Fashion & Textiles Institute: Research & Knowledge Exchange

Our research is influenced by the The Fashion & Textile Institute's unique location, which is home to distinctive dress practices and a micro-climate that nurtures potential for innovative and regenerative textiles.

Our research explores resistance to the received wisdom around fashion and textiles that privileges the narratives of the Global North over those of the Global South and narratives that condemn the environment.

We believe things can change in the fashion and textiles industries.  We seek to learn from the past, using our superb resources such as the Fashion & Textiles Institute's Textiles and Dress Collection, a research and teaching collection of over four thousand objects of everyday dress spanning the last two hundred years, and our on-campus natural dye garden. We want to explore what alternative practices may already exist in or local communities, and to unpick how on-screen representations of clothing play into discourses around dress.