Ismail Laraqui

Biography

I am a PhD researcher at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. My work explores how dress, textile objects and the body become sites through which political memory, identity and resistance are produced and contested. My doctoral research focuses on the keffiyeh in the UK and Germany since 2023, examining its material and embodied role across diaspora, protest, design, production and circulation.

My research brings together fashion studies, material culture, decolonial theory, queer theory and sensory methodologies. I am interested in how garments move between personal memory, public visibility, cultural heritage and political regulation, and how fashion can be understood not only as visual representation but as lived, felt and politically charged material practice.