Imagining and Imaging Future Fashion

Critical Fashion Studies Conference, University of Melbourne, 2020

What are the value propositions in the context of techno-aesthetics and immediate downloads? This digital ethnography analysis focuses on the use of technology to construct alternative fashion creation and consumption processes. It reviews new virtual fashion narratives ranging from waste-reducing virtual fashion to the creation of virtual archives, as well as new and inclusive virtual dialogues. While technological developments in the fashion domain have been largely driven by the priorities of international conglomerates, focused on commercial production and distribution logistics, this research reviews the use of technology to create alternative ways of designing, thinking, making, and wearing fashion, namely in virtual spaces. It aims to broaden the debate on new virtual narratives in fashion design practice, the need for integration of digital skills in fashion education, and the increasing shift towards digital fashion communication as “being fashion. Co-authored with Alexia Mathieu, Head of Master Media Design at HEAD – Genève

Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies, 2017

In the domain of research and practice in fashion design, emerging questions have been raised concerning the extent of clothing related to the body, and its physical and psychological competences regarding the user. New projectual paradigms are set, highlighting transmutation and interaction variables in a both physical and immaterial dimension. If fashion has proven to enjoy cross-contaminations with other forms of art, technology entails new advances for its contextualization and materialization. In the faded border between design and art, experimentation can bring a development for both, because the protection of the body is simultaneously the design of the mind: clothing is thought. In this analysis, the contemplation moment is a combination of synchronic circumstances of co-experience which are, at the same time, technological, individual and cognitive, with a sociological character. Ultimately, they underline an impregnated intelligence in the textile material, holder of significations of human character.

Digital Media, 2024

New paradigms of digital consumption and production have been affecting the fashion industry for several years. Within this complex current various fashion brands have experimented with forays into the world of gaming. An interesting case in point is Animal Crossing, a life simulator where users act in a media context with personalized avatars. A relevant phenomenon, given the ability to customize avatars, is the production by users of customized “outfits”. Methodologically a netnographic type of investigation was chosen. A visual ethnography will aim to find recurrences/dissonances with respect to mainstream fashion imagery.

Digital Bodies, 2017

Super technology is going to ask for super tactility' (Lidewii Edelkoort). Exploring this statement, this chapter reflects on the disconnection between digital fashion tools that lack sensory feedback and the critical role of designers' embodied experience for their practice. In order to support this discussion, additional literature is brought in, which shows that in dance bodily engagement is crucial for supporting and enhancing the creative process. This is done to explore aspects of mediation and embodiment further, and to propose a research agenda for the investigation of textile experience.

Marcuss, Aaron (Ed.); Design, User Experience, and Usability - Design Philosophy, Methods, and Tools. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg 2013. Pp. 48-57., 2013

""Abstract. Imagining the future, we create sci-fi predictions visualized through telematic imagery, involving stage sets and costumes. Looking back at sci-fi’s imagination we find it depicts the ideologies of the period in history when it was created far more accurately than it manages to predict future materials or functions. This article focuses on the body, but goes beyond the traditional perspectives of fashion, to consider wearables as an interface between the body and the world. Two key concepts will be presented in order to interpret future fashion, they are: ‘fungibility’ and ‘empathy’, which will be discussed through examples of clothing as a means for expressing data. User interfaces of the future will acknowledge the relationship between people, places and things as emergent spaces that generate meaning through everyday activity and therefore ones in which users themselves act as co-designers. Keywords: Wearables, Fungibility, Empathy, Blinklifier, Snoothood Surreal, Snoothood Chinoiserie, Blinklifier, Reverse Predictive Practices, Sleep Disorders, Snoring, Humanistic Computing, Technogenesis, Interface Aesthetics, Interface Culture ""

Nauka televideniâ, 2022

The paper analyzes the concept of digital corporeality and identity and their representation in virtual images of digital fashion. Digital fashion is a new field of fashion that develops in the interdisciplinary space made of information technology, gaming industry and digital art. The article assumes that the digital fashion body depends neither on the human nor the human body. The digital body is non-human and it explicitly represents a posthumanist corporeality as a cyborg formation (D. Haraway). It assembles through machinery and becomes randomly fixed assemblages (G. Deleuze, F. Guattari; M. Delande). The author draws on concepts of new materialism, including the concept of the plane of immanence by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari's, J. Bennett's vibrant matter and K. Barad's agential realism. New materialism shows radical change of the digital corporeality discourse. The author analyzes digital fashion projects posted on digital fashion retail platforms, such as The Fabricant, Dematerialised, DressX, Artisant, and works of digital designers who have gained fame through participation in digital shows.

Procedia Manufacturing , 2015

This study is part of the surveys conducted in the doctoral research about the methodological tools of fashion design, which focuses in the techniques and methods for the elaboration of visual support of the semantic aspects of clothing products in the educational context. In assessing the design process in this field, it was analyzed the interaction system between the fashion clothing product and its users. An exploratory research was conducted, including literature review and documentary analysis, through which we identified the main requirements of interaction between product and user. The criteria identified as essential for examining the body-artifact-environmental system are distributed in projective parameters of physical adaptation, expression and representation. For these reasons, this article aims to relate concepts drawn from theories of human factors, hedonomics, communication and emotional design, to demonstrate then that fashion clothing is a dynamic and interactive space that mediates the relationship with the environment. Therefore, this text addresses clothing as an amplified interactive space, envisioning exchanges that perform with the body, the surrounding space (physical and cultural) and time. By associating the literature and the documentary analysis of academic practices, it was possible to highlight the key indicators to understand the attributes that guide the development of wearable interfaces. Among these attributes, the communicative potential receives greater emphasis, as these artifacts are converted into individual vehicles of expression and collective identification, becoming instruments of symbolic constructions and mobile records of the space-time relations incorporated in the material culture. The results reinforces the hypothesis of a methodological approach to fashion design in which the visual thinking and systemic reasoning is valued, in order to integrate the socio-cultural codes to the usability requirements of the products, allowing the aesthetic-symbolic factors to create identification links and build the affective experience.

International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2018

Working from the case study of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, this article proposes a new-materialist framework for fashion studies. The ‘material turn’ has gained substantial recognition in social and cultural research over the past decades, but has received less attention in fashion studies. At the same time fashion hardly ever figures in scholarship on new materialism. This article connects the two fields, surveys the literature, foregrounds key concepts, and points to possible directions for fashion studies. The interdisciplinary field of new materialism highlights the role of non-human factors in the field of fashion, ranging from raw materials (cotton) to smart materials (solar cells) and from the textility of the garment to the tactility of the human body. New materialists work from a dynamic notion of life in which human bodies, fibres, fabrics, garments, and technologies are inextricably entangled. The context of new materialism is posthumanism, which entails both a decentring of the human subject and an understanding of things and nature as having agency. The key concept is thus material agency, involving a shift from human agency to the intelligent matter of the human body as well as the materiality of fabrics, clothes and technology. The insight of material agency is important for acknowledging the pivotal role of technology in fashion design today, allowing greater attention for the material aspects of high-performance fibres and smart fabrics. From a new-materialist perspective, Iris van Herpen’s designs can be understood as hybrid assemblages of fibres, materials, fabrics and skin that open up engaged and meaningful interconnections with the human body.

Fashion Theory, 2019