Download the full symposium programme here.

Explore the fashion world’s shifting borders at a day-long symposium presented in partnership with TrAIN, University of the Arts London and the ICA to accompany our exhibition Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe.

Historically, the phenomenon of fashion was viewed with suspicion in the socialist world, while socialist fashion was frowned upon in the West. Yet the recent burst of creativity and energy in the region has resulted in designers from the New East becoming some of the hottest names in the global fashion world.

Join our group of academics and young designers from Austria, Ukraine and the UK who creatively draw on their heritage as we examine how fashion reacts to and embraces global borders and the crisis of displacement.

This symposium follows two related discussions at two other venues: “New Fashion Narratives” at Chelsea College of Arts on Thursday 15 March, and “Fashion and the New East: Made in Georgia” at the ICA on Friday 16 March.

PROGRAMME

9am – 9:50am — Registration

9:50am — Opening remarks by Professor Paul Goodwin, director of TrAIN, UAL, and Nonna Materkova, founder of Calvert 22 Foundation

Session 1: Immigrants Have the Best Stories

Chair: Professor Paul Goodwin, TrAIN, UAL

10am — “Ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home”
Djurdja Bartlett, LCF, UAL

Dr Djurdja Bartlett is Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and also a member of TrAIN, UAL. Bartlett is author of FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (MIT Press, 2010) and editor of the volume on East Europe, Russia and the Caucasus in the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010). Bartlett’s new monograph European Fashion Histories: Style, Society and Politics is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic (2019), and she is also editor of a book on Fashion and Politics (Yale University Press, 2019).

10:15am — Keynote: “Will there be a new Border?”
Zowie Broach, Head of Fashion, RCA

Zowie Broach has been appointed Head of Fashion at the Royal College of Art in 2014. She is also an artist and one of the founders of the fashion house Boudicca. Established in 1997, Boudicca is well-known for its highly conceptual designs and architecturally inspired tailoring, and for its artistic engagement with some of the most prestigious international art institutions, from the Tel Aviv Museum to The Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace.

10:45am — Designer Interview: Ilija Milicic, Hvala Ilija with Anastasiia Fedorova

Ilija Milicic is a menswear designer and head of his own label Hvala Ilija. Based in Vienna, Milicic emigrated from Bosnia and Herzegovina with his family in the early 1990s. He studied design at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria, and in the fashion department at The University of Applied Arts, Vienna, under the direction of Hussein Chalayan.

11:05 — Panel discussion

11:25am – 11:45am — Coffee break

Session 2: The National and Beyond It

Chair: Dr Serkan Delice, LCF, UAL

11:45am — “The Location of Fashion: thinking about culture beyond the notion of hybridization”
Vlad Strukov, University of Leeds

Dr Vlad Strukov is an Associate Professor in Film and Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on visual aspects of cultural production in the Russian Federation and the Russophone world. He is the author of Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era (2016), as well as co-editor and contributor to numerous other publications.

12pm — “Nomadic Memories? Questioning Research in Fashion Design Education”
Marco Pecorari, Parsons Paris, The New School

Dr Marco Pecorari is Assistant Professor and Program Director of the MA in Fashion Studies at The New School Parsons Paris where he teaches and conducts research on Fashion History & Theory. His monograph Fashion Remains. The Epistemic Potential of Fashion Ephemera is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.

12:15pm — Designer Interview: Marta Jakubowski with Anastasiia Fedorova

Marta Jakubowski is a London-based designer who was born in Poland and raised in Germany. She graduated with MA Womenswear from the Royal College of Art and was selected to show her AW15 collection during London Fashion Week as part of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN initiative sponsored by Topshop. Marta has worked with brands including Hussein Chalayan, Alexander Wang and Jonathan Saunders and continues to showcase her seasonal collections during London Fashion Week.

12:35pm — Panel discussion

1pm – 2pm — Lunch

Session 3: Producing Locally, Selling Globally

Chair: Dr Vlad Strukov, University of Leeds

2pm — “Fashion and Emotions in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism”
Serkan Delice, LCF, UAL

Dr Serkan Delice is Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the Cultural and Historical department at London College of Fashion, UAL. Delice’s research is concerned with the connections between fashion and politics, which he explores through three concurrent research projects: fashion media discourses on the subject of cultural appropriation; the centrality of fashion production/consumption to political dissidence, immigration and refugee movements in contemporary Turkey; and the relationships between masculinity, male homosexuality and social and sartorial transgression in early modern Ottoman and contemporary Turkish society.

2:15pm — Designer Interview: Anton Belinskiy with Anastasiia Fedorova

Anton Belinskiy is a fashion designer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Through his designs, he addresses the emerging identity of the country’s new generation. His work has been featured in Dazed, i-D, 032c, Vogue US, Buro 24/7 and more. In 2015 he was nominated for LVMH prize and presented his collection at VFiles in New York. In 2017, he created an installation for the 57th Venice Biennale as part of Ukraine’s pavilion.

2:35pm — Panel discussion

3pm – 3:30pm — Coffee break

3:30pm — Plenary Session: closing remarks by Dr Djurdja Barlett, Dr Serkan Delice, Professor Paul Goodwin, Dr Marco Pecorari and Dr Vlad Strukov

Interviewer: Anastasiia Fedorova, co-curator of Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe.

Anastasiia Fedorova is a writer, curator and cultural critic based in London. She is a regular contributor to Dazed, i-D, GARAGE, 032c, The Guardian, Highsnobiety, BoFand The Calvert Journal among other titles. She also guest chairs SHOWstudio panel discussions, and appeared as a speaker at Radio BBC World Service and ICA London.

In partnership with TrAIN: The Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum London.

Part of a programme of events to accompany our exhibition Post-Soviet Visions which also includes a series of panel discussions exploring New East art and culture.

About the exhibition

Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe is a group show of photography exploring new visual representations of lifestyle and landscape in Eastern Europe. The exhibition gathers the work of a young generation of artists rising to prominence a quarter century after the end of Communism.

Participating artists: Armen Parsadanov, David Meskhi, Dima Komarov, Genia Volkov, Grigor Devejiev, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Ieva Raudsepa, Jedrzej Franek, Masha Demianova, Michal Korta, Patrick Bienert and Max von Gumppenberg, Paulina Korobkiewicz, and Pavel Milyakov