Figure 2 - uploaded by Anneke Smelik
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Iris van Herpen, Seijaku, F/W 2016, dress made of hand-blown glass bubbles in transparent silicone. Photo and copyright by Peter Stigter.
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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 in the past decade but has received less attention in fashion studies. At the same time, fashion hardly ever figures in scholarsh...
Citations
... Quando se trata da dimensão material da moda, grande parte da investigação tem sido conduzida a partir de um posicionamento objetivista (cf. Smelik, 2018;Ruggerone, 2017). Esses estudos concentram-se na ontologia do vestuário ou aplicam uma perspectiva semiótica ou de estudos culturais para compreender uma peça de vestuário, como em estudos históricos ou museológicos. ...
... Nos últimos anos, temos visto estudiosos da moda envolvidos na discussão, apoiados pelos primeiros esforços de Entwistle (2000) em explicar o uso de roupas como uma prática incorporada. Smelik (2018), Bruggeman (2014) e Tiainen et al. (2015 contribuem para o desenvolvimento do campo sob uma nova perspectiva materialista. Na sua investigação, analisam designers de moda que fazem uso de novas tecnologias, como impressão 3D e wearables, entre os quais o trabalho de Iris van Herpen (Figura 2) é o mais proeminente. ...
Este trabalho conceitual se propõe a articular a questão da agência material na moda e como a experiência material travada com as coisas que vestimos pode servir de suporte para se repensar as práticas de moda. O texto se baseia em teorias de agência material, pós-humanismo e afetos e devires, e considera que não apenas as pessoas, mas também as coisas que usamos, desempenham um papel ativo no sistema da moda. Para discutir o assunto, exemplos na área da moda são utilizados. O texto conclui com reflexões sobre o que um desvio para o afeto e a agência material pode significar para a moda.
... In this fast-paced and connected contemporaneity, dresses as spaces to live, disguise, cover, and protect oneself, come to take on their own meaning, often unrelated to the body that wears them: while maintaining a central role in the processes of culturalization of the body -that is, what makes human physicality to all intents and purposes a cultural object (Bovone & Ruggerone, 2006)-clothing is enriched by wearable technology, bringing out a new agency for inanimate things in a tangible matter (Smelik, 2018). ...
... This encouraged a series of experimentations which frame fashion design as the activity to conceive and develop wearable products tout court (Hrga, 2019), taking advantage of the latest technological advancements: in this sense new fashion products are not only sewn, but also 3D printed, assembled, welded (Bolton, 2016;Smelik, 2018). The projects presented combine robotics and nano-electronics, making fashion an experience that transcends mere appearances through products that augment the human body. ...
The paper aims to address how dresses and garments in the fashion-tech are beginning to acquire their own shape and meanings: the technological, electronic dress with digital, bionic, or robotic components can act and move independently from the body that wears it, sometimes even modeling, modifying or altering its shape. According to these perspectives, techno-fashion products become alive because they react autonomously to external or internal inputs, they become able to mediate the relationship between the human body and the world around it in a new material dimension that lives in a fluid environment with blurred boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. This highlights the pivotal role of new technologies for the study of fashion, as by empowering the human body they can influence human relationships with themselves, others, and the environment. These transformations involving the collision between technology and fashion could have long-term implications that affect the shape and meaning of our clothes as well as our bodies.
... What posthumanism and the new materialism share is their effort to overcome dualisms. Consistently, posthuman fashion questions the notion of material agentivity [4], engaging with the increasingly performative role of the relationship between body and dress in the process of embodiment [5]. In this perspective, design practices mediate the experience of oneself and one's surroundings in material and imaginative ways, transforming the interrelationships between individuals, the social environment, imaginaries and ecology. ...
The essay addresses the reasons why fashion design is manifesting an increasing interest in the marine environment as a context where to identify new materials for fashion, focusing on the particular case of seaweed. Through a field research, which involved MA fashion students at Università Iuav di Venezia, it is possible to demonstrate how an object such as seaweed fabric is not only a response to the need for new sustainable materials for fashion, but it is also interpretable through the framework of new materialism in a posthuman perspective. These fabrics, perceived as vibrant, represent a stimulus to redefine fashion design and its relations with environment, territories, people, and bodies. In the experimentation with seaweed, nature becomes raw material for constructing aesthetic and cultural imagery in a multispecies landscape.
... This shift encourages greater responsibility in the production and consumption of fashion, developing new relationships between waste, people and the natural world. This vision is part of that return to a new materialism investigated by Anneke Smelik [10] in the field of fashion studies. ...
The contribution investigates how the two leading multinational luxury fashion goods holdings – LVMH and Kering – have introduced circular design methodologies and waste valorisation in their creative, production and distribution processes. Starting from the hypothesis that the imaginary of fashion waste is transforming from a negative element, to be hidden and eliminated, to a vibrant matter and resource to be valorised, the websites of the holding companies and fashion brands that are part of them were analysed in order to map current circular practices. Examples of the valorisation of pre- or post-consumer waste and its reintroduction into the supply chain are not rare, but until a few years ago they came exclusively from the action of emerging designers and independent brands, alternative to the fashion system, and the existing bibliography focused on these. This contribution opens up a new line of research involving global luxury brands, starting from the hypothesis that circular practices have spread from below within the fashion system through a bubble-up effect.
... In the analysis, biological differences between bodies are taken as material conditions for the design. Thus, following Smelik (2018), materiality in this study does not only refer to materials like fabric or garments, but also to the wearer's or user's body, and the world of production and consumption. Although the concept of inclusive design consists of much more than paying attention to the differences between female and male physiologies, this study focuses on that as it was the aspect of inclusivity that the informants most emphasized. ...
Particularly since the 1990s, there has been an active discussion on inclusive design and on the possibility of designing products that would be suitable for every kind of user. Wearable technology products that need to be in close contact with the user's skin to function must be a good fit for the user's body. As wearable technology has transitioned from a specialty of the "quantify-yourself" movement to a widespread, everyday item, the Jenni Hokka works as a specialist in research methods at the Doctoral School at Tampere University. This research is part of a project undertaken while affiliated at Aalto University in which she scrutinized design
... For instance, the turning towards posthumanism, new materialism, and postdigital scholarship, has enabled a resurfacing of embodied approaches to research across many disciplines (e.g., Spatz 2017 on embodied research). Specifically, refocusing on bodily experiences and their entanglement or intraaction (Barad 2007) with the material world has facilitated scholarship through/with art (including dance, music, painting, and photography, e.g., Bolt and Barrett 2013;Hickey-Moody et al. 2016), fashion (Smelik 2018), media (Bruno 2014), sports (Markula 2019), and other ways of moving (e.g., walking: Springgay and Truman 2017), to name a few. These lines of work build on the recognition of human bodies being intrinsically intertwined with materialities and in fact coming into existence only through their intra-action (Barad 2007). ...
The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we propose a methodological toolkit: a theoretical kaleidoscope to examine and critique the constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We argue that such a tool is helpful when a critical attitude to examine ‘the ideology of digitalism’, its concomitant inequalities, and the huge losses it entails for human flourishing seems urgent. In the paper, we describe different theoretical approaches that can be used for the kaleidoscope. We give relevant examples of each theory. We argue that the postdigital does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less insidious as they continue to govern socio-technical infrastructures, geopolitics, and markets. In this sense, it is vital to find tools that allow us to shed light on such invisible and pervasive power structures and the consequences in the daily lives of so many.KeywordsTheoretical kaleidoscopeToolkitMethodologyDigital inequalitiesPostdigitalCollaborative writing
... The idea of care is understood here, according to the reading provided by Joan Tronto (2013), as an action to maintain, continue and repair our world. Manzini's focus on fashion objects as positive agents of change is an evolution, on the one hand, of the critique developed by Mol, Moser and Pols (2010) on the fact that care is often mistakenly distinguished from artefacts, which are considered apersonal and "cold" in comparison to the intimacy assumed in care; on the other, of the theories on the new materialism elaborated by Anneke Smelik (2018) in the context of fashion studies, which are contributing to bringing matter and bodily experience in its weaving interconnections with the world back to the centre of the debate. In recent years, the idea of the future and its very existence are at the centre of theoretical reflections in design and fashion. ...
The contribution questions the possibility that fashion and its objects can be interpreted as a practice of care, agents capable of stimulating a positive change in the relationship between people, environment and territories. Within the theoretical framework of fashion futuring, the design and social innovation workshop Talking Hands is analysed as a case study of redirection practices, which are expressed in participatory design dynamics, relationships between the subjects of creative and production processes, new narratives and synergies between people and communities.
... In one of our previous introductions, we argued that the material turn involves a turn (or return) to matter and materiality . From a new-materialist perspective, the aim of illuminating matter and investigating material agency includes the intelligent matter of the human body (Smelik 2018). This perspective also points to materially grounded processes of identity formation, which connect it to (neo-)Marxism and critiques of capitalism. ...
Several cross-cutting themes run throughout fashion theory: ambivalence, tensions, and immateriality and materiality, within the larger framework of capitalism. In this introduction, we interlink these themes by arguing that immateriality is inextricably entangled with materiality. The material flows through capitalism require negotiated meanings in everyday social interactions, yet cannot resolve the underlying tensions involved. Pursued by some, resisted by others, capitalism’s profit motivation always involves tensions and ambivalences. While we emphasize the material ground of fashion and beauty practices, also in relation to the formation of identity in all its ambiguity, the digital realm invites and highlights immateriality. Yet, in the end, we maintain, materiality is and must remain stubborn.
... This assumption stems from wearables' capacity to 'act' (Cranny-Francis, 2013, p. 162). For example, smart running shoes capable of calculating users' health-related characteristics and recommending a level of daily activity can eventually change wearer's perceptions of self, their body and their lifestyle (Smelik, 2018). In a broader sense, a wearable might be understood as an extension of both user' body and identity rather than as a separate object (Lupton, 2017). ...
... 262). This example suggests that wearables intervene with users' subjective perceptions, emotions and experiences (Smelik, 2018). ...
... Sophie Woodward briefly mentions the methodology of "following the materials," claiming this approach is "predominantly theoretical" as it is rooted in new materialism (2020,110). As I consider my own work as part of new materialism (Smelik 2018), I investigate here the material agency of polyester beyond its discursive meanings. My methodology mainly consists of literature research, bringing together diverse strands of research on polyester. ...
Polyester is the most ubiquitous fabric for textiles. In 2021 textile production in the world amounted to 113 million metric tonnes, of which 54% was polyester. Yet, we seem to know very little about this most important fiber for textiles and apparel. This article fills that gap by tracing a cultural history and critique of polyester. There are several phases in the production and reception of polyester, which was invented in the early 1940s. From the initial suspicion in the 1950s for a then still expensive new fabric, it moved to an immense boom in the 1960s, only to be followed by a steep bust at the end of the 1970s. Polyester was then made interesting again in the 1980s by the avantgarde designs of the Japanese couturiers. From the 1990s onwards polyester became the staple ingredient for fast fashion. Polyester is by far the most produced and used fiber for apparel: from couture to fast fashion and from sportswear to high-tech wear. However, consumers worry about polyester’s negative impact on the environment, by not being degradable and shedding microfibers into earth and water. Polyester has moved from an optimistic age of “plastic fantastic” to the awareness of the “plastic soup.”
