Publishing in the margins of fashion, with Laura Gardner, K8 Hardy and Jeppe Ugelvig | October 1, 2026 6:30–8 PM

Marginal Fashion Publishing
Tactics, Practices, Market Forces

Surveying the dynamic and collaborative activity of marginal fashion publishers of the 1990s onwards for the first time, Laura Gardner explores artistic and critical publishing at the fringes of the commercial system and their impact on the discourse and practice of fashion.

Putting these marginal practices at the centre of a discussion on fashion media, she explores their techniques, including makeshift production, parasitic economies, mirror forms, quasi-archives, pseudonymic writing, immaterial and fictional garments.

With a focus on artists' publishing and discourse on publishing in other creative fields, these projects and their radical approaches to production, content and dissemination, are examined in depth. Drawing on interviews and reproductions, this book puts forward fashion's history and active practice of experimental, performative and counter-cultural publishing, making the case that these projects - despite restrictions of scale, funding and geography - can critique, experiment with, and altogether reimagine the fashion system.

K8 Hardy is an artist who works disrespectfully of craft in mediums including photography, performance, sculpture and video. Her work interrogates conventional standards of taste, the construction of identity, and the politics of image-making. Hardy’s work is in the collection of the Guggenheim, Whitney, and MoMA.

Jeppe Ugelvig is a curator, historian, and critic based in New York City. As a curator, Jeppe has organized more than a dozen exhibitions in institutions and museums around the world. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Viscose, a journal for fashion criticism and analysis. Viscose has partnered with art institutions globally in pursuit of fashion research, including X Museum in Beijing and Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City.

Laura Gardner is an editor, lecturer and co-publisher of Mode and Mode. She holds a PhD from RMIT University, and her research and projects focus on the methodologies of experimental fashion publishing in proximity to other creative fields. She is author of the book Marginal Fashion Publishing: Tactics, Practice, Market Forces (Bloomsbury, 2026) and co-editor of Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods (Valiz, 2024). Formerly online editor for the journal Vestoj, and guest editor for Viscose issue 6, Laura also works as a freelance writer and editor for fashion, art and design publications.