The LCF Research and Knowledge Exchange Department is an academic support infrastructure for all research and knowledge exchange pathway active and curious staff in the college. We provide funding development support, ethics guidance, training events, workshops, and facilitate R&KE talks, symposia, and conferences, in conjunction with LCF’s Cultural Programme team. The RKE department manages the LCF PhD degree student cohort (approximately 100 students), their supervisors, and the LCF Professoriate. The department hosts two world-leading UAL research centres, the Centre for Fashion Curation and the Centre for Sustainable Fashion. The Department also hosts a number of incubator R&KE networks, hubs and labs for KE and research staff and doctoral students.
Research spans practice and theory in communications, design, curation, psychology, health and wellbeing, cosmetic science, social science, sustainable and material artefacts and object research, creative business and management, digital production and communication; film, media and cultural studies.
London College of Fashion moved to a purpose-built campus at East Bank in 2023, as a core member of the cultural quarter at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a unique collaboration between world-leading universities, arts, and culture institutions.
As one of six UAL Colleges, LCF contributed to the REF 2021, where UAL’s research was assessed as being World Leading and international, and ranked in the Power ranking for the Unit of Assessment; Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory.
Felicity Colman is the Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange at London College of Fashion.
Professor Joanne Begiato is the Associate Dean of Research at London College of Fashion.
Our researchers work across multiple fields producing new material knowledge and analyses of past and present cultures within the UK and around the world. Our researchers form a community of writers and makers, expressing and disseminating research across a range of visual and cultural forms. This research spans a variety of material practices, including textiles design and development, marketing, retail, psychology practices for modelling user behaviours, and the cosmetic sciences. Through engagement with professional practices across the creative industries, LCF’s research community strives to develop new methodologies that are useful across interdisciplinary domains.
The college engages fashion as a broad platform that denotes a whole system of material production, consumption, and economy in pre- and post-industrial societies. Globally, the fashion industry is one of the top contributors to massive ecological damage to the planet; with harmful processes and a wasteful use of resources. However, it is also generative of new modes of identity formation, visualisation practices, and inventive green technologies. Each of these arenas requires new ethical approaches, methodologies, and public policies, to address the startling world changes in social behaviour. In this sense, at the college we approach fashion as not only “people, planet, [and societal] profit” (Elkington, 1995), but involves a more complex set of processes. Our community engages with fashion as:
To realise this work, LCF engages in research into the visual cultural, social, and historical fields that contribute to what social platforms, such as fashion, perform. These include the disciplinary fields that emerge from the history and philosophy of visual and fine arts (photography, film, drawing, sculpture); critical theory and cultural studies; fashion theoretical studies; costume; scenography; performance; and fashion business research; the latter being a relatively new field, developing from interdisciplinary research which combines psychology, statistics, marketing, management, and cosmetic science. LCF research is informed by and contributes to UAL Research Strategy 2023-2028: Changing the world through our creative endeavour.
The traditional making-disciplines also form the foundation for research practice at the college, investigating aspects of artisanal making, textile crafts, bespoke tailoring. Our research develops methods that produce new ways of engaging with historical artefacts and archives, by disrupting disciplinary canons and augmenting with alternative histories, and models for making.
New research methods engage technological changes that affect both users and consumers of aesthetic and cultural frameworks. Our research into the cultural logics of unsustainable industries, both in the real-world and navigating the boundaries of the metaverse, reframe the traditional business models. This includes reframing topics for understanding media, communication, semiotic theory, small and medium enterprises, and large-scale industries.
Research at the college takes multiple forms, with practitioners – writers, makers, theorists – all taking the common approach of thinking differently about the creative practices of making, and writing, of engaging with materials, and all bringing together an intersectional approach to fashion and technological platforms by questioning the formation of identities, and regarding each other and the resources of the world, with care.