No. 5 (2025)
Essays

Affective Fabrics of Resistance: Fashion, Embodiment, and Political Futurity in Toxic Times

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  • Miriam Martínez Villar,
  • Antonio Francisco Alaminos-Fernández
Miriam Martínez Villar
Universitat Jaume I
Bio
Antonio Francisco Alaminos-Fernández
Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS)
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3530

Published 30-06-2025

Keywords

  • fashion activism,
  • affective resistance,
  • decolonial aesthetics,
  • embodied politics,
  • counter-modernity

How to Cite

Martínez Villar, M., & Alaminos-Fernández, A. F. (2025). Affective Fabrics of Resistance: Fashion, Embodiment, and Political Futurity in Toxic Times. Fashion Highlight, (5), 26–32. https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3530

Copyright (c) 2025 Miriam Martínez Villar, Antonio Francisco Alaminos-Fernández

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article examines fashion as a site of affective resistance and epistemic worldmaking in the face of resurgent fascist and neoliberal logics. Drawing on Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledges and Jansen’s (2020) critique of fashion’s entanglement with colonial modernity, we develop a transdisciplinary framework that connects decolonial theory, affect studies, and feminist critique. We explore how sartorial practices mobilize joy, care, and speculative imagination to counter systemic violence, erasure, and aesthetic exclusion. Fashion is analyzed not merely as surface or spectacle, but as embodied archive, critical pedagogy, and political infrastructure. Through examples of BIPOC, queer, and diasporic fashion practices, we show how fashion resists normative temporalities and reconfigures the relationship between body, memory, and futurity. This analysis foregrounds fashion’s capacity to enact alternative modes of being and knowing under conditions of ongoing structural oppression.

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