Event
Designing Together COVERSLUT©
Workshop facilitated by Rachel Siobhán Tyler
Thursday 30 October 2025
Workshop facilitated by Rachel Siobhán Tyler hosted by V&A Dundee.
This workshop takes inspiration from COVERSLUT©, Ndiritu’s fashion brand founded in 2016. COVERSLUT© integrates capitalist, Pay What You Can (PWYC) and environmental/ethical strategies into its economic framework, and is focused on dealing with issues of race, gender, and class politics. The workshop will collaboratively consider how ethos central to COVERSLUT© can help us envision new ways of designing together—and will ask: “who has the right to be fashionable?”
The workshop opens with an introduction to COVERSLUT© and the brand’s anti-sweatshop stance – including decolonial and equitable practices of fair wages, new economic models (like PWYC), and critical and environmental practices—such as low-impact textile processes, and post-consumer re-use. We will then discuss how stories of gender, labour, and class saturate our own clothes. We will conclude with a design workshop looking at how existing garments can be literally, and metaphorically, ‘re-used’ to create new ways of designing and thinking about fashion together.
This event is part of A Season of Peace Building, programmed with Grace Ndiritu for The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in Curriculum #5 and held in collaboration with V&A Dundee. This series of conversations, workshops and gatherings is designed by Grace Ndiritu, drawing on her book Being Together: A Manual For Living as a template.
Participant info
- You are invited to bring along a favourite (or least favourite!) garment to share and explore in the workshop
- We will have papers and pens and other mark-making materials available.
Sign-up
Book a place through V&A Dundee
Biography
Rachel Siobhán Tyler is a transdisciplinary artist, design historian, and educator, working at the intersection of art, architecture, fashion, and geography, collaborating with artists, designers, and makers. Their practice draws on a design background, and focuses on developing innovative approaches to feminist, queer, and inclusive knowledge-making. Rachel is a lecturer at Falmouth University and is part of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. Rachel’s work has been exhibited at Building Centre, London; Folkestone Triennale, Folkestone; The Bartlett School of Architecture, London; and at Somerset House, London; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, and on-schedule during London Fashion Week as a part of New Power Studio.
About the exhibition
Compassionate Rebels in Action, is an exhibition and event programme by Grace Ndiritu.
It is the fifth iteration of Cooper Gallery's programme, The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation.
Visit
10 October – 13 December 2025
Tuesday – Saturday, 12–5pm
Image credit
Design Together workshops at Manoeuvre Minus One, Ghent, 2018-19. Photo by Grace Ndiritu.
Funding support
The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #5 at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Partnership
This event is a collaboration in partnership with V&A Dundee.
Cooper Gallery
[email protected]