Critical fitting: pedagogy for confronting colonial dynamics in fashion

Critical Fitting is a new methodology devised to decolonise design teaching in fashion schools. The article accounts for an iterative process of practice research workshops at London College of Fashion, where Critical Fitting was developed. The workshops critically engaged with a core concept in clothing design: fit. The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion's ability to sell, ship and scale products globally - facilitated in part by vocational teaching which ties fit to practices and dynamics of colonial modernity. Our workshops located an opportunity for advancing critical pedagogy in conjunction with STS pedagogy in order to empower globally diverse students to bring to classrooms their own situated, sensory embodied and tacit knowledge of fit. This article outlines playful but conceptually powerful strategies used to remember and imagine alternative material-practices and ways of knowing – from those predetermined in industrially-produced garments to those enacted by participants’ grandmothers’ hands. Critical Fitting is an example of compositional methodology that opens new possibilities for decolonial pedagogy and can be adapted for other practices of STS teaching. The critical decolonial act within the methodology is in centring the embodied knowledge of participants in the room rather than working as a didactic tool.