Otto von Busch
Associate Professor of Integrated Design
Email
vonbusco@newschool.edu
Office Location
L - 2 West 13th Street
Download vCard
Profile
Dr. Otto von Busch is associate professor of Integrated Design, School of Design Strategies. In his research he explores the emergence of a new hacktivist designer role in fashion, cultivating "fashion-abilities" amongst users. In his research he explores how the fashion designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations, anxiety and fear, into a collective experience of empowerment and liberation. In such practice, fashion is reverse engineered, hacked and shared among many participants as a form of civic engagement, or "fashion-ability," a skill rather than product.
If fashion is to be more sustainable we need to ask more profound questions and radically reformulate the formats and protocols of fashion consumerism. The challenge is to make fashion part of a deeper and more meaningful sense of freedom, aliveness and togetherness. Von Busch's perspective on fashion is based in its emotional grounding in the body, that fashion is something we feel more than follow. This gives a radically different approach to sustainability, as it shifts the locus and agency of fashion to the user, rather than the dictates of influencers or the fashion industry. By putting the emotional grounding of fashion in focus, designers can modulate the experience of fashion amongst users, rather than the promotion of trends and number of units sold. This opens a shift in fashion practice, from craft and mass-production towards experiences of biosocial growth and a sense of aesthetic agency.
To articulate this perspective on fashion, von Busch has over the last decade examined alternative perspectives on fashion, varying from Buddhism and occulture, mysticism and tantrism, witchcraft and glamour magick, psychology and biosocial energy, to articulate creative while profound ways to address agency and empowerment through fashion practice.
His latest publications include The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion (Bloomsbury 2020), The Dharma of Fashion: A Buddhist Approach to Our Life with Clothes (Schiffer 2020), Silhouettes of the Soul: Meditations on Fashion, Religion, and Subjectivity (co-edited with Jeanine Viau, Bloomsbury 2022), and Making Trouble: Design and Material Activim (Bloomsbury 2022).
At Parsons, he is one of the founders of the Fashion Praxis Collective.
Much of his research can be found at selfpassage.info
Von Busch is also contributing editor for a seminar on Fashion, Emotion and Self at Public Seminar.