Renate Stauss
Our twenty-seventh member of the month is Renate Stauss
UCRF is running a ‘Member of the Month’ feature on this blog, where a member, selected at random from the membership database, is sent five questions to give us all an overview of our members. Our twenty-eighth participant, Renate Stauss, is a fashion scholar and educator working at the intersection of critical fashion theory, the politics of dress, and transformative approaches to fashion education, including the Fashion is a great teacher platform and the Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education.
—1 How would you sum up your research/practice?
I am Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at The American University of Paris in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture. For more than twenty years, I have been teaching fashion theory and critical studies in London, Paris and Berlin – at Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths College, Berlin University of the Arts and the Royal College of Art in London where I was part of the faculty for a decade. My doctoral research explored Dress as Therapy: Working with Dress on the Self in Therapeutic Settings (UAL). The focus of my teaching and scholarship lies on the sociology and politics of fashion and dress. Recent publications included book chapters in Fashion & Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023) and Mirror Mirror: Fashion & the Psyche (2022), and articles in Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice and Vestoj. Current research interests include the perception and potential of fashion, the emergence of fashion theory, the role of dress in political protest, and fashion education – how we learn and teach fashion. Together with Franziska Schreiber, I co-founded Fashion is a great teacher – The fashion education podcast and platform, including the conference series The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education. This year’s Digital Multilogue is Learning to Walk / Walking to Learn: On Dehierarchising and Decentralising Fashion Education. (20 November 2025).
— 2 How do you address fashion and sustainability in your work?
My work is based on a holistic socio-cultural and political understanding of fashion. Politics and sustainability have been at the core of much of my teaching, scholarship, and professional community work. I teach systems thinking around fashion, write about misperceptions, and explore fashion education in its current role as co-creator of a highly exclusive and discriminatory global fashion system, but also in its potentialities to create change.
One example: we launched the Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education to create connections and actions within and across different fashion learning cultures and contexts. It was founded in 2019 in reaction to a growing disconnect between the educational and professional fields of fashion, between what we learn and teach and the world we live in. It was founded as an open-access, participatory and outcome-oriented space and conference series focused on the learning and teaching of fashion for social, climate and educational justice. A global network of fashion learner and leading learners has emerged and collaborated on the exploration of subjects like degrowth and defashion, grieving, democracy or the dehierarchisation and decentralisation of fashion education.
— 3 What are the conflicts you have encountered around fashion and sustainability in your work?
Sustainability itself is a conflicted term. Limited in both application and ambition. Much abused as absolution. At best a working term, a lowest common denominator, a starting point. The core conflict is that of capitalism and sustainability. Of capitalism that thrives on exploitation, discrimination and exclusion, and sustainability that needs equality, justice and inclusion.
Further conflicts I encounter concern the significant knowledge action gap in fashion usage, learning, communication and practice. The cognitive dissonance between what we know and how we live in and with this world. The global western fashion industry presents fashion as a perfect product eliminating the many people, materials, processes, places involved, resulting in the misperception of fashion, in unsustainable production and consumption practices, in social and climate injustice. Part of this disconnect is another conflict concerning the privileging of sustainability as a global Western strategy and solution, resulting in forms of neocolonialism.
— 4 What do you consider the key sources and cases when it comes to fashion and sustainability?
I am careful to think of the sources I know as key sources. The limits of my languages are the limits of my world, as Wittgenstein noted.
— 5 Could you recommend some less-known sources or cases you think should be more widely shared?
A place, an author, a podcast, a newsletter, and a book,
• place: Auroville, India – a community for human unity
• author: Sanem Odabasi – fashion scholar and artist from Turkey who works on sustainability and memory
• podcast: Manufactured – a podcast about sustainability and the making of fashion by Jessie Li & Kim van der Weerd
• newsletter: The Crips (“snackable briefing on anti-greenwashing and honest fashion communication”, including brief analysis on current and coming legislation)
• book: Miss Leoparda by Natalia Shaloshvili, a children’s book about creating change, care, community, and the bicycle
Thank you Renate for sharing your work!
