Ben Barry: Microcultures of Love: Towards Systemic Change in Fashion

Datum: 16.12.2022
Time: 15–16:15

Event Label: Lecture
Organisational Units: Education in the Arts

Lecture by Ben Barry, School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, organized by the PhD Seminar in Fashion and Styles at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

From left to right: A photo of Anshuman’s leopard-print pants and bright orange suspenders, hanging from a wooden clothes hanger. The hanger is attached to clear fishing wire beneath a silver metal rod, so it appears to be levitating in mid air. The background is white. Photo by Calla Evans. An extreme close-up photo of Anshuman’s brown skin. The bright orange of their suspenders is out of focus on the left third of the image, and almost looks like it could be a light leak on a film photo. The angled crease of what might be their elbow fills most of the frame. Photo by Mindy Stricke. A photo by Calla Evans of Anshuman, a small fat South Asian person wearing leopard-print pants held up by bright orange suspenders. They are holding their belly and looking confidently straight at the camera, with their lips slightly pursed below their mustache. They have large tattoos, a nipple ring, and are wearing wire-framed glasses. They are bald, with a single pearl earring visible in their left earlobe.

How do we design tender, kinder and more caring fashion systems that ground social justice and collective liberation? In this talk, I draw on disability justice activist Patty Berne’s declaration that we need to intentionally create ‘microcultures of love’ to affirm multiply marginalized bodyminds amidst the dominance of ableism, fatphobia, racism and cis-heteropatriarchy. I explore how fashion scholars can help create these microcultures through their research, teaching and academic service by reflecting on my experiences and projects in fashion education. This talk begins by centering the necessity of carving out time and space for the ongoing journey of self-inquiry and self-care, and then highlights sites and practices for developing these microcultures of kinship, resistance and transformation. I conclude by exploring how the small-scale microcultures that we develop through research, teaching and committees have the possibility to cycle up and intervene into larger systems and cultures in fashion and the world.

Bio

Ben Barry (he/him) is Dean of the School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, The New School. As a fashion activist, educator and researcher, he is devoted to intervening into fashion systems to systemically shift power and design a future where worldviews and bodies that are currently stigmatized are instead valued and desired. His teaching and research centers the intersectional fashion experiences of disabled, fat, trans and queer people and engages them in the design of clothing, fashion media and fashion systems. Ben has published his work in Fashion Theory, Gender & Society, Fat Studies, Harvard Business Review and the Business of Fashion, among other academic and trade outlets. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University.

Online via Zoom: https://akbild-ac-at.zoom.us/j/5233479357

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