Biography
Professor Hiroshi Narumi specialises in the sociology of fashion, media, and popular culture. Since 2014, he has been a professor in the Department of Apparel and Space Design at Kyoto Women’s University, where he teaches Fashion Studies, Sociology of Fashion, Fashion History, and Fashion Branding. His research interests include 20th-century fashion, fashion and youth culture in urban environments, Japanese fashion in the post-war era, fashion practitioners as cultural workers, and Japanese sustainable fashion.
He previously served as an associate professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design from 2000 to 2013 and worked as an editor at PARCO Publishing from 1989 to 1996. Author of Cultural History of 20th Century Fashion (2007), he edited The History of Fashion 1850-2020 (2024). He has written and edited several books on Japanese street fashion, subcultural styles, and fashion design, including Doing Sociology in Fashion and Feel and Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion. In addition to his work on the slow fashion movement in Japan, his research has been published in journals such as Fashion Theory and Postcolonial Studies.
More about the visit
During his tenure as a visiting scholar, he will research the history and current state of British fashion, with a particular focus on creativity and sustainability in fashion education. He plans to study fashion programs at universities across the UK to assess how sustainability is incorporated into their curricula, with the aim of evaluating the potential impact of sustainability on the future of fashion.
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2025, Japanese Fashion on Film, Film as Fabric, with Rachal Bradley et al., Roundtable discussion. London: London Metropolitan University, 25th February.
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2025, Defining Japanese Fashion: From Meisen Kimono to Issey Miyake, talk event. London: The Swedenborg Society, 17th February.
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2024, The Birth of Fashion: Trends, Aesthetics, and Edo Kimono with Narumi Hiroshi, talk event. London: Japan Foundation, 4th July.
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2024, Entangled Threads: Revisiting the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group, Discussant. London: Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), 10th April.