Fashion Studies is launching Volume 3, Issue 1!

Join us for a panel discussion featuring four of our brilliant authors from this new issue: Shawkay Ottmann, Dr. Ellen Sampson, Philip Sparks, and Dr. Cheryl Thompson. This panel will be moderated by the journal’s Co-Founders and Co-Editors, Dr. Ben Barry and Dr. Alison Matthews David, and will be followed by a question and answer period with event guests.

RSVP here for the ZOOM link, to be sent out shortly before the event. We look forward to celebrating with you!

About the panelists

Shawkay Ottman

Shawkay Ottmann is currently an MA student at the Royal College of Art in the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme. She graduated from Ryerson University with a Major in History and a Minor in Fashion Design in 2019. She is Anishinaabe from Fishing Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan, as well as British, German, Polish, and Norwegian. In the past, Shawkay has worked as a research assistant, aiding a professor research articles on Indigenous methodologies and Indigenizing the academy, along with researching Indigenous participation in the First and Second World War for the Juno Beach Centre. In her own name, Shawkay has been published writing about Indigenous participation in D-Day for Active History, as a travel writer for Gapyear.com, and for a short story in the Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues.

Dr. Ellen Sampson

Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between bodies, objects, and experience both in museums and archives and in everyday life. Using film, photography, performance, and writing, she interrogates the ways that artefacts become records of lived experience: how people and things become entwined. Sampson has a PhD from the Department of Fashion and Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London and was 2018 Polaire Weissman fellow at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 2019–2020 Professorial Fellow in Fashion at University for the Creative Arts, UK. She is currently Senior research fellow in Design at Northumbria University.

Philip Sparks

Philip has been working as a tailor and designer for almost two decades, incorporating an art practice focused on textiles, photography, and installations into the production and exhibition of his collections. During his career, he has worked in-house in the wardrobe and design departments at the National Ballet of Canada, The Canadian Opera Company, the Stratford Festival, and Soulpepper Theatre. His clothing and accessories have been carried at retailers including Holt Renfrew, Hudson’s Bay, and La Maison Simons. Currently, Sparks continues to further his research into the anthropology and anthropometry of tailoring while producing custom garments and serving as a professor in the School of Fashion at Seneca College. Missed Fit was an exhibition of his thesis work in pursuit of a Masters in Design from OCAD University.

Dr. Cheryl Thompson

Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Industries, Faculty of Communication & Design at Ryerson University. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture and Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2020). She previously held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. Her 2019–-21 SSHRC Insight Development Grant research, “Newspapers, Minstrelsy and Black Performance at the Theatre: Mapping the Spaces of Nation-Building in Toronto, 1870s to 1930s,” aims to uncover histories of performance in Canada. This project includes a resource website that will catalogue photographs, playbills, and newspapers editorials, creating tangible cultural outcomes for increasing access to performance repertoire (e.g., plays, actors, venues) that will widen the scope of theatre history in Canada and the US.

About the moderators

Dr. Ben Barry

Dr. Ben Barry is an Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the School of Fashion and Founding Director of the Centre for Fashion Diversity & Social Change at Ryerson University. His research uncovers the experiences of people—especially of those who are marginalized due to gender identity, race, body type and other axes of identity—when engaging with fashion. Ben's work pioneers the use of co-design and arts-based modes of data collection and dissemination including fashion shows, photography and clothing design. His work has appeared in journals such as Men and Masculinities, Textile and the International Journal of Advertising, and his forthcoming book Refashioning Masculinity: Men and Fashion in the Digital Age will be published by the University of Chicago Press. He holds an MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organization and a PhD in Management from Judge Business School at Cambridge University.

Dr. Alison Matthews David

Dr. Alison Matthews David is an Associate Professor in the School of Fashion and served as Graduate Program Director of the MA Fashion program, Ryerson University from 2014–2017. She was awarded a doctorate from Stanford University and has published in journals such as Victorian Studies, Fashion Theory and Textile. Her most recent research project looked at how clothing physically harmed the health of its makers and wearers by transmitting contagious disease, leaching chemical toxins, and causing accidents, including entanglement and fire. The book Fashion Victims was published by Bloomsbury in 2015 and took the form of a major, co-curated exhibition at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto (June 2014–May 2018). That research led her to continue her literal historical sleuthing and her current book and exhibition project investigates the history of clothing and crime. She is also experimenting with historical reconstruction and film in her recent "Making History" project, which documented the research, creation and performance of an 1840s suit.

About us

Fashion Studies is an open-access, academic journal in fashion that celebrates multiple ways of knowing and sharing that knowledge. We join the movement of scholars who wish to push back against the exploitative corporate publishing monopoly that profits from publicly funded and free academic and creative labour. We believe in the democratic dissemination of scholarly and creative work that removes Western and elitist barriers and paywalls. Fashion Studies is proud to be recognized by the Directory of Open Access Journals and issues Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) as part of our membership with Crossref.