Critical fitting: pedagogy for confronting colonial dynamics in fashion

Authors

Olivia Hegarty, Cian O’Donovan, Sara Chong Kwan, Luke Stevens

Abstract

Critical Fitting is a new method devised to decolonise design teaching in fashion schools. With participants at London College of Fashion we workshopped a core concept in clothing design: fit. The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion’s ability to sell, ship and scale products globally – facilitated in part by vocational teaching which ties fit to practices and dynamics of colonial modernity. Our workshops locate an opportunity for advancing critical pedagogy in conjunction with STS pedagogy in order to empower LCF’s globally-diverse students to bring to classrooms their own situated, sensory embodied and tacit knowledge of fit whilst simultaneously exonerating them from obligations to do so.
This article shows how workshops use playful but conceptually powerful strategies to remember and imagine alternative material-practices and ways of knowing – from those predetermined in industrially-produced garments to those enacted by participant’s grandmothers’ hands. We contribute a novel compositional methodology, Critical Fitting, that opens up new possibilities for decolonial pedagogy and can be adapted for new practices of STS teaching.

Cite working paper:

Hegarty, O., O’Donovan, C., Chong Kwan, S., & Stevens, L. (2024). Critical fitting: Pedagogy for confronting colonial dynamics in fashion. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13883172