The Fashion Research Network (FRN) is a collaborative venture set up to promote and share the work of PhD and early career researchers in fashion and dress studies. The network was started by PhD candidates from the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art in response to their own experiences of navigating the networks already open to fashion researchers. Evolving from initial conversations on the merits and frustrations of research into fashion and dress the FRN provides a space for discussion forum for fashion and dress research.

 

Fashion and Dress Studies are interdisciplinary; researchers might be located within the disciplines of fashion design or business, history, art history, economics, anthropology, psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, or philosophy, for example. The broad-ranging scope of fashion research has to date mounted a communication barrier between scholars in different institutions, who have found few occasions to informally discuss their work or collaborate with peers from other disciplines. The cross-institutional FRN attempts to remedy this problem by initiating discussion between scholars with different approaches to the constantly evolving discipline of fashion research.

 

FRN’s cross-institutional and multidisciplinary approach encourages the recognition that definitions of fashion and dress research are determined by individuals’ academic and professional backgrounds.  Within FRN’s collaborative framework, we seek to reinvigorate the relationship between contemporary, practice-based and historical fashion and dress studies. To date, the varied approaches of FRN’s participants have led to discussions about not only fashion research but the nature of fashion or dress itself, an entity that eludes concrete definitions.

 

Questions we seek to explore include:

• How can fashion research incorporate the historic and the contemporary simultaneously?

• What do researchers using practice-based methodologies have to teach those pursuing research through written methods, and vice-versa?

• Fashion requires its researchers to be ‘‘bilingual’’ and therefore able to read and interpret imagery and artefacts as much as written texts. What can these skills contribute to the wider field of fashion beyond the academic institution?

• Fashion academia can seem disconnected from the fashion industry. Is this a problem, and if so, how can we rectify this?

 

 

 

Steering committee 

 

Nathaniel Dafydd Beard is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader of MSc International Fashion Marketing at Coventry University London and a PhD Candidate (Fashion Womenswear), Department of Fashion and Textiles, School of Material, Royal College of Art. His work has been published in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, Address – Journal of Fashion Writing and Criticism, BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice, Sexymachinery, and Arc and presented in papers at the universities of Brighton, Bologna, Helsinki, London, Oxford, Sheffield, and Warwick, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, London College of Fashion, Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), Paris, and the Costume Society. In September 2012 he convened Fashioning the City: Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems, the RCA’s first full-scale international, inter-disciplinary conference on fashion. www.fashioningthecity.wordpress.com

 

Alexis Romano was awarded her PhD (Dress History) from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016. Her doctoral research situates the development of the French readymade clothing industry (1945-1968) against the country’s postwar reconstruction as well as shifting cultural ideologies,  women’s identities, and conceptions of fashion and modernity. In addition, Alexis is interested in discussions of fashion in relation to the everyday, oral history and curation, themes on which she has written and spoken. She has also worked in dress archives and on exhibitions, and is currently Exhibition Reviews Editor of Textile History. www.alexisromanoprojects.com

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Ellen Sampson is a designer, artist and Curator based in London. Her work aims to cross the boundaries between fashion and fine art and to make objects that would be as comfortable in a gallery as on the catwalk. Her doctoral Research “Memory, Movement and Materiality: Footwear, Reciprocal Imprint and Embodied Memory” addresses the relationship between footwear, the body and memory: using theories of reciprocity and attachment to examine our relationship to worn objects. It explores how embodied memory moves between wearer and worn object creating a reciprocal dialogue and attachment between two agents. Her research is situated within current debates about materiality, objecthood and fashion the way that theoretical discourse can inform the creative process and the making of objects.

 

Lucia Savi has research interests which lie in twentieth-century textiles, fashion and design with a focus on Italy. Currently a PhD candidate at Kingston University, Lucia has significant experience in curating and publishing. She worked as Research Assistant on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibitions Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (2015/2016), The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 (2014) and she contributed to the accompanying publication with the chapters “La Moda in Vogue” and “Nattier: Textile Innovators”. In 2008 Lucia worked at the Courtauld Gallery on the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshop 1913-19 (2009), and contributed to the accompanying catalogue.