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Shirt Stories: UAL Professorial Platform Event

26/06/19

What can the portfolio of longitudinal practice research project tell us about our circular future?

A poster adveritisng 'Professor Rebecca Earley, Shirt Stories' with a picture of a girl in a black shirt.

Becky’s inaugural lecture on 26 June 2019 looked back through the archive of twenty years of remaking second-hand polyester shirts, bringing them back to life to discover the new slow design stories we need to write for the industry and for a more equitable circular society. The shirts, including the most recent work, Service Shirt, were viewed through the lens of Latour’s Actor Network Theory to help us understand more about the emerging roles of practice researchers in creating material systems for our circular futures. The event included two catwalk presentations by the MA Textile Design students – one using Becky’s archive of Top 100 shirts, and one with shirts made by the students themselves during the ‘Know Thyself’ summer project.

You can watch the talk online, and also download the publication which accompanies the lecture from Issuu.