Learning to Walk, Walking to Learn: On decentralising & dehierarchising learning & teaching fashion – The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2025

Where do we learn fashion? In our grandmother’s lap, in the street, the club, the market, everywhere.

Professional fashion learning used to take place in workshops and studios, ateliers and factories. It still does. Yet, from the 19th century it also moved into colleges and universities. Fashion education became increasingly specialized, institutionalized and intellectualized.
As a result, we see a dualism between informal and professional fashion learning, and between vocational and tertiary education. One seems more valid than the other. One seems more worth than the other. There are severe hierarchies within fashion education that mirror and codetermine those in the professional field. Hierarchies between sites of learning, qualifications, the value of professions, the value of subsequent work, between intellectual and manual labour, between the worth of human beings and human lives. Global hierarchies and local hierarchies.
Fashion education has increasingly become inaccessible. Increasingly distinctive, discriminatory, disembodied – disconnected from the everyday.

‘Let us walk […] and envision the learning environment as an emergent and adaptable opportunity for connection and wonder.’
Beavington, Lee (2021) ‘Walking Pedagogy for Science Education and More-Than-Human Connection’ in: Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS). Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 163.

Let us explore walking for learning. Walking, the free and open activity we all do every day – if not in body, then in mind. Walking, not as a neutral activity, equally determined by gender, class, race, physical ability, but walking as a call to action.

Together let us explore walking to decentralize and dehierarchise fashion learning.

‘In an era of complex social and political issues – such as climate change, capitalism, and forced migration, to name a few – there is an increasing demand for public and community action. Further, academics continue to grapple with ways to present research findings to non-academic audiences, while marginalized and oppressed people take up ways to transform and decolonize social and political space and institutions. To this end, walking is an ethical and political call to action.’
Springgray, Stephanie & Truman, Sarah E. (2019) ‘Walking in/as Publics: Editors Introduction’ in: Journal of Public Pedagogies. No. 4, p. 2.

Walking to unlearn. Walking to learn. Walking to wonder. Walking together.

‘You’ll never walk alone’
Gerry and the Pacemakers, 1963