‘It all started with us being fed up of hearing Marshall McLuhan's name once too often in our Visual Communication MA at the Royal College of Art. We wish we could have kept a tally of how many times his name came up.’1 This is how our book Not a Reference Yet starts. In this text we are going back to the beginning of our venture and what got us started. Simply put, we noticed a missing gap in the references we were looking for. Digging a little deeper, we started to see the mechanisms in place that stop a reference from being found or even to exist in the first place. We are both graphic designers and, in this research, we focus on our own industry, however, this problem seems to be fairly universal and applies to many industries – especially those in which representation plays a big role.

Although reading lists are an important part of curricula and play an essential role in decolonizing education, the work to diversify them can often neglect intersectional approaches that consider both racialized and gendered dimensions of knowledge construction. The consequence can be an additive approach in which black authors and authors of colour are included to diversify reading lists, reproducing racist and sexist biases. This paper examines how reading lists are constructed in curricula and presents an alternative decolonial feminist approach to creating a reading list in fashion design. The value of decolonial feminism lies in addressing the gaps in thinking by using a racialized and gendered framework. The Decolonizing the Curriculum Toolkit project at Westminster University, UK is introduced to which the author contributed a Decolonising Fashion Design Reading List, as an example of counter-hegemonic curricula which aimed to reveal the unequal power dynamics that support colonial logics in fashion design education. Exposing hegemonic distinctions in fashion that represent Western fashion as modern and non-Western fashion as traditional can then allow marginalized and excluded fashion narratives to become centred. Such an approach can then provide a key tool towards building a more pluralised and de-hierarchised set of fashion design resources.

My artistic practice has always drawn heavily from archival research and has used strategies of reproduction to underscore the archive as a living object. By disrupting the perceived fixity of the archive and recovering its heterogeneity my work reveals hierarchies of power that play out across class, gender, sexuality, caste, race, and geography.

This paper explores the dimensions of visual history in the digital age. Do digital repositories offer newer paradigms in art historical research? At the most elementary level, it can be easily said that digital tools do allow for closer scrutiny and analysis of art objects with respect to its material composition. A deeper question that needs to be explored is whether the digital age allows for newer theoretical approaches to doing art history. As inventories, museums, art galleries and libraries have been digitizing their collections, there has been a definite shift in the ways of seeing art objects due to the comfort and ease of digital devices. Given the fact that artifacts have a historical process of conceptualization, production, circulation and reception, historical art objects can be seen as a unique entry point into the larger global history of circulation of art works right from the time of their initial production to their later reproduction in print and finally to the times of digitization.