In March 2020, the world has come to a screeching halt to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, and universities across the globe have closed their doors and moved their teaching activities online. Students of practice-based courses like fashion design were and continue to be particularly challenged by the shutdown of studios and working facilities. At the same time, the pandemic represented a rare possibility to take a look at the current critical debates concerning the fashion industry. In April 2020, I organized a zoom reading group called “Fashion in Crisis”: in five thematic units, an international group of peers and colleagues and I read and discussed texts concerned with the transformations, sites of disruption, crisis and renewal that the fashion industry is facing at present. The reading group was an invitation to pause and reflect on the fashion system as we know it, and to seize the systemic rupture to ask critical questions, to envision alternatives and to discuss new possibilities for the critical and necessary renewal of fashion.

In my presentation, I will map the five sites of transformation that were discussed in the “Fashion in Crisis” reading group: fashion and neoliberalism (Hoskins 2014), labour conditions in the garment industry (Mezzadri 2017), fashion and sustainability (Fletcher & Tham 2019), design activism (Jain 2019), decolonial environmental justice (Vergès 2017) and the notion of radical hope for a different future (Berardi 2011). After situating fashion and its discontents on a temporal and spatial topography of crisis, I will draft a few thoughts about the future of fashion, and its possibilities.

Dr. Monica Titton is a sociologist, fashion theorist, and culture critic. She currently works as a Senior Scientist at Modeklasse, the fashion department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her work develops a critical, sociological perspective at the intersections of fashion, politics, art, and identity. Her research is guided by an effort to expand and develop theoretical frameworks for critical analyses of fashion, and is informed by the traditions of feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism.

She has written and published on collective narratives of self and identity in digital fashion media, on the interrelationship between contemporary art practices and fashion design, on the subversion and affirmation of gender stereotypes in postfeminist media culture, on the limits of criticism in fashion journalism, and on the convergence of feminism, fashion, and radical protest. Concerns with postcolonial inquiry in fashion theory and the representations of place and otherness in the geography of fashion media have become central to her most recent work. In addition to her scholarly work, she regularly writes about fashion, art, and culture for newspapers, magazines, museums, and cultural institutions.