Symposium Speakers :

 

 

 

Miren Arzalluz read History (BA) at the University of Deusto and Comparative Politics (MSc) at the London School of Economics before specializing in the history of dress and fashion at the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA). She has been curator and head of collections at the Cristóbal Balenciaga Foundation between 2007 and 2013. In 2011 she published her book Cristóbal Balenciaga. The making of a Master (1895-1936) (V&A Publications), and she continues her research on 20th century fashion as a PhD candidate at the University of Deusto. She is currently director at the Etxepare Basque Institute. 

 

Lauren Butcher has recently graduated from Richmond, the American International University in London with a Distinction in the Masters programme Visual Arts Management and Curating. Since then she has undertaken internships within the field of Exhibitions Management. She is now involved in freelance work for the Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive. Her research interests lie in contemporary fashion curation, gender fluid fashion and LGBT issues, inclusion and representation in museums.

 

Claire Eldred is a PhD candidate in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis focuses on Elsa Schiaparelli’s Lobster Dress and her research interests include object biography, fashion and surrealism, and the contemporary curation of fashion in museums/art galleries.

 

Alessandro Esculapio holds an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons the New School for Design in New York. He co-authored the books Just Fashion: Critical Cases of Social Justice In Fashion (2012) and The Fashion Condition (2014). His work has appeared on a number of publications including Vestoj, Fashion Projects, The Fashion Studies Journal, the International Journal of Fashion Studies and Fashion Practice. His PhD thesis, tentatively entitled Uncovering and examining the history of emotionally durable fashion, 1990s to the present, focuses on contemporary fashion practitioners who have explored emotional attachment, personal memory and durability in their work.

 

Roberto Filippello is a PhD student at Edinburgh College of Art and an alumnus of the Fashion Studies MA at Parsons School of Design in New York. His PhD research investigates queer utopian embodiment in contemporary fashion, looking in particular at the construction of affective atmospheres in the work of fashion practitioners throughout the 1990s and 2000s. His academic work is situated at a crossroad between fashion studies, aesthetics, visual and material culture.

 

Richard Sorger is the Associate Professor and Course Leader for MA Fashion at Kingston University. Between 2006-2011, Richard Sorger designed and produced his eponymous fashion label of ready-to-wear womenswear, selling worldwide. He is the co-author of the third editions of Basics Fashion Design; Research and Design for Fashion and The Fundamentals of Fashion Design, both for Bloomsbury Publishing.

 

Leren Li is currently a PhD candidate at Royal College of Art in London. She received a Master of Arts degree in Fashion Studies from Parsons, The New School for Design, and she worked in the International Sales department of Oscar de la Renta in 2015. Combining theories with practices, her research concentrates on subculture studies, creative industries in Asia and contemporary Chinese fashion in the context of material culture and visual culture studies.

 

Krys Osei is an Associate Lecturer and first-year Ph.D. Researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores the production and consumption of Africa’s first web series, An African City, across the cosmopolitan diasporic locales of Accra, London, and Washington, DC, in efforts to better understand the complex identity politics of Black womanhood.

 

Jenna Rossi-Camus is a fashion curator and exhibition-maker currently undertaking practice-based PhD research at London College of Fashion’s Centre for Fashion Curation. She is developing a proposal for a site-specific exhibition examining fashion graphic satire, set at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House. She has focused her research on fashion and humour since earning her MA at London College of Fashion with a thesis on fashion cartoons in The New Yorker.

Outside of academia, Jenna works with museums, galleries and brands to develop and deliver fashion exhibitions, often designing them as well.  Her recent works include Fashion & Freedom (Manchester Art Gallery), Women, Fashion, Power (Design Museum) and Designing La Boheme (Royal Opera House).

 

Suzanne Rowland is an AHRC/Design Star funded PhD student at the University of Brighton where she also lectures in Contextual Studies. Her thesis is titled Design, technology and business networks in the rise of the fashionable, ready-made blouse in Britain, 1909-1919. This interdisciplinary project aims to investigate the development of the lightweight ready-made fashion industry through its first successful commodity, the blouse.

 

Dr. Fatma Sagir holds a PhD in Islamic Studies, she started currently as a post-doc researcher in Cultural Anthropology at Freiburg University and is Teaching Fellow at University College Freiburg. Her research focuses on young urban Muslims and Muslim Lifestyle including popular culture, fashion, Social Media and music.

 

 

Dr. Diego Semerene is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film Studies and Digital Media at Oxford Brookes University. Semerene has taught media studies and fashion theory at the American University of Paris and Brown University. He holds a PhD in Media Arts and Practice form the University of Southern California, and has published widely on the relationship between new media and sexual practices. 

 

Lara Torres is currently a PhD student at the University of the Arts London where she is about to conduct the viva for her research project entitled “Towards a practice of unmaking: a strategy for critical fashion practices”, under the supervision of Prof. Sandy Black and Dr. Thomas Makryniotis at the London College of Fashion. She has presented her work globally. https://www.laratorres.com/

 

Karen Van Godtsenhoven holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Ghent University and an MA Gender Studies as well as an MA in Library and Information Science from Antwerp University. She is exhibitions curator at MoMu, the Fashion Museum of Antwerp since 2009, where she has curated over 15 exhibitions including Unravel: Knitwear in Fashion, Happy Birthday Dear Academie, Birds of Paradise: Feathers in Fashion, Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th century silhouette, Margiela: The Hermès Years and she has written extensively on avant-garde and Belgian fashion. https://www.momu.be/

 

 

 

Exhibition Exhibitors 

 

Kathrin Bonnar is an artist based in London. Starting from questions surrounding the possibilities of how (notions, experience, use and the effect of) clothing might be used and represented in space, their output includes making and organising. Currently artist in resident at House of Creative, London, previous relevant activity includes: Space 4_ (2017) ‘Gestures for Exchange’ Salon Flux (2016) and IND Projects, Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects (2015). http://kathrinbonnar.com/

 

Ruby Hoette is a designer/researcher exploring fashion in context through the intersection of theory and practice. Seeking to expand what constitutes ‘fashion practice’ her critical and experimental approach proposes alternate modes of engaging with and producing fashion by framing the garment as a unique artefact carrying traces of social, cultural and economic interactions and transaction. Ruby is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. She convenes the innovative MA Fashion and will be co-convenor of the new MA Design Expanded Practice from September 2017. http://www.rubyhoette.com/

 

Rafael Kouto is a textile and fashion designer, recently graduated with a Masters in Fashion Matters at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Previously graduated at the Institute of Fashion Design - Academy of Arts and Design - FHNW in Basel, Switzerland, with a professional background in Couture (Alexander McQueen, London 2013, and Maison Margiela, Paris 2015) and Ethical Fashion (Ethical Fashion Initiative, United Nations - International Trade Center, Geneva 2015). His aim is to continue researching about the use of upcycling of waste garments and materials in the creative process and into a larger scale production, for his own brand and in the sustainable department of fashion groups. http://rafaelkouto.com/

 

Richard Sorger is the Associate Professor and Course Leader for MA Fashion at Kingston University. Between 2006-2011, Richard Sorger designed and produced his eponymous fashion label of ready-to-wear womenswear, selling worldwide. He is the co-author of the third editions of Basics Fashion Design; Research and Design for Fashion and The Fundamentals of Fashion Design, both for Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Maria Ostropolski has worked as a womenswear designer for over twenty years, internationally and in London, for fashion brands from luxury to high street. She has taught Fashion Design and Fashion Buying at the Universities of Bedfordshire and Westminster at Undergraduate and Post-Graduate levels. She continues to consult on design and her research is focused on the relationship between dress, embodiment and personal construct.

 

Marloes ten Bhömer is a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University. Through her practice she aims to challenge generic typologies of women’s shoes through experiments with non-traditional technologies and material techniques. The work is consistently exhibited and published internationally, notably at the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Design Exchange (Toronto), Fashion Space Gallery (London), Somerset House (London) and the Museum of Arts and Design (New York). She was awarded the Stanley Picker Research Fellowship. http://marloestenbhomer.squarespace.com/

 

Lara Torres is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Arts London. Her research sits at the intersection of fashion, fine arts, and film practice and theory exploring critical fashion practices. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions including The Future of Fashion is Now (2014/15), Rotterdam and Transfashional taking place in London, Warsaw and Vienna (2016-17). https://www.laratorres.com/