Valérie Lamontagne appointed as professor of Fashion at AUAS

The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) has appointed Canadian Dr. Valérie Lamontagne as professor of the Fashion Research and Technology research group at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI). Lamontagne will start her professorship, affiliated to the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries, this month and will move to the Netherlands this year according to the press announcement sent out on Thursday.

As a wearables designer, curator and researcher, Lamontagne brings a lot of knowledge to the professorship, where various areas of expertise meet. Research and innovation, for example, take place in a multidisciplinary setting, from virtual and industrial design to human movement science and from philosophical to historical contexts. Lamontagne will be focussing on researching creative applications for the use of technologies in fashion, that span interests in new models of manufacturing and fabrication, intelligent textiles, to technologies for the future of retail and marketing.

Fashiontech technologies

In addition, Lamontagne will be engaged in making full use of leveraging emergent technologies to create new platforms for fashion that we wear in the everyday. In the announcement she is quoted as saying she will specifically be looking at fashiontech technologies that can be applied to the current material and social landscapes of fashion use, fabrication and aesthetic.

A great deal of experience

Dr. Lamontagne brings a great deal of experience and international contacts to the AUAS. The designer holds a PhD in ‘Performative Wearables: Bodies, Fashion and Technology’ from Concordia University in Montreal (2017), where she was Adjunct Professor in Design and Computation Arts. Furthermore, Lamontagne is the owner and designer at 3lectromode, a wearables electronics atelier dedicated to avant-garde crafting and consulting in fashionable technologies. She is also the founder and director of the Fashiontech Festival in Montreal.

This is not Lamontagne’s first time in the Netherlands. She regularly travels all over the world to speak on the subject of fashion and technology at conferences and exhibitions, and has visited our country in the past. In this respect, she collaborated with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2014) on the exhibition ‘The Future of Fashion is Now’, and has previously lived in Rotterdam (2011) for a PhD research stay at V2_Institute for the unstable media.

Link between research and education

The AMFI is looking forward to collaborating with Lamontagne. “We are delighted that she will be joining us and we are looking forward to working with her, to connect research and education in an innovative and creative direction”, comments director Irene Sparreboom in the press release.