Alison Gill

Western Sydney University · School of Humanities and Communication Arts

Aspects of the ordinary in everyday dressing remain elusive to fashion studies, meaning the life of what Judy Attfield calls ‘design in the lower case’ escapes notice. In this article, the authors assemble a practice-oriented perspective to illuminate ‘wearing’ as an outcome of sets of commonplace and routine practices related to dressing, that wea...

Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion? The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, August 09, 2019–October 14, 2019; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, December 08, 2019–February 23, 2020

This presentation will report on the early–stage development of a new Honour Code at Western Sydney University. The Honour Code is being developed as part of a new university–wide strategy around the theme of ‘Educating for Academic Integrity’, which Western Sydney is undertaking to meet the Higher Education Standards 2015 requirements regarding ac...

This presentation will report on a student design project to promote ear health by 4th year design students in the professional studio at Western Sydney University, in a learning partnership with Samantha Harkus, Principal Audiologist, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services, Australian Hearing. Design students developed a campaign to prom...

With David Bowie’s death came grief and reflection on his musical and fashion legacies. Some remarked that the song ‘Kooks’ gave a generation coming of age in the 1970s the courage to parent unconventionally. With its line, “a couple of kooks hung up on romancing”, the song implores the child (said to be Bowie’s recently born son, Zowie) to give hi...

The critical paradigm of sustainability confronts design with many challenges, not least that of how to sustain the value of the existing product environment, as shortening product life cycles and fleeting consumer attachments typify the velocity of a throwaway material culture. Design educators and researchers have identified repair and related mi...

This article will show how conventional conceptions of use in design are challenged by social practice theory, particularly when this theory is brought into a relation with the aspirations of sustainable design. Sustainable design has in the past claimed too much transformative agency for ‘green’ things, overlooking the resilience of unsustainable...

This article consists of a number of thoughts about and meditations on men’s underpants. Beginning with a ‘day in the life’ of a standard pair of underpants, it moves on to explore some of the specific characteristics that accompany the wearing of this particular garment. There follows a consideration of the role played by underpants in the creatio...

This article outlines the development, delivery and evaluation of a student project for visual communicators in a second-year teaching unit where students are learning about the communication contexts of product value and consumer attachment to commodities, shortening product life cycles and design's contribution to material and symbolic waste. The...

A sustainable material culture is perhaps more about making new relationships than making new things. This paper explores the topography of what we are calling "Design's already made," including its artifacts, practices, and perceptions, via the lens of practice theory and in response to the problem of the largely unsustainable material cultures of...

This article identifies parallels in the unfinished, recycled, and layered features of 1990s fashion design labeled Deconstruction Fashion and the Deconstructive school of French philosophy, notably the thinking and writing of Jacques Derrida. With reference to the designs of Rei Kawakubo for Commes des Garçons, Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, Ann...