LOOMS AND LABOR: Serkan Delice, Lecture “Fashion, Decolonisation, and Living Labour”, November 24, 7:00 PM

As a part of the program Looms and Labor, Serkan Delice in his lecture exposes the ways in which capitalism’s increasingly predatory, planet-wide accumulation processes appropriate the living labor that creates and sustains fashion and cultures of craft. The lecture dwells into how under contemporary transnational capitalism the fashion industry continues to capitalize on the fashion of communities, labeled by the economically leading countries as a Third World”,  and exacerbate the precarity of a globally dispersed surplus population of informal workers. It will touch upon how the decolonization within the realm of fashion needs a global approach to challenge the systemic racial inequities perpetuated by capitalism and the continual displacement of creative communities within settler colonialism. Serkan Delice will talk about possible practices of reclaiming fashion's transformative radicalism as a tool for shaping and altering the conditions of our existence and overcoming inequalities.

Photo: Dress, 19th Century, made in Palestine, Gift of George R. Dyer, 1941, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/126645

Free admission. Language: English.

Serkan Delice is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in the Department of Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. His research looks at cultural appropriation as a systemic issue in the industry in its relationship with capital accumulation, the general devaluation of living labour, and the material and psychological legacies of colonialism. He has recently published a co-edited book “Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities” (Routledge, 2023).