SSSWARM Seminar: Linking and layering: On the materiality of locality in Fijian fashion design
About
Sydney Staff and Student Workshops in Anthropology, Research, and Methods (SSSWARM) is a postgraduate workshop series aiming to encourage dialogue and debate on the diversity of ways in which anthropologists understand, use, and reflect on research methods.
Description
This talk focuses upon the ways in which fashion designers materially negotiate location – from social encounters across local, global and online spaces to ancestral connections and atmospheres – into their cultural practice. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Fijian fashion designers, I explore the ways in which locality is layered into clothing designs as they move through the phases of the value chain.
The first part of the paper attends to the production of traditional and novel aesthetics of locality through fabric and the use of patterns such as local vegetation, geometrical lines and sinuous spirals. I then turn to the distribution and marketing of clothing and fashion, highlighting the ways that designers embed locality through links and connections via social media posts. Bridging historical work on clothing, Indigenous forms of cultural production and social media branding, I conclude by extending conceptions of materiality, embodiment and place-based identities.
Speaker bio
Heather A. Horst is Professor of Design Anthropology at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture, mobility, and the mediation of social relations, through the study of homes, clothing, and technology. Selected publications include Digital Anthropology (2012/2020); Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (2016); The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Perspectives (2018); Location Technologies in International Context (2019); and Decentring Automated Decision-Making (2026). She is also the Executive Producer of three documentary films: “Smartphones and Parenting: Fijian Perspectives” with Robert J. Foster, Romitesh Kant and Eliki Drugunalevu; “Mobail Goroka” on mobile phone infrastructures in Papua New Guinea with Robert J. Foster, Verena Thomas, and Jackie Kauli; and a forthcoming film on fashion and adornment with Letila Mitchell, Juan Francisco Salazar and Rako Pasefika.
Sophie Chao, SSSWARM Coordinator, sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au
