The Lowlands Decolonial Fashion Network, consisting of FashionClash, the Linen Project, the Dutch Crafts Council, Tailors & Wearers and the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion, organised four one-day in-person field-trips between June and September 2024 to host each other and to reflect on four topics through a decolonial lens: fashion, cultural heritage, crafts and natural resources/local knowledges.

In June 2024, the Linen Project invited the other communities for a one-day field-trip to a flax field in Arnhem to address the role of local resources and knowledges to solve current problems.

End of June 2024, FashionClash organized a one-week residency during which participants reflected on questions of decoloniality in the Dutch context in general and in relation to fashion more specifically. The other communities joined them for one afternoon.

End of August 2024, Tailors & Wearers commissioned three designers to ‘rethink’ the Surinamese angisa to address the role of cultural heritage through a decolonial lens. The other communities visited T&W and the designers to reflect on their work proces and their research.

Early September 2024, the Dutch Crafts Council organised an afternoon of Dutch crafting as a process to reflect on embodied knowledges, community building and intergenerational knowledge transmission.

The Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion coordinated the overall process of the GFA24 Dutch hosting.

For our GFA24 hosting, we came together to reflect and discuss with a live and online audience what we have learned from these field trips and how we can take our experiences and conversations forward. In a small exhibition, we also presented the outcomes of the FashionClash Decolonial Residency.

Watch the full recording on the GFA Youtube channel.

About the Dutch hosting communities:

THE LINEN PROJECT investigates since 2018 and works towards reactivating the economic viability of small- scale local flax cultivation and linen production in the Netherlands. It seeks to reinstate the economy as a social, ecological and cultural domain and to strengthen socio-economic patterns and behaviours rooted in a commoning approach. The inherent connections between (cultural) heritage, education, agriculture, design, crafts, and the economy are activated as well as the exchange of diverse values, knowledge, skills and competencies.

CRAFTS COUNCIL NEDERLAND (founded in 2012) contributes to the development of crafts and the creative crafts culture in the Netherlands. CCNL is the initiator of a great and growing community of craftsman, museums and educational institutions, economy and government. Each party involved builds a link in the transition to a new form of meaning within the sector. Crafts knowledge belongs to the intangible heritage which gets transferred from person to person. Connecting people who still have this knowledge and people who want learn from it, is the natural result of our work.

TAILORS & WEARERS looks at Afro-Surinamese costume through the lens of craft, anthropology and photography. The purpose of the foundation is to research and preserve, present and provide education regarding Afro-Surinamese costumes. We do this by collecting and sharing knowledge, such as organizing events, meetings and presentations, creating educational material, providing workshops and acting as a knowledge platform, online and oNline, for interested parties and heritage practitioners.

RESEARCH COLLECTIVE ON DECOLONIALITY & FASHION (RCDF) is an experimental platform beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries initiated in 2012. It aims to critique the denial and erasure of a diversity of fashioning systems due to eurocentricity, unequal global power relations based on the modern-colonial order and the Euro-American canon of normativity materialised in modern aesthetics. Transcending academe, the Collective aims to experiment with decentral and decolonial ways of knowledge-creation and sharing concerning fashion.

FASHIONCLASH is a development and presentation platform for fashion (culture) that contributes through crossovers to, on the one hand, the individual talent development of the new generation of fashion makers and, on the other hand, to general awareness of the role of fashion in the world. Established in 2009, FASHIONCLASH initiates, produces and presents work of a new generation of fashion practitioners who research, reflect, contextualize and celebrate contemporary fashion(culture). FASHIONCLASH believes passionately in the positive contribution the art of fashion can make to personal and artistic development, identity building, society, culture and economy.