Jonathan Faiers

Jonathan Faiers is Professor of Fashion Thinking at Winchester School of Art, teaching across a number of arts and design courses on the history of dress and textiles, and fashion as material culture. Jonathan’s early training as a fashion and theatre designer and his subsequent career as a visual artist have been fundamental to his interdisciplinary approach to teaching, writing and curation.

Jonathan’s research examines the interface between popular culture, textiles and dress. His critically acclaimed work Tartan (Berg and V&A, 2008) interrogated the myth of clanship and established tartan as a ‘textile transporter’, a cloth of opposition whose troubled history has made it uniquely capable of expressing both subversion and conformity, innovation and tradition; a concept which Jonathan has lectured and spoken about widely on television and radio.

A revised paperback edition of Tartan including a new chapter exploring tartan and masculinity was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Jonathan was invited to be consultant curator for a major new exhibition on tartan based on his book (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/tartan-9781350193772/) for V&A Dundee which will open in April 2023.