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Clothes-in-Process: Touch, Texture, Time
Abstract
Contemporary research on fashion consumption has largely focused on the surface qualities of dress, comprising questions of esthetics, expression, and identity. Rather than thinking about how clothes look, this paper considers how clothes feel. Theorizing clothes as always in-process rather than stable or static, this paper uses touch as lens to explore haptic and sensuous engagements that occur across a garments prosaic biography. Informed by five vignettes from a broader ethnographic project concerning clothes use, touch is located in conversations with hands and bodies. These conversations cultivate somatosensory relations with clothes that are “in-process”, in various states of wear and repair, texture, and time. The material qualities of garments emerge as an active, tangible force that works alongside an evolving dialog of use—as clothes “wear in” or “wear out.” This paper illustrates two ways in which touch informs clothes-in-process: how bodies come to know the fabric of clothes, and how the surface qualities of clothes push back against bodies of wearers. Although mundane and instinctive, the liveliness of materials and the haptic skills that attend to the use of clothes-in-process speak to value, care, and responsibility. But somatosensory relations also encompass discomfort and anxiety, leading to accumulations of clothes as matter out of place. Paying greater attention to the somatosensory registers of the body provides insights about the material meanings of clothes as garments wear over time. In light of the social and environmental implications of clothes and clothes use, such insights are important for advancing knowledge about how wearers interact with their clothes, over time.
... The environment has an important role in the choice of clothing because there are norms that regulate a person's behavior in clothing. Family income is related to the social status carried, thus influencing the choice of clothing (Ju & Lee, 2020;Stanes, 2019). Religion greatly affects a person in the choice of clothing, because it contains a moral in the selection of good clothing. ...
... Good dress ethics according to previous study that it is a process or method by which a person displays harmony in dress and neatness in dressing according to the occasion (Billewar, 2022;Martin & Vacca, 2018). Determining good clothing and adapting to ethics is thoroughness in adjusting clothing to the state of the body, skin color, age, and opportunity (Gopura et al., 2019;Jones & Lee, 2022;Stanes, 2019). A phenomenon often encountered in society is the lack of knowledge and awareness of a person applying good and correct dress ethics (Acharya et al., 2018;Munir, 2020). ...
... Dress must also understand the environmental conditions, time of use and culture. The purpose of clothing is not only to cover the body, but clothing can also cover deficiencies in the body and can show social status in the community (Kusumawati et al., 2019;Stanes, 2019). Research by previous study explains that clothing for traveling opportunities must be adapted to fashion knowledge and appropriate dress ethics Martin & Vacca, 2018). ...
Dharma Wanita members tend to pay less attention to ethics in dressing and the use of uniform attributes according to the provisions. This is caused by various professions, education, culture and economy as well as a lack of knowledge of dressing. The purpose of this study was to find out how the influence of fashion knowledge, clothing selection factors, and dress etiquette on dress appearance. The study was shown to members of Dharma Wanita with a sample of 60 respondents taken by purposive sampling technique. The combination of factor analysis and regression analysis was used to analyze the data using the second-order PLS-SEM analysis. Evaluation of the measurement model on convergent and discriminant validity and Internal consistency reliability has met the requirements. The evaluation of the structural model shows the value of ƒ2 with the results of a large effect, the contribution (R2) of the variable is up to 97.00%, and the value of research observations (Q2) is 60.10%. Hypothesis testing is based on the β-coefficient, ρ-value, and T-statistics values that have met the cut-off values suggested in the literature. So that all of the hypothesis Ha are accepted which shows that there is a positive and significant effect of all variables on the appearance of dressed members of the Dharma Wanita.
... Additionally, evidence suggests that garment production activities and styles could explain the end quality of the garment produced (Stanes, 2019;Hataway et al., 2018). Findings from this study brought to light that the quality of stitching done, and the appropriateness of aesthetics and trimmings were relied on to improve the quality of garments. ...
... Thus, the stitching, on the other hand, though a minor detail, requires careful attention during the production process. This is essential because the average shopper, when shopping for clothing, pays attention to details such as buttons, fabric kind and texture, and overall design (Stanes, 2019). Dressmakers in this study also argued that well-trimmed fabrics and high-quality buttons, laces, ribbons, interfacing, and buckles among others play a crucial role in enhancing the garments' quality. ...
Purpose: Clothing is one of the most prioritised needs of people since it creates various impressions about them. Yet, compared to the foreign ones, the demand for Ghanaian-made is in low demand due to arguments on inferior quality. The purpose of the study was to investigate quality issues within Ghana's garment industry from the perspective of SMEs and dressmakers. Methodology/Design: A qualitative approach was employed, utilising face-to-face interviews and focus groups with industry participants. Data was analysed using NVivo to identify key themes such as pre-production, production, and post-production phases. These themes included: the type of sewing machine used; human resources and work environment; quality supervision and inspection; press as you sew; garment accessory assessment; trimming suitability and aesthetics; finishing techniques; comparative assessment of quality; and packaging. Findings: The study identified major quality challenges in each phase of the garment production process. These include inadequate training during pre-production, inconsistent quality control during production, and poor finishing in post-production. Practical and Social Implications: The study has implications for policy interventions, by addressing these quality issues, the study suggests that SMEs can enhance their competitiveness and sustainability. Improved training, investment in better equipment, and stringent quality controls are crucial for the industry's growth and market reputation. Improving garment quality in Ghana's SMEs can boost national pride, reduce reliance on imports, strengthen the local economy, create jobs, and ensure fair labour practices, this study provides a holistic view of quality issues in the garment industry, offering unique insights from local dressmakers and SMEs, and highlighting specific challenges and opportunities for improvement. Originality: This study provides a distinctive perspective into the specific quality issues faced by Ghanaian SMEs and dressmakers, offering targeted solutions to bridge the gap between small-scale and large-scale producers.
... The texture of apparel refers to the surface attributes of apparel fabrics [22]. Texture of apparel conveys the visual information of apparel surface, providing a sense of touch in the mind that influences the wearer's prediction of how comfortable the apparel will be [22]. ...
... The texture of apparel refers to the surface attributes of apparel fabrics [22]. Texture of apparel conveys the visual information of apparel surface, providing a sense of touch in the mind that influences the wearer's prediction of how comfortable the apparel will be [22]. Previous studies have shown an increasing interest in using intrinsic cues of texture to evaluate apparel quality [23,24]. ...
Apparel has the potential to influence the external expression of wearer’s emotional state and can even empower them, making patients’ hospital wearing a crucial factor in their emotional experience and medical treatment. This study aims to investigate the emotional factors that drive patients’ behavioral responses to hospital gowns using the pleasure–arousal–dominance (PAD) model. With the survey conduction and data analysis, the results identified that the color and silhouette of hospital gowns lead to the emotional experience of arousal, while the structure leads to the emotional experience of dominance, which in turn brings patients a high sense of pleasure and further affect their acceptance and willingness to continue wearing hospital gowns. Based on the results of the research, new hospital gowns were designed and validated, which further confirmed the relationship between the attributes of hospital gowns and emotions of patients. Thus, by extending the PAD model to the context of patients’ use of hospital gowns, this study provides designers with a basis for creating emotionally driven atmosphere factors in the development of hospital gowns for the Chinese market that improve acceptance and continuation of hospital gowns, making a valuable contribution to knowledge in this field.
... We cannot touch something without affecting the object, hence it remembers our very being. (Stanes 2019). ...
The imagery conveyed through one's garments and body language can be powerful tools to exchange values, attitudes, ideas, and expressions. References to revered attire are found in all cultures. Though differing in use, some are used only for sacred rituals or by certain people, while in other cultures such clothes are used in quotidian. Long established apparel movement is led both by leaders in new age spiritual consumerism and by more conservative religious leaders of various denominations and cultures. Specifically focusing on the relationship between Mormons and their clothing.
... Within material culture studies there is an adjacent body of literature detailing the felt experience of wearing garments (Miller, 2010, Robinson, 2018 and the influence this has on the formation of identity (e.g., Entwistle, 2000;Chong Kwan, 2016), sustainable use behaviour and relationships with garments (Stanes and Gibson, 2017;Durrani, 2019;Stanes, 2019). However, this literature does not explore the initial design and prototyping of garments and as such is beyond the scope of this thesis. ...
At a time of rapid digital transition in garment design industries and education, this thesis ethnographically documents garment designers’ use of touch and its role in meaning-making and understanding during garment prototyping. A novel diffractive ethnographic attention is utilised to attune to differing aspects of touch and felt experience, revealing the significance of the felt, kinaesthetic awareness of the moving body to garment prototyping. Further demonstrating that designers relate felt histories of material entanglement with their moving bodies to their contemporary experience. Development of felt histories is thus identified as a key means of designers’ enskillment, alongside moments of overlooked and informal skills sharing. A socio-material perspective informed by New Materialism is adopted to foreground the critical role of designers’ entanglement with non-human things in structuring their felt experience and deriving meaning from it. Significantly, this thesis demonstrates that sensations are perceived beyond the conventionally defined body in and through entangled tools and materials and that sensations are socio-materially mutable and can be altered by peers directing designers to touch and feel in particular ways. This problematises current haptic technologies, which simulate touch at physical and virtual boundaries. The ethnographic data is supplemented by two workshop studies facilitating garment designers to engage with prototypical digital touch technologies, enabling speculation on future digital touch tools more relevant to garment prototyping. The thesis analytically discusses differing theoretical stances on non-human agency in design and making and their implications for digital touch tools. It concludes by proposing a theoretical Framework of Garment Designers’ Felt Enskillment and making recommendations for the design of digital touch interfaces for garment prototyping. The findings of the thesis contribute to the fields of HCI, design and education, deepening academic understandings of designers’ sensory experience and the impact of digital processes, potentially informing future technology development.
... Working with her research participants, Stanes also found it was virtually impossible to trace where a piece of clothing had been made. Even when the label provided an origin, it was equally challenging to identify which plastic materialswhich might include thread, buttons, interface, lining, beading, embroidery, sequins etc.a particular garment contained (Stanes 2019). People nonetheless associated Chinese manufacture with perceived low-value plastic "polyester" materials. ...
As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the “stuff” of potential global prosperity, plastics are substances that people inscribe with varied cultural meanings. Deploying four conceptual “entry points” for global research, we explore how global plastics have become not only a site of an emergent socioecological crisis but themselves a point of leverage for a more humanized globalization. We approach the problem first as an exercise in reframing, shifting our viewpoint away from debates on waste to re-examine ideas of culture and symbolism. Then, working through the entry points of the particular, materiality and affect, we ground our argument in examples from the contemporary pandemic response, earlier ethnographic work, and our own ethnographic projects. We show how plastics have failed people’s desires for a durable modernity, but nonetheless come to shape the ways they feel and think about themselves and each other as sharing responsibility for a global world.
This work presented an overview of greener technologies for realizing everyday fabrics with enhanced antibacterial activity, flame retardancy, water repellency, and UV protection. Traditional methods for improving these qualities in textiles involved dangerous chemicals, energy and water‐intensive procedures, harmful emissions. New strategies are presented in response to the current emphasis on process and product sustainability. Nanoparticles (NPs) are suggested as a potential alternative for hazardous components in textile finishing. NPs are found to efficiently decrease virus transmission, limit combustion events, protect against UV radiation, and prevent water from entering, through a variety of mechanisms. Some attempts are made to increase NPs efficiency and promote long‐term adherence to textile surfaces. Traditional wet finishing methods are implemented through a combination of advanced green technologies (plasma pre‐treatment, ultrasound irradiations, sol‐gel, and layer‐by‐layer self‐assembly methods). The fibrous surface is activated by adding functional groups that facilitate NPs grafting on the textile substrate by basic interactions (chemical, physical, or electrostatic), also indirectly via crosslinkers, ligands, or coupling agents. Finally, other green options explore the use of NPs synthesized from bio‐based materials or hybrid combinations, as well as inorganic NPs from green synthesis to realize ecofriendly finishing able to provide durable and protective fabrics.
Fashion is immediately associated with looks. Its popularity and its most consumerist sides thrive in our current culture of image, further highlighting the connection between fashion and an aesthetic that is quintessentially visual. While it is impossible to deny such a connection, this paper explores the relationship between fashion and touch and fashion and “feel”, two terms that, albeit related, deserve independent consideration. I will begin by emphasizing the importance of seeing fashion in relation to a performative understanding of identity, which is experiential, embodied, situated, and, quite simply, “in movement”. Such an understanding, crucial for a better grasp of sartorial design, is inevitably linked to a tactile understanding of fashion: from the selection of fabrics to the silhouettes and cuts that allow a sketch to move to a garment in three dimensions. But, crucially, a performative understanding of identity is also the starting point for a reflection on touch and fashion in our everyday tasks and judgments, judgments that often move from the aesthetic sphere to other value areas and the broader socio-political context. To further cement my arguments, I will conclude the paper with two case studies: sportswear and maternity wear.
The experiences, habits, and practices that occur post‐purchase within the clothing use phase have an impact on clothing's longevity, a linchpin in sustainable clothing consumption. Though it represents one of the most carbon‐intensive and polluting phases of consumption, a clear definition of sustainable clothing use practice and how it functionally contributes to sustainable consumption is currently underdeveloped. Consumer behavior researchers have most significantly illuminated sustainable clothing purchase and disposal behaviors, leaving an understanding of post‐purchase habits that emerge in everyday clothing use incomplete and fragmented. Through a systematic literature review of 77 articles published from 1991 to January 2022, this study provides a holistic view of this domain of sustainable clothing use that highlights three dimensions (wear, care, repair) alongside the associated habits of mind and domestic management that constitute a system of use practice. The themes that emerged within the review are utilized to develop a framework and an agenda for future research in this important domain of consumer behavior.
Each stage of the fashion clothing lifecycle exerts multitudinous negative impacts on the planet. To date, research and policy interventions toward sustainable clothing consumption have largely concentrated on the initial and final life-stages of clothing production, and garment disposal. However, such efforts, even alongside industry technological advances, have failed to balance ever-expanding fashion consumption demand. More recently, alongside wider sustainability debates on sufficiency and consumption corridors, the active use phase of clothing lifecycle is emerging as a vital piece of the sustainability puzzle. An in-depth exploration of users’ real-life everyday interactions with clothing can facilitate a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of wearer garment interactions and use practices with implications for sustainable consumption. This paper presents the findings of an empirical, qualitative research study on the active use phase of clothing consumption in Ireland drawing on a complex intergenerational dataset gathered using in-depth problem-based interviews and wardrobe studies. Findings reveal that participants were largely unaware of both the positive impacts of prolonging wear and the adverse impact of frequent washing on clothing longevity and sustainability. A range of other barriers and enablers to sustainable clothing consumption also emerged, such as the impact of social media on repeat garment wear, the widespread disregard of garment care labels and the considerable acceptability of second-hand clothing wear. In providing such a snapshot into actual everyday clothing wear and care practices, we argue that it is possible to unlock insights into the various ways sustainable maximum use of clothing can be supported and we present implications for future sustainable policy development. We advocate that existing good practice in anti-consumption and sustainable maximum use must be recognised, understood, and promoted to become increasingly more widely culturally and socially acceptable and therefore, impactful in supporting sustainability transitions.
В этой совместной междисциплинарной работе мы рассматриваем, как повлияли друг на друга исполнительские искусства и модные практики, и обсуждаем конкретные примеры, в которых выразило себя это взаимное влияние. Тело как присутствие, материя и смысл давно находятся в центре искусства как на творческом, так и на теоретическом уровне, а сенсорному повороту способствовала, например, теория аффекта. В работе мы прослеживаем разворот теории моды в сторону перформанса и тела, вместе с тем наблюдая, как присутствие костюма придало свободу театральному действу — на британском материале, включая раннее творчество Майкла Кларка, работавшего с такими художниками, как Ли Бауэри, эстетику, пронизанную духом панка, и наследие этих новаторских идей. Мы рассматриваем переход от доминирующего взгляда (режиссера как сверхавтора) к более инклюзивному подходу, предполагающему осознание, что все участники, включая художника по костюмам, вместе участвуют в создании перформанса — театрального или подиумного. Мы рассматриваем и недавний переход от костюмов, изготовленных с нуля, к «найденным объектам» (порой адаптированным). Это переход совершен, благодаря экологическому движению, и означает переход от нового, покупного к подержанному, приспособленному под конкретные нужды, переработанному или переосмысленному. Мы остановимся на том, как некоторые современные театральные художники по костюмам стремятся выйти на первый план, утверждая, что костюм не подчинён остальному действию и обладает собственной агентностью. Наконец, мы размышляем о трудном и медленном становлении дискуссии об эмансипации тела, благодаря которой в модельный бизнес проникают новые и многообразные нормы тела, разные типы лица и фигуры, несуразные позы, прежде вытесненные за рамки модной нормы, и сопоставляем этот случай с примерами инклюзивного кастинга для участия в театральном представлении. Наконец, мы рассматриваем практику как исследование в интерпретации, принятой в британских университетах. Эта модель позволяет понять, что составляет суть практики, требующей серьезного к себе отношения в академической среде: создание «нового знания» посредством мимолетного действия и продолжительного, вдумчивого — и желательно аргументированного — анализа.Совместно работая над этим текстом, рассуждая о сценической моде, о практике, о практике как исследовании, авторы не могли не сказать о сопротивлении изоляции: обособленности отдельных дисциплин, стене между художниками и теоретиками, взаимной изолированности разных стран и необходимости выражать свои мысли так, чтобы говорить на одном языке, понимать друг друга и работать сообща.
This interdisciplinary collaborative paper looks at the ways performing arts and fashion practices have impacted each other, such as the performative nature of some of the recent catwalk shows, including Dries van Noten’s 2021 collection and the late work of Alexander McQueen. The Body as presence, matter and meaning has become central to the arts both creatively and theoretically, with a sensory turn being emboldened by, for example, Affect Theory. Our paper notes the performative and body turn in fashion studies, and the way theatrical performance has emancipated the presence of costume – thinking of, in the UK, for example, the way Michael Clark’s early work collaborated with artists such as Leigh Bowery, the ethos of punk as an aesthetic, and the legacy of this innovation. We consider the move from the dominant gaze (director as uber author) to a more inclusive model, which recognizes that all participants, including costume designer, contribute to the ensemble creation of a performance – theatrical or catwalk. We also discuss the more recent move from made-from-scratch costume to the (adapted perhaps) found object as sustainable practice, from new and bought to second-hand, customised, recycled and upcyled. We include in our discussion the way some current theatrical costume designers have insisted on bringing their presence in the creative process to the fore, arguing for an insubordination of costume; and finally, we reflect on the difficult and slowly emerging issue of body emancipation, with changes in the modelling business including more faces and body types, and contrast this with examples of inclusive casting in theatrical performance. Finally, we consider practice as research as understood in UK universities. This model is used to capture what constitutes practice that should be taken seriously by the academic environment: the creation of “new knowledge” in ephemeral practice and durable reflective – and possibly argumentative – analysis. In writing this collaborative piece, speaking about performance fashion, about practice, and practice as research, the authors have inevitably mentioned resistance to isolation: isolation between disciplines, isolation between artists and theorists, isolation across boundaries, and the necessity of articulating ourselves so that we can speak the same language, understand each other and work together.
Everyday household sustainability challenges and dilemmas particularly related to consumption of domestic resources energy, water and food are already an important focus in contemporary geographical inquiry. This paper seeks to advance the perspective by exploring a less obvious aspect; everyday fashion consumption practices specifically in the use phase of clothing. Where research on clothing sustainability impact has largely pursued production, acquisition and divestment, here the spotlight is on the active everyday use of clothing already owned. Data was gathered in Ireland using wardrobe studies, a range of visual, verbal and aural methodological approaches employed to uncover knowledge about wardrobe contents, user practices, cultures and experiences along with overarching systems. A central aim of the paper is to explore what geography can learn from wardrobe studies methodologies, thereby opening new opportunities to investigate and to generate valuable data regarding sustainable consumption in both the home and the wardrobe. Consequent to a critical review of current geographical work concerning the sustainability implications of clothing use and an examination of existing research on the geographical dimensions of household sustainability, the paper presents some key ways in which wardrobe studies may be more widely employed by geographers as an effective research method to reframe, analyse and appreciate the complexities of everyday actions in the clothing use phase.
In microgravity, the astronaut’s body is suspended in a void, separated from its surroundings except where measures have been taken to tether it to a surface. The experience of weightlessness can be characterised as ungroundedness – the feeling of being out of touch with surrounding surfaces. This sensation extends to clothing, which is suspended in the space around the body, not anchored to the skin as it is in normogravity. While on Earth, the weight of clothing on skin is a constant reminder of gravitational forces, equally, in space, the absence of the sensation of cloth against skin is a reminder that the body is located in an extra-terrestrial environment in which the behaviours and sensations of everyday objects are defamiliarized. This article briefly considers the sensation of weightlessness from the perspective of the relationship between clothes and the body, and proposes ways in which these considerations could inform creative practice in fashion and costume design, and in depictions of the clothed, weightless body.
Virtually all human cultures routinely wear garments or some sort of attire, both for protection against the elements and as part of a complex social display of everything from class status to gender to the act of belonging to a particular subculture. Smart garments, in addition to performing their social functions, can act as transmitters, sensors, or energy-harvesting entities. Furthermore, such garments may also possess some processing capability, enabling them to perform a variety of tasks, perhaps in conjunction with cloud-based server resources.
This article explores how men’s everyday dress practices and associated social media usage influence their thoughts and feelings about their bodies. Through interviews with 20 young men of diverse ethnicities, body shapes, and sexual orientations, findings reveal that young men’s engagement with fashion and social media merge to create a cultural climate of heightened body consciousness. Contemporary slim-fit clothing trends magnified men’s appearance fixations and incited body surveillance in compliance with conventions of male attractiveness. The proliferation of outfit posts and selfies on social networks have further caused appearance anxieties as Web 2.0 apps impelled participants to compare themselves against their peers. This study concludes that men’s body image pressures have only reinforced hegemonic masculine boundaries and the subsequent power for those who conform to them. Men with bodies that deviate from the appearance ideals experience daily anxiety because they perceive their bodies as culturally deficient.
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 wear a garment in and out over time, and enhance the visibility of clothing use. The central example is a research project that tests the theory of loosening the meaning of clean by trialling alternative laundering techniques to understand the transition to sustain-ability, or less resource-intensive competencies in the spectrum of clothing use. The promise of an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that draws from ‘theories of practice’ at the intersection of cultural studies, sociology and design is also tested as appropriate for the analysis of the quotidian realm of wearing and laundering; the analysis is particularly assisted with sustainable design research about the transition toward sustainable ways of living such as the development of ‘slow fashion’.
Based on research on clothing consumption in a provincial Romanian town, this article focuses on bobbling (pilling) and on reflections on its appearances and progression. Bobbling is considered an index of a faulty or decaying materiality, and an index of usage and, possibly, carelessness and hardship. It limits an individual's ability to project a desired self. It hints at an individual's inability to present a renewed self. It not only disrupts a common process of value creation through the act of dressing, but also exposes a disputed process of value creation through the consumption of certain objects. It foregrounds a predisposition to equate the value of objects with the value of people. It affects a sense of self-worth. The author demonstrates that a preoccupation with bobbling reflects deeper concerns and frequent deliberations over value in postsocialist Romania.
Making material things remains central to human economies and subsistence, and to how earthly resources are transformed. Yet experiences and knowledges of those who make things - especially in the heart of the industrial complex - are notably absent in existing debates on shifting to a less resource-intensive future. We review research on materials and their making, presenting three research trajectories: making beyond binaries of craft and manufacturing; the social life of making; and acknowledging industrial cultures, workers and capacities amidst climate change. Success in transforming economy and society in anticipation of volatile futures depends on material acknowledgements and accomplishments.
Longer-lasting materials and products are often promoted as a strategy to increase resourcefulness and sustainability across product groups including fashion. Yet these gains depend on changed user behavior and consumption patterns, which in fashion in particular are influenced by
social and experiential dimensions, not just material products. Obsolescence of fashion products, driven by aesthetic change and tied to changing social preferences underscores the psycho-social nature of factors which affect fashion garment lifespans. This is reflected by ethnographic evidence
that shows that garments which defy obsolescence do so in informal or unintentional ways, rarely as a result of design planning or material or product qualities. This article suggests a point of departure for design for durability that shifts away from a familiar focus on materials, products,
and user‐object relationships to instead explore material durability as emerging from strategies of human action. It suggests that durability, while facilitated by materials, design, and construction, is determined by an ideology of use.
In recent years, the study of textiles and culture has become a dynamic field of scholarship, reflecting new global, material and technological possibilities. This is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a guide to the major strands of critical work around textiles past and present and to draw upon the work of artists and designers as well as researchers in textiles studies.
The handbook offers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to the topics, issues, and questions that are central to the study of textiles today: it examines how material practices reflect cross-cultural influences; it explores textiles' relationships to history, memory, place, and social and technological change; and considers their influence on fashion and design, sustainable production, craft, architecture, curation and contemporary textile art practice.
This illustrated volume will be essential reading for students and scholars involved in research on textiles and related subjects such as dress, costume and fashion, feminism and gender, art and design, and cultural history.
Each morning we establish an image and an identity for ourselves through the simple act of getting dressed. Why Women Wear What They Wear presents an intimate ethnography of clothing choice. The book uses real women's lives and clothing decisions - observed and discussed at the moment of getting dressed - to illustrate theories of clothing, the body and identity. Woodward pieces together what women actually think about clothing, dress and the body in a world where popular media and culture presents an increasingly extreme and distorted view of femininity and the ideal body. Immediately accessible to all those who have stood in front of a mirror and wondered 'does this make me look fat?', 'is this skirt really me?' or 'does this jacket match?', Why Women Wear What They Wear provides students of anthropology and fashion with a fresh perspective on the social issues and constraints we are all consciously or unconsciously negotiating when we get dressed.
Throughout history certain forms and styles of dress have been deemed appropriate - or more significantly, inappropriate - for people as they age. Older women in particular have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles. But increasingly there are signs of change, as older women aspire to younger, more mainstream, styles, and retailers realize the potential of the 'grey market'.
Fashion and Age is the first study to systematically explore the links between clothing and age, drawing on fashion theory and cultural gerontology to examine the changing ways in which age is imagined, experienced and understood in modern culture through the medium of dress. Clothes lie between the body and its social expression, and the book explores the significance of embodiment in dress and in the cultural constitution of age.
Drawing on the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers, it aims to widen the agenda of fashion studies to encompass the everyday dress of the majority, shifting the debate about age away from its current preoccupation with dependency, towards a fuller account of the lived experience of age. Fashion and Age will be of great interest to students of fashion, material culture, sociology, sociology of age, history of dress and to clothing designers.
Clothes are inherently geographical objects, yet few of us consider the social and economic significance of their journey from design to production to consumption. The Geographies of Fashion is the first in-depth study of fashion economies from a geographer’s perspective, exploring the complex relationship between our attachment to the clothes we own, love, and desire, and their geographic and economic ties.
How far does a garment physically travel from factory to wardrobe? How do clothes come to have social or economic value and who or what creates it? What are the geographies of fashion and how do they interact with one another? This ground-breaking book powerfully reframes fashion spaces, from the body to the city, digital or virtual space to material production, positioning fashion at the centre of contemporary culture and collective identities.
Combining contemporary theoretical approaches with a cutting-edge analysis of international fashion brands and institutions including Maison Martin Margiela, Zara, Louis Vuitton, ASOS, and Savile Row, The Geographies of Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion, geography, and related disciplines including sociology, architecture, and design.
From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. This book fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture—the ways in which feelings shaped society. This book explores a variety of tactile realms; including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. The book delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses—and prohibitions—of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity. Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.
Narratives of clothing reuse and repurpose have centred on second-hand economies, recycling, upcycling and DIY, fashioning a particular kind of ‘wasted’ aesthetic where stitching, darning and patching become visible. But what of clothes that don’t show signs of wear, because they are made from human-made fabrics that degrade much more slowly than organic materials? Drawing on ethnographic ‘fashion journeys’ with young adults from Sydney, Australia, this paper follows polyester clothes, geographically and temporally, beyond of spaces of production, to their everyday use, storage, divestment, reuse and recirculation. Clothing is theorised as always in-process – materially, temporally and spatially – and understood haptically through relations between agentic component materials and human touch. Reconfiguring concepts of fashion waste questions how clothes become redundant: their material memories instead lingering in wardrobes, in stockpiles of divested objects and hand-me-downs, entering cycles of second-hand trade and ultimately, landfill. Polyester manifests a particular variant of material culture: both mundane and malignant, its feel and slow decay result in clothing that seldom slips from the category of surplus to excess in clear ways. An embodied approach, focused on materials and haptic properties of touch and ‘feel’, reveals the contours of an otherwise opaque everyday geography of clothing waste.
Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.
Historical clothes are more than just examples of how past societies dressed—they are imbued with small details of individual lives in their marks of wear. This article explores how these marks evoke memories, and how setting up interactions between personal memories and the materiality of fashion objects creates opportunities for new perspectives in the field of fashion history. The article opens by considering how historians might draw on the methodologies of material culture and archival co-authorship to bring memories into collections research. In order to illustrate these ideas, the article then presents objects from the Museum of London’s fashion collection alongside the author’s own family photographs and stories to show how integrating her grandmother’s memories into her material culture research disrupted the conventional narratives of 1940s austerity fashion. The article concludes by considering how the application of memory to collections research might inform the way that fashion objects are displayed in museums. It suggests that, by focusing on the relationship between visitor memories and the small details of how a garment has been worn and used, museums could create displays which disrupt historical orthodoxies and reveal how echoes of the past continue to shape contemporary fashion cultures.
This paper explores the role that somatic or bodily touch-based experience of ground surface textures plays in securing a commitment to health-giving exercise practices, and argues that ground-feel is a neglected and underrated dimension of how environments co-constitute health. Past work has largely either overlooked ground-feel or positioned rough ground solely as a barrier to bodily movement. This research, however, informed by mobile and video ethnographies of walking and mountain biking in Scotland, elaborates a number of ways in which the experience of textured terrain can produce sensory and emotional experiences that motivate regular exercise. The possibility of positive tactile as well as visual experiences of landscapes, including uneven as well as smooth surfaces, ought then to be taken more seriously in designing everyday outdoor environments that encourage the energetic movement of bodies. A key challenge is to identify the optimal mix of textured and smooth ground surfaces to encourage increased energetic engagement for the widest range of users.
This book explores the 'craft of use', the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use of garments, presenting them as an alternative, dynamic, experiential frame with which to articulate and foster sustainability in the fashion sector. Here Kate Fletcher provides a broad imagining of sustainability in fashion that gives attention to tending and wearing garments, and favours their use as much as their creation. She offers a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market's purpose and reveals fashion provision and expression in a world not dependent on continuous consumption. Framing design and use as a single whole, the book uncovers a more contingent and time-dependent role for design in sustainability, recognising that garments, while sold as a product, are lived as a process. Drawing from stories and portrait photography that document the ways in which members of the public from across three continents use their clothes, and the work of seven international design teams seeking to amplify these use practices, Craft of Use presents a changed social narrative for fashion, borne out of ideas of satisfaction and interdependence, of action, knowledge and human agency, that glimpses fashion post-growth.
This article offers a critique of the concept of hyper-masculinity and a more nuanced, place contingent, critical way to think about masculinity. I use the concept of hyper-masculinity to highlight a conceptual problem between essentialist and de-essentialized notions of gender. Constructionist notions of masculinity (and gender) do not escape the essentialist problem; however, by critiquing and offering a placed conceptualization of hyper-masculinity based on Seattle’s gay leather community, I push the boundaries of masculinity and gender to arrive at a more nuanced, embodied, place-based and contingent understanding of hyper-masculinity thereby side-stepping debates that essentialist/constructionist. Through participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with men who practice hyper-masculinity within the gay leather community in Seattle, USA, I interrogate hyper-masculinity within the community to demonstrate how it reinforces and subverts heterosexual gender roles and homonormativity.
The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, one that takes seriously the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place. Taking this fact seriously, the article argues, requires us to think about the material world not in terms of ‘objects’, but ecologically, that is, in terms of the processes and conditions under which certain ‘things’ come to be differentiated and identified as particular kinds of ‘objects’ endowed with particular forms of meaning, value and power. The article demonstrates the purchase of this ecological approach through the example of the Mona Lisa. It does so by exploring the rather extraordinary processes of containment and maintenance that are required to keep the Mona Lisa legible as an art object over time.
Introduction: From Materiality to Plasticity by Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael Part I: Plastic Materialities 1. Plastics, Materials and Dreams of Dematerialization by Bernadette Bensaude Vincent 2. Process and Plasticity: Printing, Prototyping and the Prospects of Plastic by Mike Michael Part II: Plastic Economies 3. Made to Be Wasted: PET and Topologies of Disposability by Gay Hawkins 4. The Material Politics of Vinyl: How the State, Industry and Citizens Created and Transformed West Germany’s Consumer Democracy by Andrea Westermann 5. Paying With Plastic: The Enduring Presence of the Credit Card by Joe Deville Part III: Plastic Bodies 6. The Death and Life of Plastic Surfaces: Mobile Phones by Tom Fisher 7. Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: An Essay on Plasticity and the STS Life by Jody A. Roberts 8. Plasticizers: A Twenty-First Century Miasma by Max Liboiron 9. Plastics, the Environment and Human Health by Richard Thompson Part IV: New Articulations 10. Where Does This Stuff Come From? Oil, Plastic and the Distribution of Violence by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello 11. International Pellet Watch: Studies of the Magnitude and Spatial Variation of Chemical Risks Associated with Environmental Plastics by Shige Takada 12. Plastic and the Work of the Biodegradable by Jennifer Gabrys
This article explores the attitudes of seven women to four dress-related activities: shopping for new garments; sorting clothes within the wardrobe; making – specifically knitting – clothes for themselves; and mending damaged items. This topic is of particular interest within the field of fashion and sustainability, because clothing consumption could be reduced if activity were to be diverted from shopping to alternative fashion practices. Positioning these practices as intrinsically rewarding leisure activities may encourage such a shift. The research demonstrates that all four of the dress-related activities occupy a grey area between leisure and chore. However, because perceptions are personal, context dependent and flexible, there is scope for attitudes to be changed. An experimental project indicates that it is possible to reframe mending as a desirable leisure activity by integrating attributes such as social interaction and creativity. This reframing is aided by individuals' concerns about wasting resources, but can also be limited by concerns about wasting time. © 2015 Australia and New Zealand Association of Leisure Studies
In this article, the authors demonstrate how an anthropologically informed approach that attends to the material culture of occupational safety and health (OSH) offers new insights for such applied research fields. Research into OSH typically seeks to solve its perennial problem of ‘improving’ workers’ health and safety through scholarship dominated by management disciplines, human factors and ergonomic sciences, and psychological and physiological theories. Here, they focus on the example of ‘the safe hand’ and its making through the materiality of gels, water and gloves in the work of health care workers. In doing so they show how organizational, environmental, embodied and biographical elements of OSH intersect with institutionalized and personalized constituents of the material and sensory culture of safety amongst health care workers. They argue that material culture studies have a pivotal role in revising the agendas of applied research and intervention.
This article was developed from the project ‘Valuing Norwegian Wool’ initiated by the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research to generate knowledge on how wool can contribute to sustainable textile consumption, and how value creation can be increased in the Norwegian wool industry. The article will compare consumer perceptions, attitudes, practices and knowledge concerning wool as a material and as garments in Norway and in the United Kingdom, through a case study of wardrobes owned by six middle-class families. The aim is to generate knowledge about the diverse web of aspects that influence consumption of woollen garments. The wardrobe study as a method aims to include the materiality of garments in clothes research in a more direct way. Analysing the materiality in connection with the social and cultural aspects of clothes gives us a better understanding of the relations between materiality and practice.
Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.
Tactile response is explored I through recall of subjects for fabric preferences. Shifts in touch preference may occur in one's experience and require bringing the touch experience to one's awareness. To investigate such shifts in preference, subjects who were studying to be designers taking an introductory design course were asked in an open-ended format to describe fabrics they liked to touch. Responses from 123 subjects were analyzed and the three most frequently listed properties they liked to touch were soft, smooth, and warm. Wool was listed by 41 percent as a fabric they disliked touching. Fabrics associated with shifting touch preferences from dislike to like included wool and cotton. Reasons subjects initially disliked a fabric were specific and included attributes of scratchy, rough, and itchy. Fabric combinations that often pleased included soft with warm and smooth with warm. When subjects reported initially liking or disliking a fabric the shift in preference often occurred because of a change in repeated exposure, focus on some features, discovery of new features or new associated experiences. Touch preference shifts were affected by how the fabric would feel on the body, contextual surroundings, and experiences with family. Such an investigation of tactile response and touch preference helps a designer to think about how to optimize user satisfaction with textile products.
In this article we explore in what ways consumers preconceptions of wool influence their ability to recognize it as a fabric. Do we know that it is wool because it itches, or, conversely, does it itch because we think that it is wool? The analysis builds on three different methods;
wardrobe studies, sample tests and interviews, in order to explore both informants’ visual senses, and also applied tactile senses. It aims to bring together social science and textile technology methodologies and understanding in order to understand the properties of wool. It does this
through adopting a multisensory understanding of the material. The research aimed to explore the associations with and experiences of wearing wool. This, we argue is as important as the senses in the process of identifying woollen fibres. The research found that the strongest influences in
fabric identification were: perceptions of use, fabric type and fibres, colour, structure patterns and the ‘feel’ of the fabric.
Recent research on how best to support the development of pro-environmental behaviours has pointed towards the household as the scale at which interventions might be most effectively targeted. While pro-environmental behaviour research has tended to focus on the actions of adults, almost one-third of UK households also include children and teenagers. Some research has suggested that young people are particularly adept at exerting influence on the ways in which the household as a whole consumes. Yet this influence is not only one-way; parents continue to have direct input into the ways in which their children relate to and interact with the objects of consumption (such as personal possessions) through routine processes including acquisition, use, keeping and ridding. In this paper I draw on qualitative research with British teenagers to highlight how young people and their parents interact when managing household material consumption. I use this discussion to suggest that promoters of sustainability might increase the efficacy of their efforts by engaging households as complex family units, where individual household members’ distinct priorities are linked by shared familial values, and where family-based group identity is used to encourage shared commitment to lower-impact living.
In this paper, I introduce knitting as a popular and underexplored creative practice. Geographers have begun to take interest in craft, skill, and ‘the power of making’ to transform social and material relations and offer new possibilities for urban life. In this paper, I sketch ways that geographers may begin to engage with collective and interventionist knitting in urban environments - in terms of socialities, interventions, and materialities. From knitting circles, yarnbombing to community projects, knitters have begun to stitch new enthusiasms, temporalities, sensorial possibilities, and enchantments into the urban fabric. I conclude the paper - with future directions for geographical engagement with a variety of craft practices that encourage reflection on the people, places, and economies, of ‘making things’ through the example of knitting.
This paper presents a study on sustainable product relationships with an eye on textiles and clothing. A framework is constructed which integrates sustainable product relationships and the field and role of design. As a result, it studies how an empathic design approach could improve
a sustainable design process. In order to promote sustainability, designers need to aim at enhancing long-term product relationships. By studying the user's relationships with and attachments to products, designers have the opportunity to create deeper product satisfaction and thereby long-term
product relationships. This paper concludes by evaluating how an empathic approach can be of primary importance in promoting sustainable product relationships by deepening current methods of understanding consumers' needs, values and emotions.
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 design. Our investigation is framed by the term "wearing." Wearing – as a recurrent form of engagement between bodies and designed artifacts or as an index of use and duration – is a multi-modal concept that brings
abstract time into specific, situated material and aesthetic relations. We contrast "wearing" to the "object time" (Baudrillard 1998) of material and symbolic systems that make new, purportedly improved, but "inexperienced" things available to us in consumer culture. Wearing induces a critical
practice of attending to those things that are declining from object time, which in this era of destructive wasting, need to be recalled, repaired, and repurposed. Wearing reveals that design, in spite of the widespread practice of trading completed designs, is better characterized as unfinished,
potentially open to the value-creating processes of its users. We elaborate on this idea by drawing on a range of examples across the design disciplines.
Fashion is often conflated with transience and novelty, demanding that individuals update themselves regularly
in keeping with these changes. In this article, however, I argue that fashion is a way for individuals to
articulate an enduring sense of self amid life’s changes. Based on material values evident in second-hand
clothing, individuals draw parallels between themselves and the clothes, where old clothes objectify their
personal values, of who they are, who they were or who they aspired to be, creating what I call, fashion-as-authenticity. Through old clothing, individuals access selective and imagined realities of different times to
authenticate the self and its transformation throughout the course of their lives.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
This paper investigates sweat to deepen theoretical understandings of how gender is lived. To do so we adopt a visceral approach that opens possibilities of thinking geographically about the affective ties and emotional bonds of sweat to engage with feminist logics of embodiment. Our interest is in what sweaty bodies can ‘do’. Attention is given to the way that affects, emotions and sensations associated with being sweaty, smelling sweat, as well as touching one’s own sweat, and that of others, provides insights into the gendered lives of people as they move through different context. Our analysis of how gendered is lived through sweaty bodies draws on ‘Summer Living’ narratives of 17 participants who understand themselves as men and live in Wollongong, a city of around 280,000 people on the east coast of New South Wales, Australia. We illustrate the theoretical significance of thinking about sweat for gender and geography by discussing the ambiguity, proximity and collectivity of sweaty bodies; and, the fragility, multiplicity and vitality of sweaty bodies. To conclude we outline how a visceral approach provides possibilities to improve household sustainability policies.
This article considers materiality in relation to memories of dress and explores why women remember the materiality of clothes they no longer wear or even no longer own. The focus is on two historical case studies of specific garments collected through primary interviews undertaken
as part of my doctoral research. One, a black silk-velvet dress, belonged to Mary who had kept the skirt of the garment, with its signs of wear and physical material traces of use. It was bound up with memories of her late brother, who paid for the dress before his death on active service
in World War II, and her late husband and their early lives together. Doris’ sister made the other dress for her 21st birthday in 1942. Doris had not kept this cotton-organdie dress, but this decision was full of regret. In her case, retaining memories of the materiality of the garment
and the occasion when it was first worn had become a substitute for the garment itself. Both oral histories reveal the significance of materiality at the time a garment is worn and in how dress wears in and on our memories.
The article discusses the findings from an extensive ethnographic study of contemporary British women’s shoe designers that explored what creativity in shoe design entails. This study profiled 23 shoe designers who create shoes for the high fashion industry. The objective of the
study was to tease out how these designers go about creating shoes while at the same time revealing how they perceive and experience their creativity in relation to the commercial world of fashion in which they are engaged. The designers presented in the article are celebrated by the fashion
press and buyers internationally as creators of fashion. While the fashion industry enables these designers to create new collections each season, an acceptance that they were creating, or influenced by, fashion was absent from their narratives. Instead, for them, design was defined by creative
freedom, expression and personal taste and through the materiality of their creations they were able to present their self-identities. This article presents shoe design as a creative process where materials are significant inspirational stimuli for each designer. Their selection of materials
was often triggered by personal emotive reasons, as their sensory, tactile engagements with them would bring forth ideas for particular designs. They narrated creativity as a personal and emotional experience, distinct from fashion, yet each season their designs were commercialized as fashion
and were proclaimed by fashion buyers, and other media agents, to be ‘on trend’ in terms of colours, materials and silhouettes. The article explores this paradox between the shoe designers’ desire to be creatively free and their necessary relationship to the commerciality
of the fashion industry, examining how fashion works by drawing out the relationship between fashion’s different layers of design, materiality, creativity and commerciality.