Beyond Gender: The Identity of Fashion

London, United Kingdom | Room HHG05, London College of Fashion, High Holborn, WC1V 7EY

“We also use dress, consciously or unconsciously, as one of the ways in which we project ourselves, the self we wish to present to the world, the group with which we desire to be associated. It is a strong and visible part of our need to assert identity […] and thus forms part of our individuation”

Unzipping Gender. C. Suthrell

Fashion is an ever growing and important form of our self expression. It is both a global phenomenon and a personal relationship.  It is informed by our faiths, our orientations, our histories and our communities. It gives you the power to express yourself like nothing else, to break down social stereotypes, to stick to those who told you ‘No!’, and to be your beautiful self.

With voices from the fashion, LGBTQ and creative industries, we will be discussing the use and impact of fashion as a construct and or a tool to share, support, include and or exclude.

The Panelists 

Travis Alabanza.

Travis is a Black queer femme performance artist living, studying and creating in London, and is currently the LGBT+ president at king’s college London. Their work has featured in The UK anthology Black & Gay in the UK, as well as Manon, Queer Contemporary, Black girl Dangerous and Beyond the Binary. They have performed in venues across the UK including RVT, Hackney Attic, Oxford Queer Week & their one person show in Bristol Stories of a Queer Brown Muddy Kid. They feel their art is a way to talk unapologetically about the love queer black bodies outside of binaries deserve.

SA Smythe.

SA is a current Visiting Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research. Their scholarship focusses on the aesthetics of Black and queer liberation, the politics of citizenship and place-making, and narratives of migration and postcoloniality in the Mediterranean. SA also does translation work and organises in queer of colour feminist writing collectives in the US, Italy, and Berlin. A new collection of multilingual prose poems and critical essays on pleasure, absence, and aberrance is forthcoming in 2016. SA is a part of the soft anonymous, a transnational QTPOC literary collective and is the publishing editor of THEM: Trans Literary Journal.

Raju Rage.

Raju is an interdisciplinary artist who uses art and activism to forge creative survival. They are interested in the role of art in social change, transformative healing justice and in collectivity. They are focused on knowledge and creative production both inside but mostly outside of academia and institutions, within pro/active creative and activist communities. Their work interrogates the ways in which contemporary diasporan identities are constructed and read/misread through history and memory, in/visibility and the effect of politics, space, symbolism, stereotypes, ethnic codes, ideology and gazes on the body. They use sculpture, collage and ritual mediums and work in live art, performance and moving image, focusing on de-con-structive techniques of resistance such as interruption, confusion, disturbance. They primarily use their non-conforming body as a vehicle of assemblage and embodiment.

Montana Williamson.

Knitwear Designer and European Visual Management (Kate Spade)

Montana is a graduate of Central St. Martins. She studied BA Textiles knitwear. She is best known for her collaborative work with designers such as Jasper Garvida and Bryce Aice Qime.  Her work is a combination of hand knitting and crochet, she creates three dimensional pieces, she has also won the UK Hand knitting Association Award 2011 for her innovation in knitwear. Her award winning work marries elements of sustainability and fashion, her work questions the social issues of waste within the fashion industry.

Katy Jalili.

Katy Jalili (Katayoun Jalilipour) is an artist and writer, Currently studying Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins. She is focusing her research on women’s and QPOCS’ place in contemporary performing arts, and the meaning of Feminist Art in activism. She is very interested in discovering borderlines between Fine Arts and Performing arts. Her ambitions include leading an independent Arts Collective which allows a more diverse and accessible environment for developing artists.