Fashion Talk at AUP: “For Love-Politics: Practicing Justice in Fashion”

This talk is part of this year's Fashion Talks at AUP entitled: Between Social Justice, Climate Justice and Fashion Justice – organized by Professor Renate Stauss, (Fashion Studies, Department of Communication, Media and Culture).

About the talk
Many fashion designers, theorists and activists agree that today’s dominant fashion system is one without love, care or respect; it is too fast, too extractive and too oppressive. This unsustainable and toxic model is damaging people and the planet, discouraging a meaningful relationship to the designs and designers, materials and bodies that make and wear fashion, and with the planet’s resources. Yet there is less consensus on how to practice fashion anew. Turning to Black and women of colour feminist politics shows, however, that a creative politics of resistance has long emphasised using love as a strategy for transformative action; this is a concept of love-politics that argues against narrow definitions of heterosexuality, gender norms and passive consumption rooted in neoliberal individualism. Instead, US academic and feminist author bell hooks who wrote fours books on love, compels us to see love embedded with spiritual as well as political meaning, calling for ‘the practice of love in everyday life’ (hooks, 2000: xxix). The relevance of this kind of thinking for fashion cannot be underestimated. A shift towards practising love in fashion could perhaps support a more critical fashion design process, one not framed by the presence of capitalist logic, and help to foster practicing justice in fashion.

About the speaker
Dr. Tanveer Ahmed is senior lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Tanveer’s research recognises the urgent need to explore alternative justice-oriented forms of fashion design by centring plural fashion narratives inspired by anti-colonial concepts of fashion. Tanveer’s PhD titled 'Pluriversal Fashions: Towards an Anti-Racist Fashion Design Pedagogy' investigated how white normativity works to racially hierarchise fashion design epistemologies and used alternative decolonial feminist frameworks to counter dominant exclusionary definitions of fashion design. Tanveer is working on a monograph ‘Fashion and Anti-Racism’ (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2026)

About the series
This year’s series explores connections between capitalism, climate apartheid and the current global fashion system. Capitalism and colonialism have devalued and obliterated a multitude of fashion cultures and traditions, makers and wearers for centuries. Centralising and celebrating a very narrow idea of beauty and bodies, of fashioning the self. The resulting structural inequalities, the exploitation and erasure remain unfathomable. The series aims to bring together perspectives and practices of post-capitalism, anti-racism, body justice and fashion activism – towards social, racial, climate and fashion justice.