AMFI director José Teunissen to teach fashion design and identity course

Dutch educator José Teunissen and programme director at Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI), has been named special educator for the fashion programme in fashion design and identity at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA for short), as per a press release shared by HvA.

In the new course, Teunissen will look at fashion as a cultural phenomenon and explore how to make the fashion world more inclusive and the decolonisation of the industry, two topics that are being discussed more and more nowadays.

She previously worked as a fashion educator and researcher at the University of the Arts London (UAL) where she was dean of the School of Design and Technology at the university’s London College of Fashion before being named AMFI programme director in December 2022.

Teunissen officially started as director in March and has assumed her role as educator in fashion design and identity at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as of May 1, the release reads.

The educator believes the industry should take a different approach to fashion and reflect more on its environmental, social and cultural impact. In her new role, she will therefore research how digitalisation, the internet, and globalisation are changing fashion and its core values.

AMFI director and researcher to teach ‘fashion design and identity’

To this end, she will specifically look into the decolonisation and de-westernisation of the fashion industry on the one hand, and innovation for the purpose of sustainability through digitalisation on the other.

Commenting on her new role, Teunissen said in a statement: "We mostly use the term fashion for clothing styles from the West, while cultures from India or South America can be just as interesting.”

“Those styles are often classified as 'costume or costume', and can be found in ethnography museums,” she continued. Within fashion research, there is currently a lot of discussion about that whole classification."

As educator in fashion design and identity, Teunissen, who is also known for her work as a museum curator in the Netherlands, and has a long trajectory in fashion education and research, will become part of the lectorate ‘fashion research and technology’ at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

The research group will be led by educator Troy Nachtigall.