The Global Tropics: Fashion and Southeast Asia Conference explores how tropical geographies shape, disrupt and inspire global fashion systems. This interdisciplinary gathering repositions the tropics—from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, from Africa to Latin America and the Pacific, as generative, intellectual and aesthetic forces.
We challenge colonial perceptions of the tropics as passive or peripheral by de-centering its ecologies, textures, temporalities and political imaginations.
The Equatorial Fashion Lab is an inclusive international research space that advances fashion practice and theory from Southeast Asia in connection to the world. It aims to create a site for fashion theorists, researchers and practitioners to conduct research rooted in the region’s lived realities. Through this work, the Lab will cultivate meaningful exchange across Southeast Asia, the wider tropical belt and the global fashion community. In doing so, it aims to nurture ecosystems that allow critical, sustained and situated fashion research to flourish.
The inaugural Global Tropics conference marks our first gathering of practitioners and theorists, creating a space to meet and engage in meaningful dialogue shaped by the region’s perspectives. Looking ahead, we will extend this work through special issues with leading fashion journals and by convening conferences that deepen both the conversations and community forming around the equator.
