Fashion education in the Asia-Pacific: Learning together in a flat world

This paper examines togetherness and difference in fashion education in the Asia-Pacific region through three perspectives: fashion designer, textile designer, and design educator. The backdrop of fashion education globally is that of industry turbulence: radical digital innovation, hyper-competition enabled by fast global supply chains, and a world simultaneously more fragmented and more connected. Aside from living in a ‘flat’ globalized world, increasingly students’ experience of fashion and textiles is flattened to images on a screen. However, the future for fashion and textile design may lie in local, entrepreneurial, and artisanal approaches to making. In this paper, we examine the idea of the local within the global, and explore how our experience of local, within the wider Asia-Pacific, shapes the fashion culture and approach to materiality of our undergraduate design students and of ourselves as designers and educators. Our teaching approach is to foster curiosity and material exploration within the students as they tackle the quixotic task of making garments in Australia, a country in which manufacturing skills are in scarce supply, and where there is no shortage of clothing, but a dearth of high quality materials. We discuss the desire for local fashion cultures in a globalized world through the notion of “fashion togetherness” in which cross-cultural partnerships may be forged to celebrate difference and find common ground. Through a series of undergraduate student projects and cross-cultural connections, we illustrate how geographical location can at once limit and expand students’ capabilities in fashion and textile design. We close by proposing collaborative strategies in making, thinking and doing fashion that may be specific to one’s own place but are shared collaboratively within regional networks of fashion educators.