Affective Passage in Toxic Times: Fashion and Joy as Resistance

Abstract

The amplification of right-wing, fascist rhetoric in 2025 is manifesting material effects on the lives of women, trans and queer communities, and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). In their treatise, Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (2023, p.2) write that in spaces of continued “colonialism, fascism, and violent nationalisms”, developing the “theoretical tools necessary to engage with the ongoing production of race and racisms” is a necessary and urgent task. As the ‘we’ of ‘our’ voices in this editorial have felt simultaneously confronted by the unfolding of events through the year on our mobile devices, and drawn in by the performativity of Majority World diverse bodies and praxes speaking against social injustice, this affective engagement has compelled us to action. Deriving from a duty of care in our positionalities as fashion researchers and members of a global BIPOC community, feminist (Vergès, 2021) and postcolonial theories (Said, 1993; Spivak, 1999) are used as critique of the asymmetric distribution of power to platform concerns and discourse ranging from issues of gender identity to decoloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Azoulay, 2019; Gaugele & Titton, 2019). Coloniality has forcefully instilled Eurocentric ways of knowing that underpin the capitalist and late-capitalist extractive mindset largely responsible for keeping the previously colonised in an economically disadvantaged and culturally inferior position (Jansen & Craik, 2016). In this manner, the decolonial thought is, as Negedu (2025, p.143) suggests, not a “one-night stand event whose phase will pass once it is completed” but rather, a continual “fighting ‘for’ an ideology” and action that centres livability for all.    

It was important that the Call for Papers for this issue provoked multiple views and points of intervention to make explicit fashion’s entanglement with the complexity of the issues at hand. This 5th Issue of Fashion Highlight has emerged from a series of fourteen contributions that propose how fashion making, worldbuilding, archiving and other forms of fashion praxis that speak of joy, love, pain, beauty, brutality, pleasure, precarity (Moore, 2018; Love, 2019; Makhubu & Mbongwa, 2019; Wachter-Grene & Chude-Sokei, 2020; Ekpe, Sherman & Ofoegbu 2023 and; Okello, 2024) are being configured from different perspectives for perceiving the world in its fuller spectrum. Our co-edited issue is divided into three sections, with the first entailing scholarly articles, followed by a section of creative and reflective works, and closing with an exhibition and book review. This introductory section has set the context briefly for this special issue. We next outline the peer-reviewed articles, ‘feeling-thinking’ through these - or sentipensare derived from South American indigenous and Afro-descended worldviews (Escobar, 2020) to conclude how these contributions, through their pluriversal engagement with fashion studies and praxes, may be both understood and experienced as different forms of affective passage through these perilous times.