Research Field: Fashion and Decoloniality
- Current projects:
- - Black Yarns: A Decolonial Research into the History of Black Women’s Fashion & Jewellery Design Practices (PhD candidate)
- - Part of the FWO research group on transmission of crafts: Crafting Futures (link)
Pierre-Antoine Vettorello has an MA in fashion design from the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and an MA in artistic research from Sint Lucas School of Arts (Antwerp). He is a PhD research fellow at ARIA (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts) combining University of Antwerp and Sint Lucas School of Arts.
He focuses on re-editing legacies of black women's designs in a context of French-Senegalese textile and fashion in a colonial/postcolonial periods between 1939 and 1966. He is researching fashion epistemology and ways to reproduce historical archives of fashion and jewelry. Vettorello's work is at the intersection of decoloniality, fashion museology, and critical and speculative design. He looks into how crucial it is to break out from Eurocentrism, which not only produces dogmas and hierarchies in fashion design but also in the means of production in the Anthropocene.
In addition to lecturing at Sint Lucas Antwerpen, the fashion department of Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Dakar Design Hub in Popenguine, Senegal, Vettorello has been collaborating with the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF). He also teaches fashion at the Instituto Marangoni in Paris and the Oxbridge Academic Programs.
Articles in publications:
- Vettorello, P-A. (ed.) 2023, The Yarn: On Colonial Violence in Fashion Schools, Black Yarns Publishing, Antwerp, ISBN 978-2-9603419-0-4 (link)
- Vettorello, P-A. (2023) ‘Decolonial Methods for Artists and Researchers from the Diasporas. Damien Ajavon: Archiving the Invisible | Méthodes Décoloniales Pour Artistes et Chercheurs des Diasporas. Damien Ajavon : Archiver L’Invisible’, Decoloniality & Fashion RCDF e-zine, (2), pp. 74-77. (link)
- Vettorello, P-A & Okemwa, N. (2022) The Curation of African Textiles in Belgian Fashion Museums from a Diasporic Viewpoint, TYPP#8 Blind Spot. Antwerp: Yellow Press, pp. I-XVI.
- Vettorello, P-A (2021) A conversation with Diana Bamimeke and Rima Hamid (Black Pride Ireland), Advanced Master of Research in Art and Design, special issue of TYPP. Antwerp: Yellow Press, pp. 35-42.