Tanveer Ahmed


After many frustrating years of learning and teaching dominant patriarchal/capitalist/racist and sexist models of fashion design, I began a part-time PhD at The Open University, UK to investigate how to develop ways to teach anti-racist and non-capitalist forms of fashion design.  Inspired by Black and women of colour feminist literature and decolonising education movements, I have drawn on my family histories and positionality as a non-white fashion design educator to offer students an alternative to Eurocentric and neoliberal agendas that dominate fashion design education. My research has devised ways to enable students to question the dominance of European fashion design in their curricula and resources by centring and learning from garments from the global south; drawing on the radical politics of love to question heteronormative values embedded in the classroom mannequin; and creating speculative fashion histories to address absences in the fashion canon. My long-term aspiration is to contribute to fashion design educational paradigms by generating new anti-racist, post-capital agendas in fashion design.

Tanveer Ahmed (she/her) is a final year AHRC funded PhD candidate at The Open University, UK investigating how Eurocentric and racist ideas underpin the design process in fashion design education. Tanveer has been recently appointed as senior lecturer in Fashion and Race as part of a programme wide drive towards implementing anti-racist fashion pedagogies at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London. Tanveer is also a visiting tutor in History of Design at The Royal College of Art in London.