing focus on workforce development, manufacturing education, domestic production systems, and the preservation of technical knowledge within the fashion industry. He regularly publishes and speaks on manufacturing, supply-chain resilience, and industry transformation, and has presented internationally on industry-education collaboration and the human systems that support digital transformation in fashion manufacturing.
Roberta Bitto is a Senior Fashion Stylist and recent MA graduate in Fashion and Visual Cultures. Her professional practice and academic research are connected by a shared interest in how fashion creates meaning beyond the garment itself. Her work explores women's intellectual labour, the relationship between fashion and art, and the cultural processes through which fashion acquires meaning. This paper develops research from her master's dissertation on post-war Italian couture and reflects her continuing interest in the broader question of what fashion is.
Hannah Buckler is a fashion worker and ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Hannah’s doctoral research explores refusals and emergent unionising in the British fashion sector and draws heavily on her extensive professional experience working as a photographic and film producer in the luxury fashion sector for brands including Chanel, Dior, Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Prada. In 2024 Hannah launched ‘We Can Be Both’, a visual research project on fashion labour which aims to open up academic conversations and connect research on fashion to the people it’s about.
Eleni Chasioti is a Greek-born, London-based independent curator and writer. Her research centres on refugee clothing and textiles, displacement, and museums. Drawing on approaches from fashion studies, material culture and museum studies, her work explores how objects carry lived experience and how clothing functions as a repository of identity and intergenerational memory. She has a background in archaeology and art history and holds an MA in Fashion Curation from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her first book, Clothes and Textiles of Anatolian Greek Refugees: Embodied Memories on Display, was published by Lived Places Publishing in 2026.
Angela Devoti is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Staffordshire specialising in Fashion Design and Fashion History and Cultures.
Lauren Downing Peters, PhD, is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies and Director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago. Her interdisciplinary research explores the entanglements of dress, the body, and identity, with a particular emphasis on plus-size fashion and standardized sizing; twentieth-century American fashion; and fashion sustainability. Her publications include Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry (Bloomsbury 2023), Fashion in American Life (Bloomsbury 2024), (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (Yale University Press 2025), and Teaching Fashion Sustainably: Perspectives, Pedagogy, Practice (Bloomsbury, Forthcoming).
Béatrice Frant is a Doctoral Researcher in Architecture by Design Practice at the University of Westminster. Her interest lies in how we perceive domestic environments, specifically the alienation that comes with being a woman, and using embroidery as an expression of gender practice that could inform new typologies of architectural design. Her work has won several awards, most recently the Fitzroy-Robinson Drawing Prize and the Technical Innovation in Detail Prize during her education at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Although currently navigating critical thought through fiction, Béatrice’s work ranges in media, also using film to challenge the inherited memory of dual nationality.
Alexi Charovas is a Doctoral Researcher in Art and Humanities at the University of Westminster (CREAM), working across printmaking, performance and photography. Their PhD examines how national iconography shapes public and personal understandings of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion, using the fustanella of the Greek Tsolias/Evzones costume, read through queer, feminist, and decolonial lenses, as a site of contested national masculinity. Trained in Biomedical Technology Engineering, Alexi completed an MA at the Royal College of Art and treats photography as active intervention in the visual codes of gender and nation rather than documentation. Their studio practice spans cyanotype, silkscreen, and surface disruption.
Mara Sendroiu is a Master's graduate from the Master of Architecture (MArch) RIBA Part II degree at the University of Westminster. Her graduate project looked at the relationship between the female body, the built environment and patriarchal structures of society through a historical inquiry of female companionship, collective structures and craft. She has received the University of Westminster Piercy & Co Maker Award for her work with textiles, and her project was exhibited as part of the RIBA London Regional Awards - 'In Safe Hands' Exhibition. Her research is rooted in architecture's role in influencing social rituals and customs.
Sarah Graham is a Lecturer in Fashion design whose practice-based research interests are concerned with the narrative and storytelling within dress that gives voice to corporeal traces and the intimate encounters between our bodies and clothes. Exploring physical and digital interactions of these bodily memories to inform the creative process and ideas around aesthetic sustainability. With a background in Fashion Contour and currently documenting garments in archive to explore the retelling of rituals and daily routines, through wear, repair and personalisation. These garments’ narratives inform her textile approaches, emphasising craft and repair techniques rooted in feminine past times and domestic routines.
Dr Wendy Moody is Course Director for a BA (Hons) Fashion Design Degree. Her multidisciplinary previous research spans design, neuroscience, engineering, and psychology. Her PhD combined clinical psychology and fMRI to explore psychological preferences in clothing design and the neural basis of selfperception. More recently, her collaborative methods focus upon creative 2D drawing/collage, 3D digital fashion and conceptual design and textures. This is explored within the following areas:
- Multiple selves, embodied emotion and performative wearing experiences
- Chronic pain (Fibromyalgia), emotions and wearing experiences
- Sustainable textiles and fashion
After a career in fashion, textile design, and design education, Di established the Textile & Dress Collection at Falmouth University to preserve and document everyday dress and its associated narratives, establishing a tailored research resource for students and academics. Her personal focus is on unremarked garment detail and the social histories embedded in clothing, thriving on unearthing forgotten stories and personal sartorial histories. She is currently working on projects that aim to forge interdisciplinary links between archives and dress and textile collections both inside and outside the university.
Anne-Charlotte Hartmann-Bragard is an independent practioner and founder of Studio Abi, a French research-creation laboratory exploring textile education through design, anthropology and childhood studies. Her work investigates clothing as a medium for embodied knowledge, creativity and cultural participation. She develops long-term projects with schools, museums and cultural institutions (France, Scotland, Denmark) and contributes to international research through ACORSO/IN2FROCC and Designing for Children's Rights (D4CR). She was a mentor for the IFM–Kering Sustainability Chair (2024–2025), contributed to Establishing Child Centred Practice in a Changing World, and is co-editing the forthcoming Strenae special issue Children's Fabrics: Forms, Sensorialities, Imaginaries (2026).
Madison Hough is an interdisciplinary curator working across fashion, textiles, and socio-cultural inquiry, using material practices as entry points into the entangled crises of the Anthropocene. Trained in socio-cultural anthropology and fashion curation, her work explores the micro-scale experience of dress as both an intimate and communal act, while tracing its connections to macro systems. She approaches textiles as carriers of cultural memory and agents of transformation. Based at the London College of Fashion Archives, her practice sits across institutional and freelance work. This project was developed at the Museum of the Order of St John, supported by the Costume Society, examining nursing uniforms as sites of gendered labour, power, and civil identity.
Anaïs Huyghe is an art historian specialised in textile conservation. As a curator at Modemuseum Hasselt (Belgium), she researched and expanded the collection, curating DRESS.CODE (2020) and We Need to Talk about Fashion (2023) — both tracing hidden or untold archive stories. She now works independently on archival research, with an interest in the female archive and alternative modes of preservation.
Wonne Scrayen is a critical fashion writer and researcher. Driven by embodied language, she explores a possible counterbalance to fashion’s normative blueprint, with a prolific focus on the linguistic and multisensorial dimension of fashion.
Angela Kinnings is a senior lecturer in design for Fashion Contour at LCF, with 25 years design experience for British and international fashion brands. She specialised in creating lingerie brand identities and designs for celebrity collaborations. Her last industry role as Head of Design for Agent Provocateur refined her creative practice in directional, statement designs befitting the brand as a leading fashion force. Passionate about teaching creative design skills for contour, she seeks to widen acknowledgment of lingerie as an important reflector of fashion culture and society, believing lingerie is a key to unlocking hidden stories of women’s History.
Robert Leach is Course Leader of the BA Fashion Design Course at the University of Westminster. He also manages an online History of Blackpool group with over 63,000 members, has close contacts with Heritage Blackpool and the new Showtown, museum of entertainment, project in the town. In 2015 he curated Archetypes, an exhibition exploring the evolution of archetypal garments, how they inspire the design process and how they become markers in popular culture and in society. In 2016 he co-curated The Vanishing Art of Camouflage, the first exhibition based on the Menswear Archive at Westminster, featuring garments with camouflage motifs, prints and designs both historically and in a fashion context. He is the author of the Thames & Hudson Fashion Resource Books. Leach, R. 2012. Fashion Resource Book. Thames & Hudson, London (Japanese and Chinese editions 2016 & 2017) Leach, R. 2015. Fashion Resource Book- Men. Thames & Hudson, London (Chinese edition 2017.
Jenni Moore is an Assistant Professor in Fashion Design, specialising in menswear, at Northumbria University. Her research explores the intersection of psychology, semiology and fashion, focusing on the visual construction of male attractiveness and its implications for garment design. Her doctoral research pioneered the use of eye-tracking technology to examine which areas of the male body draw visual attention and are perceived as attractive, establishing a foundation for evidence-based approaches to menswear cut and silhouette. She has since extended this work internationally, leading a cross-cultural study comparing UK and Sri Lankan perceptions of male body attractiveness to inform globally-responsive garment design practice.
Rachel Neal is a Lecturer in Design Cultures at De Montfort University. She is a historian of men's dress and identity in early twentieth-century Britain. Before returning to academia to complete her PhD, Rachel worked as a menswear designer for ten years, an experience that continues to inform her object-based approach to research. Her first book, Khaki and Civvies: Men's Clothes and Identity in First World War Britain, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027.
Anne Marie Ng is a Lecturer in Fashion Design at the University of Westminster. Trained at Central Saint Martins, she has over 30 years' international fashion industry experience, including senior design roles across six Savile Row houses and as the first female Global Head of Design at Gieves & Hawkes. Her practice is rooted in the hand: in the tacit, accumulated judgement that comes from handling cloth, developing menswear collections and shaping garments alongside master tailors. Her current practice-led research explores how fashion illustration can reveal embodied knowledge, tacit craft and material intelligence within bespoke tailoring.
Previously trained in fashion design, Muyo Park is now a PhD student at MCCS, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research focuses on rethinking the 'fashion portfolio' as the bottom line of young designers' affect against the capitalised creative ideology, exploited by neoliberalised urban fashion labour and the university's internationalisation. He is also a student associate with Fashion Academics Creating Equality (FACE).
Dr Richard Sorger is a fashion academic and researcher. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and Course Leader for the Fashion MA at Kingston University. Sorger completed his practice-led PhD in 2023, and his research explores the notion of fashion embellishment, primarily the use of sequins, as a spatial and theoretical concept through its relationship with the body, fashion and dress. Between 2006-2011, Sorger designed and produced his eponymous fashion label of ready-towear womenswear. He exhibited his collec2ons in London, Paris and Milan, and showed his work on the catwalk during London Fashion Week, Spring/Summer 2008 to Spring/Summer 2011.