Fashion Refusal

Forthcoming exhibition, curated with Dr Tassia Joannides (RMIT University)

Fashion Refusal: Acts of Resistance and Regeneration

(working title)

EOI HERE

Drawing on current research from RMIT's School of Fashion and Textiles, Fashion Refusal presents a series of provocations for holistic and restorative fashion practice. The exhibition brings together works emerging from the 'R strategies' of circular fashion — recycling, repair, reuse, reduction, and refusal — with a particular focus on the regenerative opportunities of refusal as an underrepresented strategy.

Far from abandoning fashion, refusal is framed here as a way of resisting and reimagining the systems, norms, and aesthetics that underpin dominant destructive models. The exhibition ambitiously aims to reclaims the term fashion itself — shifting its meaning away from fast, linear, and environmentally harmful production toward a fashion oriented around slow, ethical, and regenerative values.

This exhibition will showcase the vital work being done in sustainable fashion practices in the RMIT fashion and textiles design community. It will highlight circular, regenerative and ethical design that rejects or refuses hierarchies, systems, norms and practices of fast fashion systems, making space for alternative ways of doing/thinking/dressing/making within the discipline (and beyond).

We invite expressions of interest from the RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles broader community across a range of disciplines to contribute to the exhibition Fashion Refusal (working title) to be held at the RMIT Design Hub Gallery opening in February 2027. This exhibition will form part of the Independent Program at the 2027 PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival and will include a curated series of panel discussions and public workshops.

Fashion Refusal is curated by Dr Tassia Joannides and Dr Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran from RMIT’s School of Fashion and Textiles, with support from RMIT Galleries, Weft Research Centre, the School of Fashion & Textiles.

The Brief

Recent scholarly work has identified up to 100 Rs of circular fashion — from rethinking and redesigning to re-localising and restoring — the exhibition positions refusal specifically as a means to expand, complicate, and provoke more ethical and sustainable fashion and textile practices. It does so through creative design practice as a mode of research: one that generates embodied, spatial, and poetic experiences alongside more traditional research methods. This practice-based approach makes room for the imaginative and speculative — producing knowledge that text-based research alone cannot. Creative, critical and speculative works are encouraged.

The exhibition features works organised around a series of entry points into fashion refusal. These are not discrete categories but overlapping lenses — ways of approaching and expanding the central inquiry.

Refusal as resistance — refusing fast/dominant fashion systems as an act against extractive capitalism, overconsumption, the colonial supply chain (including erasure of local fashion traditions and offshore disposal of fashion waste). Work that takes a firm position or that's explicitly adversarial or activist in intention.

Refusal as aesthetics — Refusing newness, finish, and trend cycles. Visible mending, unravelling, deliberate incompleteness. Refusal to adhere to unsustainable aesthetic norms.

Refusal to conform – fashion practices and communities often marginalised by the dominant fashion system (across culture, class, age, gender, geography) whose ways of everyday fashioning of self actively refuse the flattening effects of globalisation.

Refusal as restraint — the "less" tradition, zero-waste pattern cutting, designers who refuse excess material. Practices oriented around sufficiency: asking what ‘enough’ looks like in terms of garments, materials and consumption. Refusal as craft.

Refusal to disappear — second life garments, heirlooms, pieces that refuse obsolescence, including community‑held practices and local dress traditions that persist despite the pressures of global fashion. A cultural and/or archival approach.

EOI HERE

Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran

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