Chaired by Rebecca Carrai (KU Leuven) under the title “The Global Architecture of Fashion,” the DHS Affiliated Society panel at the 115th CAA Annual Conference will take place in New York, February 3-6, 2027.
Fashion is a driving force of our Capitalocene. It is one of the most polluting sectors of today’s global economy, generating substantial waste annually. Operating on a business model that merges creativity with practices of extraction, fast renewal, and disposal, fashion has long fascinated philosophers as well as scholars in geography, business studies, media, art, design, and cultural history. Building on and seeking to advance existing scholarship, this session proposes to tie the analysis of fashion more closely to spatial studies. The call asks: what are the landscapes produced by fashion? Which building typologies, interiors, or other forms of spatiality-virtual, ephemeral etc.-emerge thanks to and serve to sustain this industry?
Framing fashion in spatial terms reveals how such a phenomenon is contingent on, and intrinsic to, multiple spaces, more or less deliberately designed, yet all sustaining diverse fashion operations. Fashion manifests in central locations through brand museums and flagship store interiors. Peripherally, it shapes the industrial territories of warehouses, factories and more. Spatial analysis can problematize fashion’s ubiquitous presence and map the diverse facets of this “global architecture of fashion.”
Merging architectural historians with design historians, art historians, and other voices, this interdisciplinary session invites critical spatial perspectives from any geo-cultural context, preferably rooted in the second half of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. Studies of interest might examine fashion spaces belonging to the supply chain, including issues of labor, coloniality and extractive practices; as well as emerging urban typologies such as fashion museum architectures.
Submit an abstract via the CAA website by 31st August, 2026:
https://caa.confex.com/caa/2027/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html