In June 2023, London College of Fashion colleague Sarah May and I devised and walked with colleagues and students from Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush, the former home of London College of Fashion’s School of Media and Communication, to LCF’s new home at East Bank, on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The route passed through the major commercial fashion districts of London. This walk presented an opportunity to think and sense how fashion media is embedded in a fragile planetary system. We burrowed through the seductive images, surfaces and sounds of a global fashion city to find the inter-dependent systems and networks that make our Capitolocene. We regard data centres, sewers, the weather, Prêt-a-Manger, 5G masts, birds’ nests, Gucci handbags, Instagram, manholes, Thames’ beaches, plastic bags, Deliveroo riders, vapour trails and pigeons as actors in a non-hierarchical, messy fashion ecology.
Pozzi’s ‘pedestrian pedagogy of place’ describes sensory learning through walking. We used pedestrian methods to map the global fashion city in more earthly and material ways in order to resist commercial, gentrification and growth narratives more common to fashion cartography. Our walk marked multiple transformations, from West to East London, from the School of Media and Communication’s past to its future and gave us a model for new and long-term forms of collaborating across disciplines, understanding complexity, fashion learning and unlearning across, through and outside the boundaries of the institution.
This video is an incomplete impression of the eight hours we spent together and includes our insights from the walk. Why should you walk for eight hours with your students? 1. for resistance 2. for resilience 3. to see systems 4. to feel systems Thanks for watching!
Intellectual Simulation 