In their First Word essay, “Listening as a Radical Act,” Erica de Greef, Shayna Goncalves, and Angela Jansen (2021) argue for the importance of listening as a means to overcome our legacies of colonization. Without listening, it is too easy to assume that “fashion” is inherently capitalist and modern, created by genius designers (artists) in Western fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York) and that everything else is just a pale imitation. The way I have stated this might seem like an exaggeration—surely it can't be that bad in fashion studies—but as the authors have pointed out from their own diverse perspectives, it really is that bad. Too many people have experienced the study and curation of fashion as a devaluing gauntlet.
The first book I can think of that explicitly questioned the colonial underpinnings of fashion studies, Re-Orienting Fashion (2003), was published less than two decades ago. In 2016,...