Research

Exploring identity, digital fashion, and justice through creative and strategic lenses.

Research Overview

My research examines how fashion, identity, and digital technology shape the ways people express themselves and build community. I work across gaming, digital fashion, queer studies, and design management to explore how creative practices open pathways to inclusion, agency, and new cultural and economic systems.

My goal is to understand the futures people are already creating and to imagine the ones we have yet to design.

Featured Projects

Digital Fashion and Extended Identities

This project investigates how digital dress shapes identity, belonging, and embodied experience in virtual environments. Drawing on gaming culture, avatar design, and emerging digital fashion platforms, I analyze how people use clothing to build, protect, or experiment with versions of themselves.

Outcomes and Goals

  • Developing a conceptual framework for extended identity in digital fashion

  • Generating insights that inform design ethics, platform inclusivity, and creator economies

  • Producing scholarship that positions digital fashion as a site of queer possibility and liberation

  • Building interdisciplinary bridges between fashion studies, game studies, and design management

  • Preparing groundwork for future collaborations with digital fashion brands, educators, and technologists

This project supports a broader goal of shaping how institutions teach and understand digital selfhood.

Modding, Glitches, and Queer Possibility in Video Games

This work explores how players use modding, glitches, and fan-generated content to challenge gender norms and expand expressive freedom in games like The Sims 4. I examine how these grassroots practices become tools for identity-making, resistance, and community-building.

Outcomes and Goals

  • Publication in ZoneModa Journal, offering one of the first fashion-focused analyses of gaming mod culture

  • Advancing understanding of queer crafting, player agency, and everyday design activism

  • Introducing new language for scholars studying gender, fashion, and digital environments

  • Informing future curriculum on digital dress, gaming, and queer studies

  • Paving the way for a larger, multi-platform research agenda on queer digital fashion practices

The project underscores the power of users to reshape design systems from the margins outward.

Justice-Centered Fashion Management

This project explores how fashion management can be taught and practiced as a justice-oriented field. Through curriculum design, graduate research mentorship, and program leadership, I investigate how students develop frameworks for addressing inequity, redesigning systems, and building sustainable creative economies.

Outcomes and Goals

  • Building a graduate research ecosystem where student projects lead to real-world social impact

  • Developing pedagogical tools that merge design strategy, justice work, and management practice

  • Informing long-term program strategy in the MPS Fashion Management program

  • Creating replicable models for inclusive decision-making and ethical leadership development

  • Shaping future publications and talks on justice-centered creative education

This work connects academic leadership with research innovation and classroom transformation.

Selected Publications

Drak, D. (under contract). Introducing Fashion Theory (3rd edition). Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Forthcoming 2027.

Drak, D., & Barry, B. (2025). Disability dress in video games: Player modding and fashioning disability worlds in The Sims 4. ZoneModa Journal, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2611-0563/23051

Smith-Glaviana, D., Ridder, A., Drak, D., & Camerlengo, L. L. (2025). 2025 scholars’ roundtable: From Zoom to Lectra: The tools, theories and technologies that move dress forward. Dress, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/03612112.2025.2561450

Drak, D. (2025). Branded education of sustainable fashion in immersive digital spaces: H&M’s “Loooptopia” for roblox. In E. Huggard (Ed.),  From brand marketing to education: Developing informed, responsible and inclusive fashion brand narratives. Routledge.

Drak, D., & Barry, B. (2024). Modding masculinities: Video game hacking and transcending gendered dress. Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, 10(2), 197-215. https://doi.org/10.1386/csmf_00076_1 

Selected Conferences & Talks

The Fashion of Play: Access and Identity Creation Across Gaming Platforms (with Pidzamecky, A.)

Queerness and Games Conference, September 2025

From Zoom to Lectra: The Tools, Theories and Technologies that Move Dress Forward (with Smith-Glaviana, D., Ridder, A., & Camerlengo, L. L.)

CSA Scholars’ Roundtable,
Costume Society of America, June 2025

Reimagining Fashion Management Education: Opportunities and Challenges at the Intersection of Business and Justice

Transformative Fashion Pedagogies 2.0 Conference, May 2024

A Digital Enclothed Cognition: Deconstructing the IRL and Digital Fashioned Identity Binary

ZoneModa International Conference, October 2023

Leveling-Up Access to Education Through Twitch: Democratizing Education Through Gaming Platforms and Theories

Digitally-Engaged Learning (DEL) Conference, September 2022

Driven by futures

My research is driven by possibility. I study how people design themselves, resist constraints, and build communities of care. I aim to contribute frameworks, language, and systems that help fashion and design fields imagine futures that are more inclusive, more expansive, and more aligned with the lives we want to live.