Lara Torres

I am a Senior Lecturer at the Fashion and Textiles Department at the University of Portsmouth. After graduating in Fashion Design in 2004, I worked as a fashion designer for the Portuguese Fashion and Textiles industry. My graduate collection won the ‘New Blood [Sangue Novo]’ Award in 2003 at the Lisbon Fashion Week, which sponsored an international internship at the Alexander McQueen Studio in London. Upon returning to Portugal, I gained international press and publicity at the Lisbon Fashion Week [published in Elle, Vogue, Wallpaper]. I managed my independent brand ‘Lara Torres’ between 2005 – 2011, producing small experimental fashion collections sold in Japan, Germany, and Portugal.

In 2011, I graduated MA in Fashion Artefact from the London College of Fashion with a practice-based project exploring a fashion film titled ‘An Impossible Wardrobe for the Invisible’. This film project has been featured in many international exhibitions.

In 2019, I was awarded my PhD from the London College of Fashion entitled Towards a Practice of Unmaking: The Essay Film as a Critical Discourse for Fashion in the Expanded Field. The Unmaking project was shown internationally, at the ’State of Fashion' Biennale in Arnhem in 2018 and the Transfashional project, curated by Dobrila Denegri (2016 - 2020) with exhibitions in Museums and galleries across London, Warsaw, Vienna, Kalmar, and Rimini.

Since 2016, I have been teaching at the University of Portsmouth in the Fashion and Textiles Department. I am also a pathway leader for the MA Fashion Artefact [Low residency] and Senior Lecturer in Fashion Artefact at the London College of Fashion, University of Arts London since 2022.

I am the Research and Innovation Group Lead for Fashion, Textiles and Material Futures at the University of Portsmouth. I have acted as an external adviser for doctoral students at the University of Portsmouth and an External Examiner for the MA in Fashion Design at Northumbria University.