This network is framed by the concerns of the Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA), a unique teaching collection held by the University of Westminster. The collection holds over 2000 menswear garments from 1780 to the present day, primarily focused on post-1940s British men's dress - clothing produced, designed, worn, or retailed in Britain. It includes designer fashion, streetwear, everyday dress, sportswear, workwear, and uniforms. It receives over 800 visitors each year and is utilised for research purposes by students, scholars, and designers in industry. It is modelled on Italian garment archives, particularly the menswear label C.P. Company, founded by designer Massimo Osti. Osti's collection was non-hierarchal, housing military, utilitarian, industrial, and fashion garments together. The WMA mirrors this approach, directly aiming to overcome the gender and high-fashion biases inherent in most teaching and museum collections of fashion. Menswear, relative to womenswear, is still underexplored in fashion research and exhibitions, despite growing interest in the field exemplified by an increasing number of menswear exhibitions, including Reigning Men (Los Angeles County Museum, 2016), Invisible Men (University of Westminster, 2019) and the forthcoming Dandy Style (Manchester Art Gallery, 2022). However, scholarship on British menswear has tended to focus on tailoring and tradition; spectacular and dandy style; and London. This network seeks to question these preoccupations by interrogating the fashion practices of the inhabitants of four key cities. Through a series of workshops, the network will bring together academics, curators, designers, retailers, and fashion industry professionals to investigate the links, relationships, and encounters between the local (Liverpool and Manchester), national (London), and international (Milan) menswear industries and communities. These will allow for the development of a framework for expanding to other cities. Workshop 1 London - Archiving, collecting, and curating British menswear Tour of the Westminster Menswear Archive. Before the workshop, each participant is invited to engage with the WMA through its online catalogue to select one garment relevant to their research or practice. These will be used as the starting point for discussion of the place of archival collections in researching and creating British menswear. Workshop 2 Milan - The location of the industrialisation of menswear Tour of the C.P. Company design studio and archive to examine how it is used to document the company's material culture and the foundation for a research methodology to inform concepts for new menswear outcomes. Workshop 3 Liverpool - The significance of a port city as a site of cultural exchange Specialist menswear retailers play an essential role in disseminating new menswear, acting as intermediaries between industry and consumers by curating garments relevant to specific local audiences. Workshop 4 Manchester - Subculture / Mass Culture: Menswear and Youth Style. The final workshop will focus on menswear, leisure, and youth cultures, using cross-generational participatory research that invites members of the public to share their narratives of youth style. The network will innovate in its approach, diversify its collaborative partners, and engage with previously overlooked menswear communities and creators by involving non-academic participants and practitioners, including those outside the fashion industry, and utilising the network's social media platforms for dissemination, feedback, and dialogue. A multidisciplinary approach strengthens the project, with academics from several disciplines such as music, youth studies, fashion design, fashion communication, and history bringing their unique perspectives to light on the network's questions.

This research project is the first to systematically investigate the hidden history of fashion film in the silent era between 1900 and 1929, and its legacy for the rapidly changing field of fashion communications today, both in the UK and globally. It posits fashion film as a unique hybrid of two industries with distinct practices, resources, and motivations. Its interdisciplinary approach provides a new historical and theoretical framework for understanding this important and increasingly popular phenomenon. To that end, the project brings together scholars with combined expertise in film history, fashion history and media studies, and practitioners involved in various aspects of contemporary fashion film production. The study of fashion film has been neglected in both film and fashion histories, and in the fashion industry it is often assumed to be a novel product of the digital age. The project redresses this by conducting extensive archival and filmographic research into fashion film of the silent era, and by subjecting these findings to a comparison with the practices of emergent digital fashion film in the early 21st century - another period of rapid technological and cultural change. We use 'media archaeology' as an innovative, non-linear method of connecting these two periods. Although not historically proximate, each period acts as a critical prism for understanding the other. More broadly, we will also investigate the potential of media archaeology approaches to 'rewire' established fashion history methodologies and to inform contemporary fashion practice. Emphasising for the first time the transformative effects of film on fashion in both periods, the project forges a new understanding of film as a 'fashion medium' and as a 'fashion object'. It will make a major contribution to scholarly studies of the history of fashion, of film, and of fashion film, and will change how contemporary fashion filmmakers and other media practitioners understand the history of their discipline and the context for their own creative and commercial work. The project team is based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. The project's methods span fashion history and theory, fashion in film studies and media archaeology. The specialist art school environment is a singularly appropriate milieu for this project because its research activities regularly combine historical and theoretical research with art and design practice. The team will work closely in partnership with AnOther.com (an influential online magazine owned by Dazed Media, a leading UK-based international media platform with a focus on culture, fashion and lifestyle), the British Film Institute (the UK's foremost body for the collection, preservation, exhibition and promotion of film and the moving image), the British Fashion Council (the national organisation for the promotion of British fashion design and media in a global market), Somerset House (a major arts and cultural centre based in London) and Moravska Galerie Brno (a major national arts museum in the Czech Republic) to ensure a broad range of outputs and impacts, and wide dissemination. The outputs include: workshops, a showcase on a contemporary media platform, a conference, an international touring exhibition of historical fashion film at Somerset House and Moravska Galerie, Brno, public-facing screenings and discussion events, and several publications: a monograph accompanying the exhibition, a book documenting the conversations between academics and media industry practitioners, and a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Exploding Fashion destabilizes conventional historical methods to create new forms of understanding about the material culture of the past. It 'explodes' the mystique of the fashion design process in two ways. Firstly, it deconstructs the myth of the designer as sole creative genius by uncovering the intriguing role of the patter cutter. Secondly, it reverse-engineers four historical designs by game-changing designers who were also innovative pattern cutters, digitally reanimating museum objects as moving images which visually narrate how these things were once made, and how they moved on the body. This project thus foregrounds the pattern cutter, an essential maker and technician in the fashion design process whose role is essentially unacknowledged in design histories and unfamiliar to consumers. The project offers a long overdue corrective to this oversight. Like the warp and weft of fabric, it interweaves two strands of enquiry: firstly, the participatory nature of fashion design, and secondly, the cultural and historical implications of studying pattern cutting as a technology of the body. Like an exploded-view drawing, the project offers a visually-led understanding of how fashion is an object of pattern cutting. Working together in museum archives, historians and pattern-cutters will study a small number of highly complex garments in close detail, using several visual methods to 'explode' them in order to understand their construction. This involves making paper patterns, toiles (canvas prototypes of the garments), textile samples and digital visualisations of the garment in motion, to produce a set of 'materialised' investigations in 2D, 3D and 4D formats as a form of reverse engineering. The project thus reveals a backstage view of the fashion design process, and aims to make the invisible visible. It will set fashion in motion, animating a greater understanding of how historical dress designs once worked on the body. Outputs include a major exhibition at Somerset House (London), a book associated with the exhibition, academic journal articles, a museum study day, several workshops, a fashion industry showcase, and an online project with a fashion media partner. The project employs curation as a form of creative practice capable of revealing and narrating fashion design as a type of visual, motile and three-dimensional knowledge. Fashion curation sits between the academy and the museum, bridging the historical and the contemporary through the exhibition of objects, images and texts. Due to the new methods developed in fashion studies, the close reading of the cut and construction of historical dress has been discarded, and this project seeks to redeploy it in a contemporary context in order to offer new interpretations on the making of modern clothing. The research team consists of professional pattern cutters, historians, curators, and digital visualisers who will investigate the overlooked role of the pattern cutter. The project uses ideas about co-design which privileges processes and procedures over authors and styles that have rarely been tested in fashion. Exploding Fashion employs three forms of practice: pattern cutting, visualisation and curation. It combines the methods of practitioners and historians in a blended approach; it brings technicians and academics into debate, and investigates whether the practitioner's mode of 'thinking through making' can offer new paradigms to the fashion historian, allowing us to theorise pattern cutting as both cultural and technological, using cultural and historical theories of the body as a set of technologies. Situated at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, the project bridges fashion design practice and academic history and theory, and draws on its expertise in both areas to produce innovative fashion thinking that is unique to London's status as a fashion capital that excels in design, education and curation.

The Collaborative Research & Development (R&D) Partnership project will work with the Fashion Textiles and related Technology (FTT) industry in order develop research-led solutions to business growth, technological and consumer change. This will include working closely with small firms who make up the vast majority (80+%) of the sector, in fashion design, designer-making, manufacturing, retail and in related services that are fed by the fashion & textiles sector, e.g. events, interiors, publishing, performing arts, media and other creative services, as well as a wide range of textiles applications in manufacturing, medical and product design. The research will be delivered by a partnership between several universities led by the University of the Arts London, who together specialise in fashion and textiles design, business, manufacture and marketing, including specialist research centres in sustainable fashion and circular design, sustainable prosperity, materials and textiles manufacturing, in London, Leeds, Loughborough and Cambridge. The R&D project will be based around the East London Fashion & Textiles cluster and the connected production growth corridors of the Thames Gateway and Lea Valley/M11 (London-Cambridge) where opportunities for FTT workspace and manufacturing expansion are evident. The R&D work programme will include short and longer term research projects and enterprise support with small firms/SMEs to identify and develop solutions to the growth of their business, products and markets and related skills needs; work with larger fashion brands to develop more sustainable products through innovative design, manufacture and waste processing; research consumer experience and needs in material/fashion brands and retailing, including the future place of high street retail, store design and online markets; test new and existing synthetic and natural materials for new product development; and explore markets for more sustainable UK fibres/chemical processes and opportunities for regional UK textile production. The R&D programme, which will be co-designed with FTT companies and industry associations, will also identify the related skill and training needs which accompany the economic and technological challenges facing the FTT industry, and design through the university partners and other training providers (e.g. FE Colleges) and enterprise support organisations, new and novel training and Continuing Professional Development programmes.

The UK is known for its successful creative industries and its fashion designers are widely acknowledged as creative influencers on the world stage. The UK's designer fashion sector, largely made up of micro and small enterprises (MSEs), constitutes a globally recognised creative engine, effectively acting as R&D for the wider fashion industry. Design-led fashion enterprises, whilst often struggling financially themselves, provide pioneering alternative visions of prosperity in business. This project investigates the role of creative entrepreneurship and design in fashion MSEs as a potential driver for change, providing a valuable lens through which to examine the future for a sustainable fashion industry. A multi-disciplinary research team will work directly with a range of design-led fashion MSEs as co-producers of the research. The fashion designer-entrepreneur, and leaders in MSE teams, will be the focus of analysis. The research will explore sustainability as a creative endeavour, examining four key areas: design and operations; business networks and ecosystems; working practices; entrepreneurship and business models. This will lead to new knowledge and understanding of the internal operations and external context within which these fashion MSEs operate. This knowledge will be applied to establish and support new sustainable models of business development, repositioning designer fashion MSEs as major contributors to the UK's creative and sustainable economy, and ultimately informing future UK policy for the creative industries. The research will analyse existing and novel business models and practices that foster sustainable prosperity, a concept aiming to balance environmental, social, cultural and economic considerations. We will identify barriers and points of intervention in order to develop alternative business support mechanisms for sustainability to inform fashion businesses at both small and larger scales. To meet this complex challenge, the academic team is drawn from three leading research centres and universities, whose complementary academic expertise will provide a novel cross-disciplinary approach to research in fashion innovation and sustainable prosperity. Led by London College of Fashion (LCF) at University of the Arts London (UAL), the project is a collaboration between UAL's Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), Middlesex University's (MU) Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) and the Open University's (OU) Department of Design. CEEDR is a key partner in Surrey University's Centre for Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). To maximize the impact of the project directly on the fashion sector, the research team will work closely with the Centre for Fashion Enterprise (CFE), a fashion business incubator based at LCF (est. 2003); the British Fashion Council (BFC), the UK industry body responsible for promoting international sales of designer fashion; and the Ethical Fashion Forum (est. 2005), an alternative sourcing platform for international fashion MSEs working with sustainability. The research team will also work with a group of 20 designer fashion MSEs who want to engage with sustainability practices. Four key project partners will provide current examples of different business models incorporating sustainability: Unmade, Christopher Raeburn, Martine Jarlgaard and RizBoardshorts. These four MSE partners will engage with the research team in knowledge exchange and evaluation throughout the entire project. Outputs will include: case studies, academic journal articles, key findings report, and policy briefing note. In addition, a business support for sustainability 'toolkit' will provide new guidance for both emerging and established business support and incubator organisations (eg. CFE, BFC, Fashion in Leeds initiative) to foster more sustainable fashion practices.