Fashion Hacking as Shapeshifting

2008

This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This ...

Social Sciences

This article explores how Disabled people’s fashion hacking practices re-make worlds by expanding fashion design processes, fostering relationships, and welcoming-in desire for Disability. We share research from the second phase of our project, Cripping Masculinity, where we developed fashion hacking workshops with D/disabled, D/deaf and Mad men and masculine non-binary people. In these workshops, participants worked in collaboration with fashion researchers and students to alter, embellish, and recreate their existing garments to support their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. We explore how our workshops heeded the principles of Disability Justice by centring flexibility of time, collective access, interdependence, and desire for intersectional Disabled embodiments. By exploring the relationships formed and clothing made in these workshops, we articulate a framework for crip fashion hacking that reclaims design from the values of the market-driven fashion industry and towa...

Fashion Practice, 2009

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.

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '13, 2013

We present a design exercise illustrating how fashion practices and the fashion design process can be used to create new opportunities both in the mobile domain and in product design, as well as in wearable computing. We investigate the concept of outfit-centric design by extending the support for social and visual interaction with digital devices beyond the currently available shells and stickers, and drawing on the ways in which people vary their dress ensembles. We designed a set of mock-up samples in a local fashion style, as a first step in understanding possible applications of the emerging technology of organic interfaces. Initial user feedback shows how fashion-conscious participants creatively experimented with the set's variations of shape and color in outfits created from their personal wardrobes, which revealed the importance of the objects' size and location on the body. It also points out that a lack of integration with the fashion system's processes reduces the attractiveness of the samples.

We present a design exercise illustrating how fashion practices and the fashion design process can be used to create new opportunities both in the mobile domain and in product design, as well as in wearable computing. We investigate the concept of outfit-centric design by extending the support for social and visual interaction with digital devices beyond the currently available shells and stickers, and drawing on the ways in which people vary their dress ensembles. We designed a set of mock-up samples in a local fashion style, as a first step in under-standing possible applications of the emerging technology of organic interfaces. Initial user feedback shows how fashion-conscious participants creatively experimented with the set’s variations of shape and color in outfits cre-ated from their personal wardrobes, which revealed the importance of the objects’ size and location on the body. It also points out that a lack of integration with the fashion system’s processes reduces the attractiveness of the samples.

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.

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.

Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies, 2017

Proceedings of the 10th World Congress of the International Association For Semiotic Studies Recurso Electronico Culture of Communication Communication of Culture Culture De La Communication Communication De La Culture Cultura De La Comunicacion Comunicacion De La Cultura 2012 Isbn 978 84 9749 522 6, 2012

How fashion has been working and annoucing the paradigmes of the digital culture? Among many elements, we may stress a few ones which determine digital culture such as: fluidity, hybrid body and its manipulation, internationalization of diferences in real time, datas in digital formate making sampling a common dinamic, frontiers surpassed in cases of gender, culture and social relation, constant negotiation (in-betweeness), biotechnology, and genetic manipulation. Digital technologies have been playing an important role in silhouette when proposes overcoming the idea of rigid frontiers. In this sense, we can understand the importance os belgians and japanese fashion designers since the 1980's. These designers have broken strict beliefes of gender, binomy beauty-uglyness, original-copy and, human being-being in determinist culture. As Derrick de Kerchkove says, once we have everything in digital datas, all of it can be sampled, breaking the idea of begging-middleend. The fashion designers,