FASHION RESEARCH NETWORK

Fashion Research Network, is an interdisciplinary network for researchers in fashion studies. Through collaboration we facilitate, disseminate and promote conversations which critically examine the nature of fashion studies and the parameters of the field. FRN brings together researchers from multiple subject areas and institutions to critically examine the role of dress in society. Founded a point when the field was both less established and less defined, FRN has played a key part in shaping understanding of fashion studies as a diverse and dynamic field in the UK. We work to facilitate conversations and collaboration between those who research through practice and those who research using traditional methodologies and more broadly between practitioners, curators and the fashion industry.  FRN is built on a model of teamwork and collaboration, working with a diverse range of partners to deliver events. Past partners include FIT, University of Brighton, National Portrait Gallery and ICA. Since 2013 FRN have convened ten symposia, 12 seminars, and numerous reading groups, gallery tours and curator talks- building a vibrant and resilient network of researchers

FRN STEERING COMMITTEE

Nathaniel Dafydd Beard is Senior Lecturer and Course Director of MSc International Fashion Marketing at Coventry University London and a PhD Candidate (Fashion Womenswear), Department of Fashion and Textiles, School of Material, Royal College of Art. His work has been published in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, Address – Journal of Fashion Writing and Criticism, BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice, Sexymachinery, and Arc. In September 2012 he convened Fashioning the City: Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems, the RCA’s first full-scale international, inter-disciplinary conference on fashion.  www.fashioningthecity.wordpress.com

Bethan Bide is a lecturer in Design and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. She is a fashion historian specialising in 20th century ready-to-wear, and is interested in themes of everyday fashion, fashion cities, sartorial biography and fashion in museums. In 2017, Bethan was awarded her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, for her thesis entitled ‘Austerity fashion: rebuilding London fashion after the Second World War’. She also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the London College of Fashion, and previously worked as a production coordinator and producer of radio comedy programmes.

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is an Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at Chelsea College of Arts and London College of Fashion. Her research interests include fashion and/as prostheses, representations of ‘deviant’ bodies in lifestyle media, affect and the work of fashion intermediaries. Her writing has appeared in Fashion Theory, The Business of Fashion,  SHOWstudio, Style Zeitgeist, Vogue, GQ and a number of consumer publications and artist books. She was a co-founder of the conference Fashion // Intersections: Bodies, Cultures, Spaces, held at London College of Fashion. Before moving into academia, she had a 15-year career in the fashion industry where she worked as a fashion editor, buyer and strategic consultant. She is currently completing her PhD at King’s College London.

Alexis Romano is a New York based writer, editor and curator within the fields of fashion and visual culture. Her work explores 20th-century fashion, photography, women’s history, and everyday, subjective aspects of dress. She teaches fashion studies and research methods at Parsons, The New School for Design, and is US Editor of WeAr Global Magazine. She earned a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and also has degrees from the Bard Graduate Center and Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. She is the author of Pret-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-1968 (Bloomsbury, 2022). She was the 2020-21 Curatorial Fellow in The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.alexisromanoprojects.com

Ellen Sampson an artist, curator and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between bodies, memory and objects, both in museums and archives, and in everyday life. Using film, photography, performance and writing she interrogates the ways that things become records of lived experience. Ellen is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in Design at Northumbria University and was previously Professorial Fellow at University of the Creative Arts, London and 2018-19 Polaire Weismann Fellow at The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has a PhD from Royal College of Art, London. Her book Worn: Footwear, Attachment and Affect was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. www.ellensampson.com

Lucia Savi is the curator of Bags: Inside Out exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is a curator and fashion historian specialising in twentieth-century textiles, fashion and design with a focus on Italy. In 2019, Lucia was awarded her PhD from Kingston University, London with her thesis entitled: ‘The Relationship between Italy’s Textile and Fashion Production, 1945-1985’. She has more than 10 years’ experience in curating, publishing and lecturing. Previously she worked as Research Assistant on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibitions Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (2015/2016), The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 (2014) and at the Courtauld Gallery on the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshop 1913-19 (2009).