The amplification of right-wing, fascist rhetoric in 2025 is manifesting material effects on the lives of women, trans and queer communities, disabled persons, and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). It is a system being visibly re-organised to undo the work of feminists and other activists and exacerbate structural and systemic racism so as to dictate who will serve and whose interests will be served. In their treatise, Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (2023, p. 2)  write that in spaces of continued “colonialism, fascism, and violent nationalisms”, developing the “theoretical tools necessary to engage with the ongoing production of race and racisms” is a necessary and urgent task.

The study of cultural production must not be neglected in this climate. Edward Said’s theses (1978; 1993) critique imperialism’s territorialisation of culture and its self-representation towards the perpetuation of unequal power relations. Orientalist narratives (Said, 1978; 1993) and the primitivisation of black bodies (Jackson, 2012) are to this day still being used as strategies to justify this agenda. Fashion has been an agent for both enabling and resisting this oppression, showing that the act of dress can be not only political but also affective in how it empowers the bodies it adorns into action (Pinther, Kastner & Ndjio, 2022). In times diffracted by the use of technology, we sense in our daily interactions with social media how fashion in its broad sense is being deployed in the everyday to engage intersectionally with gender and queer oppression, as well as decolonial discourse (e.g., artists like Alok Vaid-Menon, Desire Marea and Rharha Nembhard). In tandem with these arguments, this issue of Fashion Highlight uses fashion to ask, how can we mobilise to challenge the negative effects of these global changes? This call is in the same respect interested in what the particular views, thoughts and praxes of BIPOC fashion scholars may be in relation to their lived experiences of these radical changes. 

It is important that Issue 5 provokes multiple views and points of intervention to make explicit fashion’s entanglement with the complexity of the issues at hand. Are there instances and examples of fashion making, worldbuilding, archiving and other forms of fashion praxis that speak of joy, love, pain, beauty, brutality, pleasure, precarity etc. (Love, 2019; Ekpe, Sherman & Ofoegbu, 2023; Okello, 2024; Moore, 2018; Makhubu & Mbongwa, 2019; Wachter-Grene & Chude-Sokei, 2020)? Are these forms of fashion praxis generated in ways that allow BIPOC bodies and other bodies not only to resist but also to allow affective passage for their generative being and becomings? Put another way, how can situated approaches (Haraway, 1988) be used to carve out space to write about ourselves, for ourselves, using modes of fashion?

Fashion’s exclusionary relationship with modernity is a Western concept that ontologically holds up the notion of a singular reality of binarised orders (Jansen, 2020), such as West and Rest (Hall, 1992). Contrarily, when applied in other ways, fashion is a mode of narrating visibility, alternative imaginaries, presence, and futurity, contributing meaningfully to the decolonial discourse (Mchunu & Gounder, 2024, p. 95). Fashion holds the capacity to be applied for resistance and as an intervention to challenge the current atmosphere imbued with instances of gross erasure and silence. Similarly, the formation of joy, amongst others, is a radical choice and a resistance to sub-humanising conditions.

For this issue, we seek contributions that see the value in and of fashion as a site to develop a rich and intellectual discourse around the current political climate in which we find ourselves. The guest editors of Issue 5 invite researchers, historians, practitioners, designers, activists, educators, members of civil society, and more to contribute to this topic. We are interested in contributions that use a critical, transdisciplinary, decolonial, and pluriversal lens for viewing fashion research and fashion practice-based research. We seek contributing authors to share new research that unpacks theoretical and visual/sensorial innovations of fashion studies, enabling the growth of the discipline by continually seeing fashion’s political, cultural, social, and affective value. We also welcome book and exhibition reviews that remain within the theme of Issue 5. In the growing praxis of fashion media, contributions from reviewers of fashion films that tackle the topic will also be considered for publication.