Guest Editors: Romana Andò & Shawana Khalil

DOWNLOAD THE CALL FOR PAPERS

Fashion education is undergoing a profound transformation as it responds to accelerating digitalization, advancements in artificial intelligence, shifting cultural and geopolitical perspectives, evolving student learning cultures, and growing demands for environmental and social responsibility. In a time marked by multiple disruptions, including the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, systemic instability, and economic volatility, fashion education is being reconfigured. Traditional pedagogical models, often rooted in Western-centric narratives of fashion history, production, and creativity, are increasingly inadequate for preparing students to engage with a complex, interconnected, and rapidly evolving global industry. 

Fashion education often intersects with digital humanities, sustainable studies, and critical debates on global inequality, including waste colonialism and the uneven flow of materials across global communities. As physical and digital systems become more complex, educators are challenged to rethink how knowledge can be created, shared, and applied across diverse cultural and geographic contexts. Concurrently, fashion education must engage with critical questions related to craft, heritage, identity, decoloniality, and cultural plurality. The challenge is to cultivate learning cultures that are interdisciplinary, participatory, and enable students to critically engage with the social, environmental, and ethical implications of fashion systems. There is a need for more reflective, resilient, and inclusive pedagogical approaches.  

Furthermore, fashion education can be a bridge to more sustainable and equitable futures, contributing to human wellbeing. It can help reimagine how knowledge, creativity, and a responsible approach can shape industry practices and societal values. It holds the potential to reconfigure relations between bodies, materials, technologies, and global systems of production and care. All of these form part of the new system, where the students can not only engage more critically, creatively, and responsibly with contemporary challenges, but also create through phygital practices that bridge hands-on craftsmanship and digital technologies. 

This call invites contributions that critically examine how fashion education can be reimagined in an era of responsible innovation, digital transformation, and changing learning cultures, while preserving and reinterpreting fashion heritage and craft traditions. Particular attention will be given to innovative teaching practices that respond to increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary, and participatory student cohorts. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and practice-based contributions that explore new pedagogical frameworks, methodologies, and institutional strategies that reshape the future of fashion education and foster a more inclusive, responsible, and sustainable global learning community.

SUBTOPICS

• Digital transformation and new skills

• AI, virtual environments, and digital fashion in curricula
• New professional profiles and hybrid competencies
• Rethinking technical and creative skill sets for the platform economy 

 

•  Sustainability and ethical responsibility

• Integrating environmental and social sustainability into fashion training
• Circular design, slow fashion, and regenerative practices in education
• Teaching ethics, responsibility, and systemic thinking
• Beyond GDP: Rethinking Progress, Human Well-Being and Happiness

 

•  Heritage, memory and innovation 

• The role of archives, museums, and craft knowledge in education
• Heritage as a resource for future-oriented creativity
• Balancing tradition and experimentation in curricula
• Reimagining traditional textiles in Contemporary Fashion
• Craft industries, livelihoods, and sustainability

 

• Pedagogical innovation

• Participatory, experiential, and practice-based learning models
• Interdisciplinary teaching approaches and cross-sector collaboration
• Industry–academia partnerships and new learning ecosystems

 

• Decolonising fashion education

• Teaching increasingly diverse and interdisciplinary cohorts
• Embodied learning, affect, and identity in fashion education
• Collaborative and community-based learning practices

 

SELECTED REFERENCES

Andò, R. (Ed.). 2020. Teaching Fashion. An Introduction (Vol. 2). Edizioni Nuova Cultura.

Barry, B., & Christel, D. A. (Eds.). 2023. Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution. Intellect.

Bellet, A. (Ed.). 2024. New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies. Routledge.

Gupta, S., Kumar, R., Jaiswal, S., & Kumar, M. 2026. The 5-pillar Model of Fashion Education: An Empirical Research on the Stakeholder Perspectives. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 19(2), 155–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2024.2447032

hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Hogans, K., & Shaw, D. (2025). A Reparative Space: Theorizing Decolonizing and Freedom Pathways in Fashion Education. Fashion Theory, 29(1), 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2024.2437844

Kim, S. J. 2024. Generative artificial intelligence in collaborative ideation: Educational insight from fashion students. IEEE Access, 12, 49261–49274.

Kohli, J. K. 2025. Impact of artificial intelligence on fashion education for future jobs. Higher Education for the Future, 12(1), 114–128.

Liu, A., &  X. Li. 2025. Sustainable Fashion and Traditional Craft: The Role of Experiential Learning in Shaping Designers and Promoting Cultural Sustainability in Central Asia. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology,  35(6): e70200. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.70200.

Lorusso, M. 2025. Reimagining Fashion Education for a Just Future Inspired by Ben Barry's Vision and Voice. ZoneModa Journal, 15(2), 157–166.

Rocamora, A., & Smelik, A. M. (Eds.). 2025. Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. I.B. Tauris.

Scott, K., Curtis, B., and Pajaczkowska, C. (Eds.). 2024. The Future of Fashion Education: Speculation, Experience and Collaboration. Routledge.

Williams, D. 2016. Transition to Transformation in Fashion Education for Sustainability. In: Leal Filho, W., & Brandli, L. (eds), Engaging Stakeholders in Education for Sustainable Development at University Level. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26734-0_14

ABOUT THE GUEST EDITORS

Dr Romana Andò (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Romana Andò is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, where she has directed the Master in Fashion Studies — and subsequently the Master in Fashion Theory and Practices, offered jointly with Unitelma Sapienza — for the past eight years. Her research spans media audience studies, gender and masculinity in contemporary media, fashion and cultural theory, and the relationship between fashion, heritage, and digital transformation. From 2021 to 2024 she coordinated a PNRR-funded research project on fashion and museum practices, exploring new models of cultural mediation and archive valorisation. She has published extensively on Italian television, media consumption, fashion consumption and fashion pedagogy, and is the author of Audience for Fashion (Egea, 2022). She is currently co-editing this Special Issue as part of her broader commitment to internationalising fashion education research.

 

Dr Shawana Khalil (Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design)  

Shawana Khalil is Professor of Fashion & Textiles and Director, Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC) at Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design (PIFD). She is the first Pakistani to earn a PhD in Fashion from a European university with distinction. Her expertise spans fashion design, garment construction, apparel anthropometrics of South Asian women, sizing & fit, textile and craft heritage, and emerging technologies in fashion for inclusive and sustainable design. She has received advanced training in France, Italy, and UK, serves on the Commonwealth Fashion Education Council, and contributes to Pakistan’s fashion industry as a design and technical consultant. She heads PhD in Design and Master of Design programmes, providing strategic leadership in research and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her work positions fashion education as critical inquiry, integrating context, culture, craft and technology. 

 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE AUTHORS

We welcome full papers in English with a range length of 4000-6000 words, footnotes and bibliographical references excluded. It is highly recommended to use the template and APA STYLE as a formatting guideline. 

The deadline for submitting the proposals (saved in .doc or .docx format) via the platform is 30 November 2026. Issue 9 will be published in 2027.

Fashion Highlight is published by Firenze University Press with ISSN 2975-0466, whose Diamond Open Access policy requires no fee for publication, while supporting the double-blind peer review process. Fashion Highlight is indexed in Scopus. 

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, concerns or information: fashionhighlight@fup.unifi.it  

https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh