About us

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:

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.