Dress Devolution 4 | Conference

The conference is supported by the Fashion and Textiles Institute at Falmouth University and will take place at the University’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall, UK.

What challenges to mainstream discourse and practice around textiles, dress and costume can technology offer? Dress Devolution 4 will explore the uses of technologies both emergent and established, that provide space to challenge orthodoxies.

We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers, Zenzie Tinker  (Zenzie Tinker Conservation) and Dr Nathaniel Weiner (Central Saint Martins).

Conference theme: Technology old and new

What challenges to mainstream discourse and practice around textiles, dress and costume can technology offer? Dress Devolution 4 will explore the uses of technologies both emergent and established, that provide space to challenge orthodoxies.

Current gyrations over AI and its potential to damage the creative industries or indeed creativity itself would suggest that it is the first technological advance to offer such a threat, while in fact it is the last of many.  Textile production, at the heart of anxiety around Industrialisation, arguably ushered in the digital age by way of the Jacquard loom. Innovations in IT systems propelled international fashion conglomerates to enormous wealth and enormous waste, and now forgotten technologies represent provocations in a monstrously flawed system. Meanwhile the means of representing, recording and imagining dress through fashion plates, film, magazines, television and social media have contributed to and shaped wider discourses around class, race, sexuality and gender.  

So called ‘bleeding edge’ technologies might be harnessed for good: as means of disseminating dress practice and wisdom, for preserving and studying objects and intangible cultural heritage, and for more sustainable design processes in fashion, textiles and costume design.

This conference features presentations on research that investigates technologies, past present and future, and their relationship with our fields.  Critical or congratulatory, we will hear from research that engages with technology in any form that impacts the local, the specific and the unique in costume design, fashion or textiles.