During a "Culture Club" radio emission, hosted by the ModeMuseum Hasselt, Karen Van Godtsenhoven talked about the research behind the exhibition, together with curator Eve Demoen.

At the workshop  "New Work in Queer and Faminist Fashion Studies" at University of Amsterdam on June 5, 2026, convened by prof. Ilya Parkins, Karen Van Godtsenhoven presented a research paper on opacity as a feminist strategy in the oeuvre of Rei Kawakubo.

Abstract: Rei Kawakubo’s oeuvre and self-presentation are characterized by different forms of opacity, 
with regards to race, form and gender. These elements will be contextualized through the 
lens of feminist and decolonial thinkers such as Édouard Glissant (For Opacity), Gayatri 
Spivak (The Subaltern cannot speak), Dorinne Kondo (About Face) and Anne Anlin Cheng 
(Ornamentalism). Presenting herself as an enigma, Kawakubo is known for her refusal to 
explain herself to the press. Near-invisible and deliberately mute, she performs an 
inscrutability which could be viewed as strategic silence, indicating both a resistance to 
Orientalist tropes as well as a questioning of who gets the right to speak in Eurocentric 
cultures. Secondly, her strategic opacity manifests in the material poetics of her work, 
especially in the ‘third’ phase of her career, from 2014, the year she published a manifesto 
of ‘not wanting to make clothes’, up until 2025. Throughout this decade, there is a dialectic 
between abstraction versus figuration, as well as a dialectic between silence and more 
outspoken affective engagements with the world. 
Thirdly, the right to opacity in Kawakubo's work is manifested by her refusal to conform to 
gendered dress codes by either negating, or inflating them. Using body-concealing shapes, 
as well as exaggerated "feminine" decorative elements, Kawakubo obscures all gendered 
"reality". With Cheng, we can read this as resisting “ornamentalism,” describing the way in 
which Asian women were discursively constituted through inanimate and decorative objects.

At the 2025 workshop "New Work in Queer and Feminist Fashion Studies", convened by Prof. Ilya Parkins at UBC Okanagan, Karen Van Godtsenhoven presented a preliminary literature review and working paper on the work of Rei Kawakubo and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

In het kader van de studiedag "De Kleren van de Keizer: Mode en Psychanalyse" , georganiseerd door de Stichting Psychanalyse en Cultuur in De Studio Antwerpen op 30 november 2024, presenteerde Karen Van Godtsenhoven haar research ivm Sonia Rykiel aan een breed publiek. Er verscheen ook een publicatie hierover, uitgegeven door Garant, redactie door Trees Traversier en Wouter Hessels.

A research paper "‘Une façon de vivre l'époque": A relational reading of mood, selfhood and feminist world-making in the work of Sonia Rykiel” presented by Karen Van Godtsenhoven at the workshop New Work in Feminist and Queer Fashion Studies', at Ghent University (Belgium) on 7-8 June 2023. This workshop offered a collaborative, generous space for sharing new work and to connect with other researchers approaching fashion from a feminist and/or queer theoretical position.

Hosting co-PI Ilya Parkins during her research stay in Ghent as part of the FWO project.

Co-PI Prof. Ilya Parkins came for a research stay at Ghent University from May 11-30, 2025, during which she hosted the workshop "Emotional Labour in Fashion and the Arts, on May 23, 2025, at the Art History, Musicology and Theatre Sciences department at Ghent University. 

Hosting co-PI Ilya Parkins during a research stay in Ghent as part of the FWO project

Ned Kahn Auditorium, Zebrastraat, Zebrastraat 32, 9000 Gent

13u Welcome.

13:00-13:15: Introduction by Karen Van Godtsenhoven (UGent) and Eve Demoen (Modemuseum Hasselt)

13:20-13:40: Francesca Granata (Parsons - The New School), "Fashioning the Pregnant Body: Gynophobia and Experimental Fashion from the 1980s Onwards"

13:40-14:00: Lydia Kamitsis (independent curator), "Madeleine Vionnet: Matrix"

14:00-14:15: Karen Van Godtsenhoven (Universiteit Gent, "Mother-daughter transmission in fashion creation: Sonia and Nathalie Rykiel"

14:15-14:30: Eve Demoen (Modemuseum Hasselt), "Mother as Muse"

Break

15:15-15:35: Pauline Devriese (Modemuseum Hasselt) and Tirza Westland (Kunstmuseum Den Haag), "Unexpected: Developing Object-Based Methods for Tracing Historical Pregnancy Dresses in Museum Collections"

15:35-16:00: Roundtable on Non-Normative Bodies in Museum Exhibitions: Pauline Devriese, Tirza Westland, Wim Mertens(MoMu Antwerpen), Caroline Esgain (Brussels Fashion and Lace Museum).

16:00-16:30: MSc Zelda (Fitzgerald) Dapaah, representing the Xclusive House of Lanvin FOR ALL QUEENS!, "The multifunctionality of Fabulosity: The case of the African Mother"

16:30. Conclusion by Karolien De Clippel (Modemuseum Hasselt)

16:40-17:15: Book launch M&Others. Fashion and Motherhoodin collaboration with Lannoo Publishers and signing in the presence of the authors.

New Work in Feminist and Queer Fashion Studies', at Ghent University (Belgium) on 7-8 June 2023. This workshop offered a collaborative, generous space for sharing new work and to connect with other researchers approaching fashion from a feminist and/or queer theoretical position.

Maude Bass-Krueger, Ilya Parkins, Karen Van Godtsenhoven, "Introduction: New Work in Feminist and Queer Fashion Studies"

Tamara Poblete, “Activismo de género on the Streets of Latin America: Political Resignification of Dress as a Tool of Protest in Feminist Uprisings from 2015 to 2019”

Roberto Filippello, “What’s Queer About Fashion Studies Now? Notes from the West Bank”

Karen Van Godtsenhoven, “‘Une façon de vivre l'époque": A relational reading of mood, selfhood and feminist world-making in the work of Sonia Rykiel”

Sarah Banon, “Fashion vs Feminism: Preliminaries to their Reconciliation”

Krys Osei, “Nikko Blue Hydrangea and Lumière Gladiolus: Collaging Floral Portraits and Twirling Between Cultures in Accra, London and Washington, D.C.”

Isabel Mundigo-Moore, “A Methodology of Tenderness”

Tanveer Ahmed, “I’m a Hijabi, get me Out of Here! Fashion Education and Islamophobia”

Ilya Parkins, “Dress and Emotion Work: Queer Feminist Theorizations”

Floriane Misslin, “Negotiating gender and sexuality in editorial photography: diagramming the experiences of LGBTQIA+ fashion producers”

Nicola Brajato, “Dressing Biopolitics: Notes on Bodies, Sartorial Subjection and Masculinities”

Rosie Findlay, “Editing as Feminist Praxis: Chatting About Dressays”

New Work in Feminist and Queer Fashion Studies', at  University of Amsterdam, June 5, 2026. This was the third international workshop organised as part of the project, offering a collaborative, generous space for sharing new work and to connect with other researchers approaching fashion from a feminist and/or queer theoretical position. It was convened by prof. Ilya Parkins, together with Roberto Filipello and Natalya Lusty.

Varieties of (In)Visibility in Trans Fashion:
Diego Semerene (University of Amsterdam), “Travesti Glamour is Not a Reparative
Metaphor”
Miyuki Shiraki (University of British Columbia), “Trans Material Labour and
Inconspicuous Fashion: Cutting-Together-Apart Practices of Packing”

Theorizing Immaterial Labour:
Edward Salazar Celis (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Unfixing the Archive: Latinx
and Latin American Fashion and the Politics of Creative Labour”
Ilya Parkins (University of British Columbia), “Sartorial Emotion Work and Social
Reproduction”

Fashion as Feminist Intervention 
Karen Van Godtsenhoven (Ghent University), “Opacity as Decolonial Feminist Strategy:
Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garçons”
Tamara Poblete (University of Amsterdam), “Guerrilla Marika: Dress, Enjoyment and
Subversion”

The Queer 1930s
Louise Wallenberg (Stockholm University), “Fashionable Fairies on Film: Alternative Male 
Ideals on the Swedish 1930s Screen”
Natalya Lusty (University of Melbourne), “Schiaparelli and the Readymade: Queering
Capitalist Form."

This was the second workshop in our ongoing FWO project: New Work in Feminist and Queer Fashion Studies. The workshop was held at University of British Columbia, Okanagan and online

Karen Van Godtsenhoven, “Rei Kawakubo: Feminist Postcolonial Fashion?”

Elizabeth M. (Lily) Sheehan, “Ordinary Complaints: Fashion, the Whisper Network, and the Open Secret of Sexual Violence”

Francesca Granata, “Greer Lankton: Doll-Making as Queer World-Making”

Elspeth Brown, “Louise Lawrence, Trans Femininity, and Sexuality 1950s-1960s”

Sunny Xiang, “Child’s Play”

Philippa Nesbitt, “Modeling and Non-Normative Embodiment”

Roberto Filippello, “Redressing the Homeland: Feminist Textility in Palestinian Diasporic Art”

Rosie Findlay, “Editing as Feminist Praxis: Chatting about Dressays (Again)”

Justine Woods, “Re-stitching Indigenous Sovereignty Through Indigenous Fashion Technologies”

Valeriia Pelevina, “Exploring the Feelings of Wearing Vintage Clothing”

Hazel Zaman, “Trans Embodiments of Feral Desires Through Furry Art and Aesthetics”

Rebecca Halliday, “Secondhand as Queer Fashion Space: A study of Canadian Secondhand Sellers on Social media”

Workshop “Emotional Labour in Fashion and the Arts” — 23 May, 12:00 –15:00, Ghent University, Art History seminar room

Workshop on emotional labour in fashion and the arts led by Prof. dr. Ilya Parkins, with contributions by Dr. Apolline Malevez and Dr. Annelies Van Assche.