The Fashion Professorship at ArtEZ was launched in 2002 as the first professorship in the Netherlands to conduct research and develop theory in the field of fashion. At that point in time, fashion hardly had any international research tradition in academia. To investigate pressing issues in the field of (Dutch) fashion, Professor José Teunissen (2002-2016) initiated several large-scale interdisciplinary research projects.

In January 2017 Daniëlle Bruggeman was appointed as Professor of Fashion at ArtEZ to further develop fashion research and theory in the Netherlands. In 2018, Daniëlle Bruggeman gave her inaugural lecture and presented the accompanying publication Dissolving the Ego of Fashion: Engaging with Human Matters. This publication presents the vision and research themes of the Fashion Professorship.

In brief 

Equitability – Committed to creating more agency and equitability for all living beings.

New Ecologies of Matter – Committed to practicing more care for living (things that) matter.

Critical Fashion Approach – Developing affirmative theories, critical strategies and embodied practices, contributing to a critical fashion discourse.

Living Community – Facilitating interdisciplinary communities of international researchers and practitioners.

Solidary Systems – Redefining value systems to activate post-anthropocentric ethical attitudes for more empathy, solidarity and wellbeing.

A Critical Fashion Approach

Starting from a critique on the untenable systems at the center of our contemporary neo-liberal, market-driven society and consumer culture, the Fashion Professorship focuses on reflecting on the contemporary fashion industry as the prime example of the socio-cultural, economic and political power structures underlying anthropocentric and capitalist systems.

The Fashion Professorship aims to activate and contribute to (1) practicing alternative and solidary systems; (2) creating more agency and equitability through an embodied approach, moving beyond systemic de-humanization; and (3) developing a post-anthropocentric and new materialist approach by re-engaging with all living beings and living (things that) matter.

Through art and design-driven research and critical theory, the Professorships focuses on developing alternative approaches, systems, practices, vocabularies and strategies. In doing so, the Professorship aim to contribute to a critical fashion discourse.

The Fashion Professorship initiates theoretical and practice-based research projects to incubate and develop a body of knowledge, concrete practices and relationships that contribute to transforming fashion’s Ego-system into healthier, more diverse and balanced ecosystems. With an interdisciplinary community, the Professorship researches the underlying changing values and meanings of fashion to collectively affirm critical practices of making, wearing and embodying fashion.

From Ego-systems to ecosystems
The Fashion Professorship believes that the realization of the vision can only flourish when it is first and foremost a shared vision that is lived by the community. It is committed to collectively – together with a diverse and interdisciplinary community – developing new insights and knowledge, while making that accessible to foster change across a broader and international community.

Unique in its kind, the MA Critical Fashion Practices is concerned with fashion’s intangible practices. We examine where fashion lives beyond the cloth – for example in language, networks and spaces – and explore how fashion can play a fuller role in the production of real social, cultural and economic alternatives, moving towards a more honest and equitable reality for everyone involved. We ask ourselves: What kind of language is needed?, How should we organize ourselves?, What kind of networks can we embody?, What spaces can we occupy? To explore these questions, we make use of a variety of strategies, among them: intuition, (creative) writing, publishing, intervention, activism, reading groups, colloquia, exhibition-making, performance, film-making, podcasting, vlogging. Central to these explorations is the concept of interdisciplinarity and the autonomy of the student in relation to the larger community he/she is part of. This translates into a project-based curriculum, which means – specifically in the first year – students work collaboratively on a group project under the supervision of a tutor. Within the context of these projects, students are facilitated in formulating, exploring and refining their own research objectives. Through this project-based approach we create an immersive learning experience that relates closely to challenges within the current field of fashion. This immersive learning experience is facilitated through our learning community, consisting of our students, tutors, guest tutors, professors, Centre of Expertise, other ArtEZ MA programmes and professionals from the field of fashion and design.

https://www.artez.nl/en/courses/master/critical-fashion-practices