Faculty Research & Creative Activities
Scholarly Research and Creative activities (SRC) are flourishing in the School of Fashion. The range of topics, approaches and mediums our faculty members employ demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of fashion. Below are sample research and creative projects conducted by our faculty members.
Refashioning Masculinity (external link, opens in new window)
Dr. Barry’s current research project, funded by SSHRC, explores men’s fashion consumption in the digital age. Barry is examining the challenges men experience due to gender norms and the opportunities to use fashion to empower them to celebrate gender diversity. Drawing from his forthcoming book Refashioning Masculinity: Men and Fashion in the Digital Age (University of Chicago Press), Barry explores how fashion as an industry, a trend and an everyday social practice resists and transforms dominant ideas and ideals about masculinity. He questions whether current movements in men’s fashion are systemically or stylistically refashioning the gender order.
The Fashion and Race Database is a comprehensive resource that seeks to help students, educators, researchers, designers, business professionals and the pedestrian audience learn about the intersections of fashion and race. The goal for the database is to center and amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) fashion scholarship, illuminate under-examined histories and address racism throughout the fashion system.
The Database is organized into six distinct sections, The Library, Object that Matter, Profiles, Essays & Opinion, The Directory, and the Calendar. This platform provides hands-on research and publishing opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students and showcases exciting work from established BIPOC writers and allies.
The Fashion and Race Database Conversations Series launched a Holt Renfrew-sponsored three-part panel series entitled, ‘Retail as a Portal,’ which explored how retail can empower us to produce and consume with positive, social impact and ignite systemic change. The series featured Professor Kim Jenkins in conversation with Byron and Dexter Peart, Leigh Joseph (ancestral name Styawat), Sir John, Yomi Abiola, Sherri McMullen, and Robin Givhan.
Retail as a Portal: Image-Making as a Blueprint for Systemic Change (external link)
Fashioning Resurgence is a panel series co-presented by Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto (external link) and Ryerson's School of Fashion, with support from SSHRC and The Creative School. The series explores Indigenous-led fashion creation, expression, entrepreneurship, and scholarship.
atlasDress
The exhibition is an evolving installation that incorporates participants into the creative process. A number of contemporary artists have focused their creative practice in fashion and textiles (see Schofield, 1982; Sterbak, 2002 and 1997; Orta, 2016; Zits, 2018). The atlasDress was designed as a response to their work, it symbolically highlights the burden of carrying textiles and the responsibilities of the fashion industry on one’s back.
Many consumers purchase clothing with an awareness of garment value, origin, manufacturing conditions and environmental impact. This may be due to the distance between the manufacturer and the consumer, a distance that has grown exponentially since the industrial revolution (Martin & Hoftijzer, 2017).
At the atlasDress exhibit, visitors are invited to participate in the design of a dress by draping silk squares disposed around the model. Without being named, the concept of nostalgia would have its origins in Homer’s account, the Odyssey, where nostalgia serves as a form of vitamin to Ulysses to support himself, to stay well (Sedikikes, 2018). Starting from the premise that nostalgia is an emotion common to the human being, we can affirm that it joins the passions and from then on will be impregnated in everyone’s memory (Saint Augustine, trad. 1861, cited by Martin, 2016).
Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present
The book looks at how clothing harmed and continues to harm the health of its makers and wearers by spreading contagious diseases, leaching chemical toxins, and causing accidents like fires and entanglement. The project led to several outcomes: a book with Bloomsbury (2015), a four-year co-curated exhibition at the Bata Shoe Museum (2014-18) and now a co-authored book for the 9-12 years old tweens called “Killer Style” with Owlkids Publishers.
Owlkids publishers contacted Dr. Matthews David to co-author Killer Style with Serah-Marie. Together, they adapted and added to Dr. Matthews David’s research for her adult book Fashion Victims (2015) to share it with a new generation. Dr. Matthews David hopes it will inspire tweens to really think about the history of what they have in their wardrobes and to make a positive impact on the way people and the planet are treated in the fashion industry in the future.
Ghosts, 2018 (4.00)
‘Ghosts’ is an experimental video that uses illustration and digitized 8mm film to explore concepts of queer childhood, Otherness, sexuality, time, loss, and death. The video fuses illustrations with personal childhood family footage to explore the relationship between past and future, innocence and sexuality, birth and death, linear time (normative) and repetition, humans and monsters, bodies and ghosts.
The video is based on the novel, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, that many children in Canada read in school. The story resonated with Medaglia personally during his coming-of-age in an Italian, Roman Catholic environment.
The final video engages with an individual, embodied experience (8mm childhood film) and cultural expectations (The Chrysalids) to examine the relationships between subjectivity and cultural norms.
The Junction Collection (external link)
Navarro Delgado was selected for the 2018 Junction Artist-in-Residence (JAR) Program based on his experience creating site-specific fashion projects in diverse communities. Navarro Delgado designed, The Junction Collection-a fashion project informed by the dualities inherent to life in Yukon. Navarro Delgado showcased his collection at the Fashion Art Toronto (external link, opens in new window) 2019 event in Daniels Spectrum.
The Junction Collection was centred in the rural town of Haines Junction, a geographic and cultural space shared by both First Nations and Non-First Nations communities. Like the town, The Junction Collection pairs materials and concepts, which although contrasting, complement each other.
Ott’s research focuses on fashion systems, which are mechanisms for the production and consumption of clothing. While the prevailing contemporary fashion system is structured around mass production, its manufacturing techniques are increasingly coming under scrutiny as working conditions and environmental effects are considered exploitative and unsustainable.
In an ethnography of tailors and shoemakers, Ott investigates the notion of craftship to understand what embodied skills, materials, and tools inform contemporary practices of craftsmanship. This study provides a perspective on how the body and materials interrelate, how work is organized, and what factors influence the making of bespoke artefacts - in other words, how body and things engage in the making of a suit or a pair of shoes.
Early findings of this research project have been published in a book chapter: Ott, R. (2018). The cordwainer’s lair: Contingency in bespoke shoemaking. In E. Bell, G. Mangia, S. Taylor, & M.L. Toraldo (Eds), The Organization of Craft Work: Identities, Meanings, and Materiality (pp. 196–216). London, UK: Routledge.
Osmud Rahman’s research interests lie in the areas of consumer behaviour, branding, online/offline shopping, fashion sustainability, consumer identity, fashion culture and subculture. Rahman’s scholarship has explored shopping behaviours of aging consumers, branding strategies in transitional economy, footwear design and visual presentation, fashion innovativeness in India, sustainable practices and transformable fashion design, Cosplay and performing identity, Lolita and elusive consumption, and the meaning of hijab. Currently, Rahman is working on a research project of men’s height, body image and clothing fit. His works have appeared in various academic journals such as Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, The Design Journal, and International Journal of Design.
Daemon & Saudade
This exhibition explores emotion, grief, loss and preservation through a series of photographic prints and sculptural garments paired to reveal both the beauty and pain of emotion. This exhibition took place at the Art Gallery of Northumberland (external link, opens in new window) located in Cobourg, Ontario.
Neighbourhood Policing: Designing Uniforms That Work
A team of Fashion Faculty, led by Dr. Sandra Tullio-Pow, successfully won a contract to assess and propose recommendations for the uniform worn by the neighbourhood officers. This research was completed at the request of the Toronto Police Service in order to improve uniform fit, function, and public perception of its neighbourhood police bicycle unit.
Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (University of Chicago Press, 2020) (external link)
Dr. Wahl contributed a chapter in the book that is a collaboration with Dr. Ben Barry.
Photo Credit: Cover art from Fashion Faculty, Mic. Carter
'I craft affect into experimental cloth forms.'
As a researcher, I tell stories through a compound and densely articulated making process. In a sense, I believe describing my work as something that materializes is apropos as my academic arguments are predominantly and most eloquently spoken in intricate yet effusive cloth forms. These forms are webbed together by multiple techniques and treatments— weaving, knitting, crochet, embroidery, and stitching, which are then washed, stained, brushed, printed, and mended. The materials include: mono-filament invisible, mohair, horsehair, and wool yarns, with tulle and organza fabrics, are held in a tenuous balance of construction and deconstruction. With multidisciplinary and non-linear procedures, I reveal my ongoing obsession with the affect emitted by specific body imagery in art and popular culture. As I examine these aestheticized bodies, I engage with theory that speaks to their emotive qualities to gather descriptive vocabulary. The theoretical glossary generated becomes a list of creative prompts to be interpreted in the textile studio where I attempt to craft this affect in my primary language which is experimental cloth
Link to Publication (external link)
If you are interested in finding out more about the projects mentioned above or collaborating with faculty at the School of Fashion, please visit: