Episode 14 – Toby Slade on Decolonizing Fashion

Chic

The 14th episode was recorded remotely with Toby Slade, who is the Associate Professor of Fashion at the School of Design at the University of Technology in Sydney Australia. Toby specializes in Japanese fashion and culture, and has taught fashion and art in Japan for over 16 years. This past March, Toby returned to Sydney Australia to decolonize their fashion program at UT, just a week before the lock down started due to the COVID-19 pandemic. His 2009 book, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History was the first book in English to cover the entire historical sweep of fashion and clothing in Japan. His recent book, Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (2018) examines contemporary Japanese fashion and art. His current research focuses on the history and the changing meaning of luxury in Japan. Toby is also a Steering Committee member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion (RCDF) that was established in 2012, and which originated with several conferences on “non-Western fashion” and has since evolved into a network based on decolonial theory. The previous two episodes were recorded with Toby’s colleagues from RCDF, and I was very fortunate to be able record all three interviews as a trilogy on decolonizing fashion, which is a topic I have been actively working on for the past year and a half, since I was hired to teach fashion studies and had to redesign the fashion stream in the Design and Communication program at the University of Southern Denmark. And of course, it is an important topic we all continue to grapple with, especially now with the anti-racism protests and riots in the US and solidarity demonstrations all around the world.