Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

gender and sexualities in Colombia and Mexico will be addressed. In this paper, I aim to present the context
of these issues, along with some findings and questions around this research in progress.
10F
Posthuman Fashion: Undoing Anthropocentrism of the Fashion System (Chair, Susan Ingram)
In the 2000s, low-cost clothing collections that encourage disposability have become the norm. Attempts to make
fashion more ecological and socially sound have not succeeded thus far. The session proposes new ways to theorise
fashion, dress, and cloth from a posthuman perspective. What does it mean to think fashion outside of consumerist
anthropocentrism? The session consists of three papers which set out to investigate and challenge the underlying
human-centred values of the fashion system, while keeping issues like environmentalism and social justice at focus.
The papers further examine the material, technological, human and non-human agencies of fashion and dress within
the market economy of the fashion system but also at its margins or even outside of it. Furthermore, the session
suggests a paradigmatic shift towards posthuman theorising in the study of fashion.
Annamari Vänskä
From anti-fashion to posthuman fashion
“This is the end of fashion as we know it. Fashion is insular and placing itself outside society” (trend
forecaster Li Edelkoort, 2015). This paper starts off with Edelkoort’s anti-fashion manifesto where she argues
that because the fashion industry is unsustainable and values neither cloth nor human life, it has become “a
ridiculous and pathetic parody” of itself and must be radically changed. By contextualising Edelkoort’s
manifesto in the history of fashion theory, the paper discusses theoretical, methodological and practical
changes within fashion research and design over past decades. By doing so, the paper shows how cultural
and societal shifts and changes have also changed fashion and its theorisation, and how the current
unsustainable fast fashion system can be challenged by using methods provided by posthumanist thought.
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi* & Vappu Jalonen* Cloth-bodies: fashion and the more-than-human
This co-authored paper is a critical, visual-performative collection of moments, fragments and visions that in
their various ways touch upon entanglements of the cloth and the body. The paper suggests that the
(affective) relational movement happening between the cloth and the body is essential for understanding
what clothing is and how it works. Hence the term cloth-bodies that refers to compositions intrinsically
more-than-human. The paper asks what cloth-bodies can do by offering examples that range from everyday
situations to haute couture creations displayed at art museums. It studies, for instance, 1) how clothing
participates in the movement of the body both in restricting and enabling manner, even sizing the body,
moulding it according standardised cuts and sizes and 2) how cloth-bodies could retain their moving vitality
in the fashion exhibitions organised at museums. New Materialism, and especially theories of relational
materialities give the paper tools to study clothing beyond anthropocentricism of the fashion system.
Katariina Kyrölä Non-human agencies of native Sámi dress
The traditional costume of the indigenous people of Northern Europe, Sámi, has recently been the target of
much media controversy through its costume shop versions and “unwitting” abuses by non-indigenous
women, while it has also been used in Sámi art and online activism. This paper investigates the non-human
agencies of the native Sámi dress, as it is circulated in the media as a highly charged symbol as well as a
material artefact. The traditional hand-crafted Sámi dress is perceived timeless, outside of the marketoriented
fashion system, while it is also copied for mass production and used as a visual short-hand for Sámi
politics. Does Sámi dress define the bodies it is attached to rather than the other way around? How does
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