The LCF Transnational Fashion Network (TFN) is the world’s first research body dedicated to investigating how fashion—as discourse, material object, performance, and visual and cultural economy—is produced, disseminated, and practiced across national borders, both historically and now.

Established in 2017 by the late Dr Djurdja Bartlett, this network provides a platform for researchers and practitioners interested in investigating the movement and intersections of people, ideas, commodities, labour, capital, and culture within the circuits of production, representation, consumption, and subject formation.

A particular aim of the network is to confront fashion’s structural inequalities through transnational collective action and solidarity. To this end, the network promotes collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research on the effects of migration and displacement on global fashion production and practices; decolonisation and the emergence of diaspora communities as well as hybrid styles and spaces of fashion; cross-national intersections of race and class; contested processes of globalisation and localisation; and the negative consequences of transnational capitalism, including systemic labour exploitation and planetary degradation.

Outputs

Delice, S., and A. Almila (co-eds.) (2023) Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities: Socio-Political, Economic, and Environmental. London & New York: Routledge.

Delice, S. (2022) Critiques of Appropriation and Transnational Labor Ethics, Fashion Theory, 26:4, 475-491, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2022.2046869.

Delice, S. (2019) 'Thrown Away Like a Piece of Cloth': Fashion Production and the European Refugee Crisis' in Fashion & Politics, edited by Dr Djurdja Bartlett. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Kirkland, T. (2022) 'Tartan: Its Journey Through the African Diaspora' in Scotland's Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery, edited by Emma Bond and Michael Morris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kirkland, T. (2021) ‘Reflections of Durbar in the Diaspora’, Critical Studies in Men's Fashion, 8: 1-2, pp. 127-140. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/csmf_00036_1.

Lewis, R. and A., Kristin (2023) ‘Aesthetic Labor in Religious Contexts: Women Encountering Modest Dress in the Workplace in the UK and Saudi Arabia’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2023.2172782.

Loscialpo, F. (2023) ‘Ethno-Racial Capitalism within Contemporary Fashion: Forced Labour and the Uyghur Crisis’. In Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities: Socio-Political, Economic and Environmental, edited by S. Delice and A. Almila. London & New York: Routledge.

Loscialpo, F. (2019) ‘“I Am an Immigrant”: Fashion, Immigration and Borders in the Contemporary Trans-global Landscape’, Fashion Theory, 23 (6): 619-653. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1657258.

Mazzarella, F. and R., Migle (2023) Reality, Reciprocity, Resilience: Scoping a Decolonised Process of Designing for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities. Project Report. University of the Arts London, London. https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/19602/

Reimers, A. (2022) Otto Dix and Weimar Media Culture: Time, Fashion and Photography in Portrait Paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Oxford: Peter Lang Academic Publishers.

Stevenson, C. (2022) ‘Radical Pedagogies: Right Here, Right Now!’, Fashion Theory 26 (4): 465–473. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2022.2046863

Torres, L. (2022) ‘Fashion Ontology: Researching the Possibilities for Knowing through an Expanded Fashion Practice’. In: Fashion Knowledge Theories, Methods, Practices and Politics. London: Intellect.

How to get involved

The LCF Transnational Fashion Network (TFN) welcomes both text and practice-based researchers across LCF and UAL, as well as collaborators and practitioners working outside the university framework.

Contact us

If you are interested in collaborating to produce impactful interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in relation to the transnational production, distribution, and practices of fashion, design and technology, media and communication, and performance, please contact the network leads and lcfresearch@arts.ac.uk.