Defashioning Education: A conference by Berlin University of the Arts

The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education is a participatory and outcome-oriented space and a series of conferences focused on the learning and teaching of fashion at the tertiary level. It aims to explore and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the field and the practices of fashion education, and to foster a greater understanding of its pasts, presents and futures – methods, values and didactic, pedagogic and epistemological questions - creating a global exchange to inspire mutual learning, collaborative research and shared action.

De-Fashioning Education is a call to action as much as contemplation. A collaborative, critical and creative re-thinking and re-making of fashion education. An exploration of different fashion learning cultures.

Education for essential de-growth calls for radically different educational models and approaches: a community of learners who aim to co-create shared and diverse futures, relationships with nature, and with one another.[1]

De-Fashioning Education explores how to bring the learning and practices of fashion into balance with nature’s limits and needs and the equality and well-being of all human beings. An education for being, not only for having.[2]

De-Fashioning Education is an open access conference, a collaborative contemplative space to consider contradictions and develop shared action. It invites us to re-imagine how we can learn for interexistence and interbeing – fashion education for the pluriverse.[5]

[1] Degrowth / Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung (2014) ’Dimensions of learning for a de-growth society’, Degrowth conference Leipzig, 3 September, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iewh1DG2Ug. [2] Fromm, Erich (1976) ‘Introduction: The Great Promise, Its Failure, and New Alternatives’ in: To Have or to Be?New York: Harper & Row, pp. 1–12. [3] hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, p. 1 [5] Escobar, Arturo (2017) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the making of Worlds, Durham & London: Duke University Press, p. 175.