Dr Lara Torres

Biography

Dr Lara Torres is a Senior Lecturer in MA Fashion Artefact at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, where she completed her PhD in 2019. Her research focuses on material-led pedagogies, practice-based fashion methodologies and post-disciplinary approaches to craft and artefact-making, examining learning cultures, material ethics and design education through posthuman and practice-as-research perspectives.

Torres’s practice-based work draws on Derridean deconstruction, intertextuality and Rosalind Krauss’s expanded field to reimagine the boundaries of fashion, artefact and craft in the 21st century. With more than 17 years of teaching experience in the UK and Portugal, she has led, designed, validated and examined programmes in Fashion and Textile Design, and contributes to curriculum development at both UAL and the University of Portsmouth.

As an artist and researcher, her work has been exhibited internationally, including The Future of Fashion is Now (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; OCT Art & Design Gallery Shenzhen; OCAT Shanghai), Transfashional (London, Warsaw, Vienna, Kalmar) and State of Fashion (Arnhem). Her film Unmaking and subsequent artefact-led projects have toured in Why-What-Who: 10 Years of Fashion Artefacts (Venice, Beijing, Buenos Aires).

Her publications include journal articles on practice-as-research and material thinking, as well as chapters in Crafting Anatomies: Archives, Dialogues, Fabrications (2020) and Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practices, and Politics (Intellect, 2022). Her current writing advances critical conversations around making-as-thinking, embodied knowledge, sustainability and the evolving role of the fashion artefact within contemporary design research.

She is currently co-authoring two peer-reviewed papers: Thinking Through Making: Material-Driven Design Pedagogies in Postgraduate Fashion Craft Education (with Naomi Filmer) for IFFTI 2026, and a comparative study on sustainability pedagogies across European and Southeast Asian fashion institutions (with colleagues from RMIT Vietnam and other partners).