After Learning to Walk, the incredibly enriching and inspiring first part of this Multilogue on walk-learning fashion, we look forward to Walking to Learn – to 24 hours of local-global walk-learning.
WELCOME TO THE WALKING MULTILOGUE!
A day of local-global walk-learning of much more than fashion. Where do we learn fashion? In our grandmother’s lap, in the street, the club, the market, everywhere. Professional fashion learning used to
take place in workshops and studios, ateliers and factories. It still does. Yet, from the 19th century it also moved into colleges and universities. Fashion education became increasingly specialized, institutionalized
and intellectualized. As a result, we see a dualism between informal and professional fashion learning, and between vocational and tertiary education. One seems more valid than the other. One seems more worth than the other. There are severe hierarchies within fashion education that mirror and codetermine those in the professional field. Hierarchies between sites of learning, qualifications, the value of professions, the
value of subsequent work, between intellectual and manual labour, between the worth of human creativity and human lives. Global hierarchies and local hierarchies. Fashion education has increasingly become inaccessible, increasingly distinctive, disembodied – disconnected from the everyday.
‘Let us walk […] and envision the learning environment as an emergent and adaptable opportunity for connection and wonder.’ Let us explore walking for learning. Walking, the free and open activity we all do every day – if not in body, then in mind. Walking, not as a neutral activity, equally determined by gender, class, race, physical ability, but walking as a call to action. Together let us explore walking to decentralize and dehierarchise fashion learning. (Beavington, Lee (2021) ‘Walking Pedagogy for Science Education and More-Than-Human Connection’)
After LEARNING TO WALK, the inspiring first part of this Multilogue on walk-learning fashion in 2025, we are greatly looking forward to Walking to Learn – local, glocal and global walks, live and pre-recorded walks that can bring us together locally and globally. Walk with local communities in person in Auckland, Berlin, London,
Melbourne, New York, São Paolo, Skopje, Sydney and Zagreb. Walk with a global community to de-fashion, to notice place, to unthread absences, to meditate. Walk together to learn with birds, and about fashion and nature, about braided times, size inclusion, and textile city traces. About sensory mapping and co-mapping. About trawlermen and weavers and waterwalks. Build a drawing machine for walkingwhiledrawing.
Walking to unlearn.
Walking to learn.
Walking to wonder.
Walking together.
The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education wants to create connections and actions within and across different fashion learning cultures and contexts. It was founded in 2019 as a participatory and outcome-oriented space and a series of conferences focused on the learning and teaching of fashion. It aims to explore and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the field and the practices of fashion education, and to foster a greater understanding of its pasts, presents and futures – methods, values and didactic, pedagogic and epistemological questions – creating a global exchange to inspire mutual learning, collaborative research and shared action.
The Multilogues are organized by Franziska Schreiber & Dr. Renate Stauss, who are brought together and driven by their love for making and wearing fashion, for learning and thinking through fashion, and their belief in its connective, educational and transformative potential.
