Episode 35 – Angela Jansen, founder of RCDF

Chic

The 35th episode was recorded remotely with Angela Jansen, who is the founder of the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF). She is an independent researcher, educator, consultant, curator, and the author of Moroccan Fashion: Design, Tradition and Modernity (2014), co-editor with Jennifer Craik of Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion(2016). She is also the guest co-editor with Toby Slade of the special issue of Fashion Theory on “Decoloniality and Fashion” (2020). Her scholarship grows out of an ongoing critique of Eurocentric fashion. She argues that the way fashion as a noun has come to refer to a temporality of contemporaneity, or a system of inequality and an industry of capitalism particular to modernity, is intrinsic to its discriminating, exploitive, and destructive nature. While fashion as a verb, the act of fashioning the body, is of all times and places. Systems of fashioning “outside of modernity” are deliberately and systematically discriminated against, silenced, and erased. In 2012, she initiated RCDF to experiment with decolonial ways of knowledge-creation and sharing – through conversation, through the communal and coalitional, and through a broad diversity of voices across age, race, gender, education, discipline, and geography.