Dr Lara Torres

Biography

Dr Lara Torres is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Artefact at the London College of Fashion and a Lecturer in Fashion and Textiles at the University of Portsmouth. She completed her PhD at UAL in January 2019 and has over 20 years of experience teaching across the UK and Portugal.

Her research focuses on material-led pedagogies and practice-based design methodologies, exploring how making functions as a form of thinking within fashion and craft education. Working at the intersection of fashion, artefact, and contemporary craft, she investigates how materials act as active agents in the design process, shaping outcomes, informing decision-making, and enabling new forms of knowledge production.

Her current research advances critical discussions around material agency, more-than-human design, and ecological approaches to fashion education, examining how practice-based learning environments can foster more responsible, responsive, and sustainable design practices. Drawing on frameworks such as new materialism, ethics of care, and situated knowledge, her work positions materials as epistemic partners within creative practice.

Torres is particularly engaged in developing pedagogical models that emphasise learning through making, iterative experimentation, and embodied knowledge, challenging outcome-driven approaches to design education. Her recent research, including the paper Thinking Through Making: Material-Driven Design Pedagogies in Postgraduate Fashion Craft Education (presented at the IFFTI Annual Conference), explores how material-led approaches support ecologically responsive learning in postgraduate contexts.

Alongside her pedagogical research, she continues to contribute to interdisciplinary design discourse through writing and practice. Her publications address practice-as-research, material thinking, and sustainability in fashion, including contributions to Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practices, and Politics (Intellect, 2022).

As an artist-researcher, Torres has exhibited internationally in exhibitions such as The Future of Fashion is Now, Transfashional, and State of Fashion, and her artefact-led and film work has toured globally. Her practice draws on expanded notions of fashion, informed by critical theory and interdisciplinary methodologies, to explore the shifting boundaries between body, object, and environment.

Across her teaching, research, and practice, Torres is committed to rethinking fashion education through material engagement, critical inquiry, and collaborative knowledge-making, supporting emerging designers in developing more thoughtful and contextually aware practices.