Dear FSJ readers,

In 2023-24, Caroline Stevenson from the London College of Fashion along with Ben Barry and Fiona Dieffenbacher from Parsons School of Design co-led a symposium entitled Transformative Fashion Pedagogies 2.0 (TFP), building on the success of the symposium by the same name in the previous year.

TFP 2.0 aimed to address recent calls to action (see Timmo, 2017; Barry, 2021; Cheang, 2020; and Stevenson, 2022) for educators to radically rethink the role of fashion education in relation to industry and wider debates around positionality, power, and social and climate justice. While the fashion industry continues along a damaging path of exploitative environmental and social practices, we have found a renewed opportunity for fashion education to challenge the status quo and equip a new generation of students with the practical and intellectual skills to create lasting change. This symposium offered an intimate and supportive space for fashion educators from London College of Fashion and Parsons School of Fashion to share the progressive and inclusive pedagogies that we have implemented in our courses and institutions across business, product, design, textiles, media, concept, history, and theory.

The symposium foregrounded fashion pedagogy as critical research, asserting the interconnectedness of research, teaching, and industry and/or community organizations and the role we play as educators in enacting impactful social and political change with our students. Presenters were asked to respond to one of four themes: Design Justice; Defining Fashion; Undoing Fashion; and Industry Impact, along with key questions posited within each.

This special issue represents eight presentations from the symposium in the form of academic papers, hybrid visual essays, and teaching notes.

In response to the theme “Defining Fashion,” Caroline Stevenson shares ideas for micro intervention in the form of workshops with the aim to reconcile the gap between theory and practice in fashion education and questions the relationship between authority and language in fashion knowledge.

Three papers address “Undoing Fashion.” Fiona Dieffenbacher asks, “How Can We Encourage Students to Undo Preconceived Ideas About Fashion?” and offers insight from the lens of the design school as well as pedagogical approaches within the context of a course. Sara Chong Kwan, Olivia Hegarty, Cian O’Donovan, and Luke Stevens explore the concept of The Critical Fitting and share examples from their workshop that seeks to undo traditional approaches to this practice, moving to a more collaborative, open-ended process. Santiago Útima Loaiza examines how aspiring fashion designers can recontextualize their creative processes by recognizing their region’s collective memory and integrating their personal experiences.

Three papers address the theme of “Design Justice”:  Sugandha Gupta’s hybrid visual essay discusses the embodied knowledge and expertise of people with disabilities in the field of art and design and offers the Sensory Design framework as an example.  From the context of the classroom, empathy is addressed from two perspectives:  Steven Faerm looks at its role in cultivating equitable and just learning environments, and David Hopwood and Lilia Yip ask the critical question, “Can Empathy be Employed as a Powerful Tool for Change?”

Speaking to Industry Context, Carolina Obregon and Giovanna Danies offer teaching notes from their BioFashion elective course that integrates biology, design, and sustainability, fostering an innovative mindset and critical thinking. Liliana Sanguino’s visual essay “Hands-On” addresses students’ gaps in fabric knowledge that impacts their ability to translate ideas in 3D and shares the the impact of a Materials Donation Resource built from deadstock fabrics from industry that provides a space for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

We hope you find these nine papers, visual essays (pdf versions of which are available for download here), and teaching notes compelling and insightful for your own practice, whether it be in industry or academia.

Regards,

Ben Barry, Caroline Stevenson, Fiona Dieffenbacher
Guest editors


The design of the title banner and chapter openings for this issue is by Claudia Sanchez San Miguel, Parsons MA Fashion Studies '25.
It is part of the Spring 2025 University Design Studio course taught at Parsons School of Design by Lucille Tenazas, Henry Wolf Professor of Communication Design.
Collaborative design was provided by Nadia Batchelor, MPS Communication Design '25, Yaxuan Cai, MPS Communication Design '25, Ana Licinio Caligiorne, AAS Communication Design '26, Huijie Ji, MPS Communication Design '25, Yingjie Mu, MFA Design and Technology '26, Rudy Ofori, MFA Design and Technology '26, Teo Tsivranidis, MFA Design and Technology '26, and Danit Weitzman, MFA Design and Technology '25.