Shapeshifting: A Conference on Transformative Paradigms of Fashion and Textile Design

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/8553

This publication presents 30 selected papers developed from an initial 47 presentations made at the Shapeshifting Conference held in Auckland in April 2014. The conference explored transformative paradigms in fashion and textile design through four thematic frameworks including Ambiguous & Automated Forms; Surface & Structural Transformations; The Fashion System & The Ephemeral; and Transformational Strategies. Shapeshifting, as a process of change and responsive agency is considered in these papers as a concern with cultures of transformation, navigations of the social and technological and the transversal hacker who unpicks and revises in order to contest what is current and deliver our future.

Editors: Frances Joseph, Mandy Smith, Miranda Smitheram and Jan Hamon

All 30 papers selected for publication were double blind peer reviewed by an international panel of fashion and textile experts and academic reviewers.

The publication has been produced by the Textile and Design Laboratory and Colab at the Auckland University of Technology, February 2015.

ISBN: 978-1-927184-27-1

http://www.shapeshifting.aut.ac.nz/conference-proceedings/

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 30

Designing a two-phase glow-in-the-dark pattern on textiles
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Kooroshnia, Marjan
Although many research projects have explored ways of creating light- emitting fabric displays using LEDs, electro-luminescent wires, and optical fibres, fewer research projects have investigated ways of designing glow-in-the-dark surface patterns using photo-luminescent pigments in textile and fashion design. This may be due to a lack of adequate experimental exploration, as well as a lack of documented information with which to guide textile and fashion designers regarding how these pigments can be used to create such patterns. This article reports on findings based on the design properties and potentials of photo-luminescent pigments with regard to textiles. Through practice-based research, a series of design experiments were created which demonstrate ways of understanding and working with photo-luminescent pigments when designing glow-in-the-dark patterns for textiles. Through experimentation with plain and complex motifs, the influence of using photoluminescent pigments on the process of creating of a glow-in-the-dark surface pattern was examined. The results indicated that, since the colours of positive and negative spaces were reversed in dark conditions, it provided an opportunity to create tessellated surface patterns similar to those of patterns created by Maurits Cornelis Escher. Predicting the effect produced by complex printed patterns was not as easy as predicting that produced by plain printed patterns, stressing the need for tools that allowed the designer to simulate and observe the glow-in-the-dark effect before starting to print. A two-phase pattern was then created, with different expressions in daylight and darkness. For this purpose, each colour of textile pigment paste was mixed with a combination of photo-luminescent pigment and binder, and then printed on to the chosen fabric. The effect produced by the mixture in darkness was a gradation of light, like a tone or value halfway between a highlight and a dark shadow and similar to that produced by a printed, glow-in-the-dark halftone. These research experiments provide textile and fashion designers with a textile printing method that allows them to create two-phase glow-in-the-dark patterns with identical forms in daylight and darkness, but with two expressions in each. It also offers recipes for print formulation and documents results, offering a new design resource for textile surface pattern designers to promote creativity in design. In so doing, the article provides fundamental knowledge for the creation of glow-in-the-dark surface patterns on textiles.
Smart textiles as raw materials for design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Dumitrescu, Delia; Nilsson, Linnéa; Persson, Anna; Worbin, Linda
Materials fabricate the designed artefact, but they can also play an important role in the design process; as a medium or method used to develop the design. Textiles can, with their soft and flexible properties, be easily transformed and altered in numerous ways; for example, by cutting, folding or printing on the material. This transformative character makes textiles interesting sketching media for surface explorations when designing artefacts. The development of transformable materials; for example, fusible yarns and colour changing pigments, have expanded these inherent transformative qualities of textiles and have opened up the design field of smart textiles. Accordingly, this new material context has created a new area for textile designers to explore, where it is possible to enhance and play with the alterable character of their textiles, and control their transformation through physical manipulation and programming. However, these expanded transformative properties also open up a new task for textile designers; to design "smart textiles as raw materials for design". By this term we mean, textiles that are not finished in their design but that can be developed and enhanced when they take part in a product or space design process. In this article, we explore and start to define what smart textiles as raw materials for design can be, and look at how these materials can come into and add something to another design process. The foundation for this exploration is a number of textile examples from the “Smart Textiles sample collection” and our experiences when developing and designing with them. (The Smart Textiles sample collection is a range of textiles that is designed and produced by the Smart Textile Design Lab, to give students, designers and researchers direct access to different types of smart textiles). The possibilities and limitations of smart textiles as raw materials for design are explored by looking at the textile examples from two perspectives: firstly, by looking at the considerations that come with designing this type of textile design, and secondly by looking at what these transformative textiles can bring to another design process. Each example is analyzed and classified according to what transformable design variables for structure and surface change can be embedded in the textile design, and what design variables this subsequently creates for a design process that uses these materials i.e., describing what type of transformation different examples of smart textiles introduce to the design process/design space; whether the change is reversible or irreversible, and whether the change occurs through physical or through digital manipulation of the material. This article ends with a discussion of how smart textiles in the form of raw materials for design could influence how we design textiles and how we design with textiles. Can transformative materials enrich material explorations in a design process? Can further development and alteration of the material design be introduced or defined by the textile designer? Could smart textiles as raw materials for design open up a stronger connection between the design of textiles and the design of the product or spaces where they will be used?
Metamorphoric fashion: a transformative practice
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Sgro, Donna
Transformation is embedded in the growth of an organism, while fashion, highly responsive to changing social and physical environments, rides the current of flux like a dreamer wandering through darkness. Through my fashion practice, attempts are made to reflect upon, expand and make possible inroads into the translation of this creative movement, from inspiration to mixed garment and textile outcomes. This involves engaging the imagination of possible futures, new approaches, and unknown outcomes, through mixed material expressions. Translating the life cycle of an organism, which is highly adaptive, evolutionary and responsive, this work forms part of my PhD study, “Metamorphoric Fashion”, being undertaken at RMIT University, Melbourne. Using a practice-led research methodology, which draws upon mixed creative methods, my research attempts to engage with the uncovering of imaginative potentials of fashion and textile processes. The concept of transformation leads this investigation, and initially a study of butterfly metamorphosis was undertaken. This involved “fashion-designer-becoming-lepidopterist”, and engaged a movement between the ordinarily disparate worlds of ecology and creative practice. Using mediums of photography and drawing, a series of transitions were recorded in which the organism underwent both transitional and metamorphic change. Through these methods, meditations on relationships between nature-culture become possible, as thinking about ecology enters the creative process. Through drawing, a series of stylizations developed which recorded the imaginative thinking time, line by line. My particular fashion practice is in the process of transformation and diversification, reflecting the nature of the metamorphic phenomenon, and the particular interpretations of the butterfly study that an individual approach enables. Aiming to uncover the ways in which the practice is able to accommodate these transformations, forms part of this study. Why this might be important for fashion practice more generally perhaps, is because it identifies a type of practice that attempts to evolve itself, to become something it does not yet know. The research aims to capture this state of becoming, and the perpetual sense of movement.
Writing on the transformative and imaginary body
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Ha, Winnie
"Unable to sense any articulation in your palms and fingers, you realise your arms are now stumps, rounded off where the elbows would have been. All you can feel is clammy, thin film, like loosely stretched latex. You are entirely covered in a milky coalescence forming a semi-translucent, membrane-like film. This new skin stretches over an engorged blob enclosing you like a wrinkly, half-deflated water balloon. Laying there immobilised you think of those whole headless chickens with their appendages neatly tucked under plump bodies, wrapped in plastic bags and sitting in a supermarket cool room along with countless others, their identity registered on barcode stickers, their value calculated in weight." (Ha Mitford, 2012) This article discusses the potential for the literary imagination to extend conceptual and imagistic possibilities of the body in fashion. It posits that writing, as an act of creative production and an expressive tool, can initiate ideation of bodies that are as yet unknown – as potentialities. The narrative form and linguistic devices of metaphor, analogy, allusion and projection are used to draw forth, shape and carry the body from the imaginary (concept or idea) into readable form. The transformative body performs as the subject of imagination, the protagonist in the narrative. It also performs as the agent mediating between the actual and imaginary, who, in this context, relates to both the author (me) and reader (you). This article discusses the author’s writing practice that focuses on “writing the imaginary, embodied and performative.” The intent of the practice is to produce affective sketches of imaginative forays into and beyond one’s own body, coalescing into performative self narratives as well as fictions. "You gasp, in wonder, as you contemplate the forces of collision, disintegration and reconstitution at work. You sense an anticipation growing in you that is so achingly pure – because you expect nothing in return. All you want to know is what would become of you when the transformation is complete." (Ha Mitford, 2012) This article connects Joanne Entwistle’s emphasis on dress as embodied practice, the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard, especially his writings on the poetics of the creative imagination, and the concept of ekphrasis (specifically the use of verbal art to engage a visual one) put forth by literary critics and authors Michael Clune and Ben Lerner. The discussion weaves through a piece of prose fiction entitled Falling which alludes to some of the concepts in this article. Produced as part of the author’s PhD research practice, Falling presents an alternative, narrativebased approach to account for the poetics of fashion, using the transformable/transformative body as the site and subject. The narrative centres on a body undergoing a process of extreme physical transformation, metaphorically referring to the continual disintegration and reconstitution of the self, at the verge of fashion, where fashion is understood, conceptually, as the aesthetic expression of ideas and sensibilities to do with contemporariness and progress (Lehmann, 2000, p. xii), and how this implicates the self. The article mediates literary experiences of what the body could potentially be, and suggests the capacity of writing to account for fashion as an embodied practice and lived experience. Falling performs the propositions put forward in this presentation – to enact, through writing, processes of bodily transformation that drive fashion, stressing the fundamental role of imagination, and the performativity of language in understanding the transformative agency of fashion.
Using social media as a toolkit for co-creation when designing fashion with communities
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Lapolla, Kendra
This research introduces a transformational strategy for using social media as an access point to engage a wider community in the co-creation of fashion design. Past research in co-creative fashion has examined participatory opportunities through mass customization and crowdsourcing, but has undervalued the source of “user-generated content” from social media as an initiative in co-creative fashion design. This usergenerated content on social media platforms can be used as a co-creative toolkit to encourage active engagement in the beginning of the fashion design process. Cocreative toolkits are used to invite non-designers into the beginning of the design process and allow further creativity to trigger different feelings, emotions and desires (Sanders & William, 2001). This approach provides more than mere product selection and customization. Otto von Busch (2008, p. 32) states: Perhaps there can be forms of fashion participation, beyond mere choosing, in which we can create our own parallel but symbiotic arenas and practices. This does not mean becoming the new dictators of a new microculture, but instead of being able to experiment with radically participatory forms of fashion. This research explores a new approach for participatory fashion by addressing the question, how can social media be used to engage communities throughout the entire fashion design process? Through examination of a case study, new strategies illustrate how social media can be used for co-creation in the fashion design process. This case study employs Pinterest.com as a co-creative toolkit for a small community of young urban professionals to virtually pin inspirational ideas that inform designers throughout the design process. Designs are added to the website where the community is further able to add input. The ability for these co-creators to post inspiration, thoughts and ideas initiates a creative conversation with the designer. Further, this open dialogue continues when the co-creators eagerly “like” and comment on previous posts. This provokes a fluid visual and verbal discussion that allows for more globally accessible co-creation over time. Unlike other co-creative toolkits used in a timed session, these co-creators are guided by their own desire to contribute when and where they want. When social media is used this way as a toolkit for co-creation, communities are invited to not only be involved in the design process but also to have greater influence over the final designs.
Transformative textiles: integrating material and information in the design of sonified textiles
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Alexander, Charlotte
Digital technologies are now deeply embedded in our everyday lives, becoming seamlessly integrated with objects and materials that we engage with routinely. Digital information is no longer confined to screens as “painted bits”, but is spilling into our environments creating a seamless extension of the physical affordances of objects into the digital domain. This seamless integration is enabling information to be explored through new modes of interaction, utilizing interactive materials that can be manipulated, accessed, and programmed. The progressive, ubiquitous nature of computing is creating a need to re-evaluate the ways in which new technological emergences affect how we relate to and understand the world around us. A key area of material technologies development contributing to this seamlessness is “interactive textiles”, also known as smart textiles or “e-textiles”. These materials are the amalgamation of digital technologies and textiles, allowing materials the ability to sense, react, and display. This utilization of digital media within our materiality is producing textiles that are no longer mute, but are responsive, amplified through a number of outputs, including light and sound. This transformation of materials from passive to responsive is being driven by the informational capacity of embedded technologies. Küchler (2008) describes e-textiles as existing not simply as material but also informational. This material-informational duality highlights a need to understand the way in which we relate to material in our changing technological world, and a closer consideration of our “dual citizenships” between our physical (material) and digital (informational) spaces. Through a practice-led investigation, utilizing the processes of the creation, prototyping and performance of sonified textiles, this paper presents current research into the relationship between textile as material and information and the way in which these dimensions may be aligned successfully through design. It also draws on key theoretical texts and the work of other designers. Considering closely this transformation of textiles, this investigation intends to understand the evolving relationship between material and information; the physical and the digital.
Re-shaping the process of design & making: shifting the relationship between designer and client in the context of digital knitwear design and production systems
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Farren, Anne; Yang, Sooyung
New technologies have created a gap in designer knowledge and understanding of the design capabilities and production potential of new CAD software driven equipment. Significantly, within some sectors of the fashion industry, there is an assumption that CAD software run production technologies can eliminate the need for a designer, with production-based technologies “driven” by a technician. Our work with the garment industry supports the emergence of an assumption amongst production machinery manufacturers that CAD software systems can eliminate design input and associated costs (Mohammed, May, & Alavi, 2008; Eckert, Cross, & Johnson, 2000; Eckert, Kelly, & Stacey, 1999). CAD driven production technologies such as the Shima Seiki WholeGarment® knitting system have “predefined garment templates” (preregistered garment shapes in Shima Seiki’s terms) embedded in the software. The manufacturer of this machine claims that these preregistered garment shapes can minimize the creativity gap between the designer and technician. However it is our experience that the system is too complex for cost effective implementation of design innovation. Recent developments in CAD driven knitwear production systems have resulted in changes to the conventional relationships between the client, the designer and the technician. In this context, we have identified a new role, the “designer-interpreter”. Designer-interpreter denotes a professional knitwear designer with additional training in managing computerized seamless knitting machines. Research carried out at Curtin University has identified this as a creative role that is required to optimize design and production using computerized flat V-bed seamless knitting systems. Within current applications of computerised V-bed seamless knitting systems, the textile and garment design processes are fully integrated and cannot be effectivelymanipulated in isolation. There is a current assumption that a knitwear technician can be a design-interpreter. However the designer-interpreter is required to facilitate the creative integration of textile and garment design. This is achieved through the application of their specialist knowledge of knit design, CAD driven software and machine operation. The designer-interpreter can work with either another designer or the end user to develop fully customized garments. With the creative support of the designer-interpreter, a consumer without any design background effectively becomes a “designer”. This system repositions the relationship between designer, manufacturer and consumer. This paper presents research carried out by the Fashion Design & Research HUB at Curtin University into the creative potential of the design process using computerized flat V-bed seamless knitting technology for the client with little or no garment design experience. It reflects on observations made during workshops, of the changing nature in the relationships between designer-interpreter, client, design process and technology.
Shifting ideas of time and place in fashion
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Palomo-Lovinski, Noël; Faerm, Steven
This paper examines how shifting contemporary conceptions of time and place affect the current practices of the fashion industry. The Internet as a reporting tool, coupled with remarkably accelerated production cycles, has rendered fashion both contemporaneous yet timeless, thus making the traditional system of trends or selling cycles superfluous. As fashion companies expand within a global market, clothing has become both seasonless and placeless, as locality is overwhelmed by mass fashion. Demands prompted by these new conceptions of time and place are placing unprecedented responsibilities on designers who must increasingly develop excessive quantities of product suited to multiple climates and target highly differentiated aesthetic preferences and localized communities. Beyond the homogeneity of mass global fashion, the Internet has also helped to define communities beyond environmental proximity, thus rendering place as more of a concept then a literal idea. The fashion industry and academia must adapt to new best practices since the present system of doing business is counterproductive to establishing a viable and sustainable future. These changing perceptions of temporality and regional relationships create new opportunities for industry and education. How can designers create clothing that successfully addresses both localized and specialized demographics and succeeds in the increasingly timeless and placeless market? How will the designer's role evolve as a result of this expanding market? There are a few examples, both professional and theoretical, within the present fashion industry that can serve as burgeoning models for this new concept of practice. Educators and researchers such as Becky Earley, Holly McQuillan, Timo Rissanen, and Kate Fletcher have suggested a variety of “designer-as-maker” pathways in theoretical practice that seek to create tangible results. Design practitioners such as Natalie Chanin and Azzedine Alia have created business models that subvert the traditional industry systems. Additionally, small-batch manufacturing, made possible through technology such as 3D printing, digital textile printing, and knitting machines, suggests that fashion need not be confined to one place and limited by predetermined concepts of time. Seen through the framework of social geography and social theory perspectives, this paper examines the possible implications of time and place on design and future industry practices. These concepts will be examined through a two-pronged approach by considering both advocacy within the fashion industry, and how to best educate students so they may employ these best practices as future design leaders. This paper seeks to add to the conversation of professional practitioners with insights to navigate the evolving industry with alternative design and business structures. The paper also aims to provide design educators with an increased facility and awareness into future industry practices so they may successfully evolve their programmes and curricula.
Tactility and experience as transformational strategy
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Riisberg, Vibeke; Louise Bang, Anne; Locher, Laura; Breuil Moat, Alina
The Awareness Project investigates the following question: Can dialogue tools that challenge tactile competencies support the development of fashion and textile design in a sustainable direction? In this article, we pay special attention to user engagement and design education and discuss experiences of tactile sensibility as a means to create increased awareness about the material quality of textiles and garments. The aim of our research is to develop new dialogue tools to be used in the teaching of fashion and textile design students in order to stimulate new ways of thinking and engaging with users. By employing participatory methods in the field of fashion and textiles, we seek to develop an alternative transformational strategy that may further the design of products and services for a more sustainable future. In the initial theoretical section, we define tactile sensibility, which is at the core of our research question. Next, we take a closer look at what constitutes an experience and how scholars in the field of fashion and textiles connect this to sustainability issues. Subsequently, we describe the methodical basis of the dialogue tool and our empirical material. We base our discussion on two experiments conducted as part of the Awareness Project. The outcome of the study shows new ways of establishing dialogue between users and designers, as well as furthering reflection and verbalization of areas within the perception of textile and fashion products that are often considered “tacit knowledge” and a “tacit experience”. Finally, we conclude that if designers wish to promote change related to sustainability, it is likely that an embodied participatory dialogue that builds on the combination of user experience and tactile sensibility can be further developed into didactic tools to support a “new design paradigm” and eventually contribute to changes in the fast fashion system.
Enabling design and business innovation through new textile technologies
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Joseph, Frances; Heslop, Peter
Textile production initiated the first industrial revolution, with James Hargreaves’ invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1766 introducing the beginning of systems of mechanized mass production. More recently, the development of new forms of digital manufacturing has given rise to a “New Industrial Revolution”. This paper considers the introduction of digital textile technologies in relation to this new “maker” economy and to traditional industrial textile and apparel design and production systems. While factors such as high investment costs, technology limitations and the need for specialized technical knowledge initially restricted the uptake of new technologies by traditional textile and fashion design manufacturing companies, technology developments are overcoming many of these problems. However, a lack of access and usability has limited engagement and innovation by designers, makers and technology entrepreneurs. This paper discusses the achievements, opportunities, limitations and impacts of work conducted through a university-based research and development centre that provides access to advanced technologies and associated technical, research and design expertise in areas of digital textile printing and seamless knitting for product development, sampling and training. Drawing on case studies developed from client and staff interviews, product and market analysis, recent theoretical writings and a contextual review, the paper will consider ways in which these technologies are helping designers and companies to do things differently and create value. More immediate and localized design development strategies can support on demand production of specialized, high value products locally and internationally. They have also provided more effective design and production methods to other industries; for example, costume designers for film, theatre and television companies. This facility also provides support for new areas of application and new manufacturing processes, for example in the areas of shaped, seamless knit and e-textiles. Through these studies, traditional fashion production and market problems such as remote global supply chains, the separate and highly specialized roles of designers and technicians in the knitwear industry, the production of pre and post-market textile waste and the minimizing of stock levels are reconsidered. Business concepts and strategies, enabled by new forms of digital manufacturing are related to approaches discussed in the case studies.
Repeatless: transforming surface pattern with generative design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Russell, Alex
Much of the initial use of digital technology within the printed textile industry has focused on the particular advantages that it has over previous fabric printing methods. Examples include simplifying workflow, producing relatively cheap short runs, or allowing designers to work with photographic imagery and unlimited colour palettes. This paper firstly identifies that digital fabric printing has a fundamentally different possibility in relation to its forerunners. Formerly, printing was essentially the ability to reproduce the same image (or text) over and over again. Digital printing, however, does not have to work from static information; it can print a design that changes as it is being printed. Secondly, the research demonstrates that digital technology can provide the content with which to do this, creating a design that not only changes as it is being printed, but that never repeats. This is achieved by a generative software application. The resulting code is based on cellular automata, a method of mathematical modelling that allows the elements within a system to evolve in relation to each other. In this case, the elements are the individual motifs or other visual components and the system is the overall design. The rules that govern how the motifs arrange themselves are based on methods used by printed textile designers to ensure the eye can roam freely over a design, balancing the arrangement and scale of the motifs, for example, or the negative space between them. The degree of complexity possible with cellular automata allows the qualitative design process to be modelled with a richness that maps the skills of creating pattern into code. The output is a non-repeating design of infinite length that can be saved section by section to be streamed to a digital printer, exploiting the technology in an entirely novel fashion. Seen individually, digital design and digital printing technology present a large number of new possibilities for the printed textile industry. This paper shows a way that interdisciplinary, practice-led research can integrate them and offer a method to shift the paradigms of what pattern is and the way in which it can be reproduced.
Fashion beyond representation
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Shand, Peter
The promise of transformation is fashion’s most significant gift. In ideal form, fashion is a site of profound elasticity. That ideal appears as both a reflection of constant becoming with its attendant stimulation and as a means by which we might embrace and actively reveal such a state. As a notion, fashion offers almost pure encounter by virtue of: its existence in duration; a directionless or productively purposeless mode of proposition; its social provocation; and an intimate relationship to the body politic. Its ceaselessness and relentlessness activates imagination, memory, wonder, shock. Its proximity to lived experience actualizes degrees of phenomenological and psychological connection with a striking capacity to move us, to reflect in material form a life immanent. As a mode of generative creative practice, fashion has a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for invention, distinction and contestation. It both reflects and anticipates existing social and cultural conditions and contributes to their overhaul. Its capacity for revolution is a condition both internal to its own logic and manifest in its realization in the world. As a means for personal or individual expression it is a toolbox par excellence. Individuals are able to reflect their membership of community and to exhibit idiosyncrasies of temperament, outlook, belief or taste. Nor does fashion of itself constrain those activities – as with any good box of tools ideas and items both may be picked up, worn, discarded, modified, returned to or destroyed at the behest of the user. Fashion enables us self-actualizing exhibition whilst simultaneously pointing to the necessity of its own redundancy. Janus-faced, fashion affords a means by which we may both advance and attempt to still the ceaselessness of our becoming.
Wear, repair and remake: the evolution of fashion practice by design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Cramer, Jo
Through my postgraduate, fashion practice-based research project, The Living Wardrobe, I have become increasingly interested in garment design that specifically facilitates future alteration and modification. There is potential for such a simple design approach to encourage habits of reduced consumption when garments are kept in use by adapting to wearers’ changing needs. Once a common provision in garments, the capacity for alteration is largely missing from contemporary women’s wear. The economies of mass production reduce seam allowances to the minimum required for assembly, while complex industrial construction methods deter intervention. At the same time, the practical skills of repair and alteration are rarely learnt anymore. So passive has fashion consumption become and so disposable are the products that a dropped hem, ripped seam or missing button usually consigns a garment to the (charity) bin and justifies another trip to the boutiques. In an attempt to disrupt this cycle, my research looks at design strategies with the potential to re-engage the wearer in habits of wear, repair and remake. Designing garments with the adaptability required for prolonged, active use enables garments to better keep up with the times, changing style (not merely fit) over time. This approach to product longevity considers the use of the garment across multiple lifetimes, acknowledging that a garment may have several sequential owners. Through a discussion of recently developed garment prototypes, this paper will outline the challenges I have encountered in designing garments to actively engage consumers in this cycle of wear, repair and remake. These challenges range from the practical, technical and the aesthetic to considerations of participatory design strategies, consumer education, design authorship, and alternative models of fashion production and consumption. This discussion further considers the impact of this research on my fashion practice. The Living Wardrobe aims to be a fashion practice that accepts responsibility for the design agency of the garments it creates. Remaking my practice to this end has fundamentally shifted how I approach design development, fashion production and communication, suggesting a new model of fashion design practice for sustainability.
The Wardrobe Hack and Uncatwalk digital platforms of action and services for positive engagement with clothing
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Whitty, Jennifer
"The choices we make about what we wear are influenced by life present, lives past and our ideas about our future selves. Expressions of values ... build a rationale for dress that transcend narrow commercial views about fashion. Instead they give us broader perspectives that honour our reality as well as our aspirations; and connect our psyche with our fibre and fashion choices." (Fletcher, 2014) This research explores the emerging field of enriching the user experiences of people involved with fashion in the post-production sector and in the post-retail environment. This is an area in which historically the fashion industry has paid little attention. This research addresses the question, can designers create courses of actions or “services” using digital media that enable “users” of clothing to embrace the positive aspects of dress for a creative and satisfying experience of fashion? The research builds on Kate Fletcher’s work within the “Local Wisdom” international fashion research project, which provided a forum for critiquing the dominant logic of growth in a world of finite limits (Daly, 1992; Jackson, 2009) by applying design skills to offer user-initiated examples of resourceful practices (Manzini & Jegou, 2003). The projects “Wardrobe Hack” (2014), developed by researchers Whitty and McQuillan, and “Uncatwalk” (2014), developed by Whitty, explore the emerging field of enriching the fashion user experience by utilizing digital platforms for disseminating and extending this engagement. The Uncatwalk website provides a digital media interface for a democratic virtual global exchange of interactions involving fashion. The Wardrobe Hack site provides a service for empowering and sharing clothing user stories and systems. We currently have a situation in society where there is low participation with clothing, as clothes are disposed of rapidly. This research seeks to address this situation to create a better integration of clothing and meaning in our lives. It aims to get to the heart of the current issues in the fashion industry and propose positive alternative roles for designers and consumers. Ezio Manzini (1997) has long declared that sustainability is a societal journey, brought about by acquiring new awareness and perceptions. Guy Julier (2008) makes a case that design activism builds on what already exists. In keeping with this thinking these research projects have been developed with direct participation from members of the public.
The shift from 3D body scanned data to the physical world
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Reilly, Lyle
This paper highlights the technological relationship and opportunities to combine 3D body scan and 3D print technologies for consideration within the fashion sector. Three dimensional (3D) human body scanning technology has been available for more than 20 years; fashion along with a number of other industries such as entertainment, security and medical have successfully extracted computational scanned data to obtain specific body measurement to gain a picture of body shape, proportion and posture. This information can provide valuable insight when dealing with the complexity of the human form, particularly in the context of lifestyle, age, ethnicity and location. Predominately this empirical data has been gathered to develop size/measurement averages for large population studies (11,000 participants were scanned, providing 130 body separate body measurements, in recent commissions in both SizeUK and SizeUSA). In a fashion context, the information provided by these large studies has tended to reflect the mass apparel market, in particular sizing measurements for targeted groups, while customization of 3D body scan data for individuals within the fashion and textile industries has been limited. To date the most prominent examples have come from the niche market arena of men’s suiting and specialized sportswear to aid fit, comfort and performance. Over a similar period of time, 3D printing technology has also grown to the point that commercially available equipment has helped to shift a design approach for modelling and rapid prototyping applications. This technological transformation is having a profound effect on existing industries, for instance engineering, while also providing a fresh platform for emerging designers from many sectors to communicate design ideas as a physical reality. For example, bespoke fashion accessories developed by UK designer Catherine Wales in her 2013 work “Project DNA” illustrates that the fashion and textiles industries can also take part in this industrial transformation. Using a technology focused design thinking framework, the research explores the opportunity for combining both these technologies; in other words utilizing individual 3D body scan data in the form of a point cloud to produce physical 3D modelling for customization purposes. At this stage there is little documentation of the reflective practice to empower designers with the techniques to connect these technologies, or indeed the exploration of creative possibilities and human centred outcomes. This paper documents early stage development of the conversion process from a Symcad 3D body scanner to outputs obtained from a Formiga P100 3D laser sintering system housed within the Design & Creative Technologies Faculty at AUT University, New Zealand. The physical prototype outputs are based on actual body scan data to produce a scaled mannequin. Key research findings and insight clusters are evaluated within a summary framework which highlights potential applications and uses for the fashion sector to engage with such technology to personalize and enrich human engagement.
Eye tracking to establish a hierarchy of attention with an online fashion video
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Payne, Ryan
Engaging customers online is fast becoming a focus for entrepreneurs, researchers and marketers as it offers a platform with a lower barrier of entry and is heavily utilized among the tech savvy millennial generation (aged 18-24) through social applications currently such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Often, using it as an entertainment source to replace television shows, online videos for today’s millennial generation have become the new and socially acceptable way to interact with peers as well as with various brands. This research explores how fashion videos have risen in prominence and how they are perceived by the millennial generation. It explores attitude formation and online image processing to generate a hierarchical list of traits which participants focused upon when viewing a fashion video. The result is an established order to engage, direct and hold the attention of audiences for the longest time possible; eyes of the people in videos, lips, motion, size, images, colour, text style and, lastly, position. Using optometric or eye gaze tracking technology to capture where participants directed their focus, a comparison of what participants believed they valued to what they actually focused upon was demonstrated, with 30 semi-structured interviews and pre/post questionnaires to measure perceptions of the portrayed brand. This article articulates how the hierarchy generated is based upon a social referencing scheme for the viewer, followed by an attribute information search, to the situation and branded objects portrayed. Additionally this study, unsurprisingly, found that participants did not fully remember the full videos that they were exposed to, nor the content upon which they had directly focused. However, it is important to note that participants could recall considerably more amounts of information when their eye pupils dilated, presenting an opportunity for additional research.
The fashion system and the ephemeral: ballet and costume
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) O’Brien, Caroline
This paper interrogates the theory that dress is synonymous with the identity of the ballerina. Rooted in the seventeenth century French court, classical ballet is perhaps our last vestige of aristocratic manners and civility. The early court dances were encumbered by dress of the day, arguably identifiable in its silhouette and material composition. In 1832 Marie Taglioni made a landmark contribution to the ballet, the combination of the romantic tutu and the satin slippers that allowed her to elevate onto her toes. The ballerina evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an iconic symbol of feminine virtue, permitting an earthbound mortal with a gift for movement to transcend her corporeal bonds and hover over the earth. The religion of the ballerina might be described as an art of high ideals and self-control in which a public aristocratic bearing and grace symbolize private virtue and an elevated state of being. The classical tutu is an esoteric garment, an evolution of theatrical pragmatism and ephemeral fashion, but in its lightness, sparkle and elegance, in the craft and dedication that go into its making, the tutu embodies everything that ballet is about. This paper considers the ways the tutu constructs and articulates an appropriate ballerina femininity, demonstrating that this iconic functional artefact of the ballet is beautiful in its own right. Expressive of the dichotomy inherent to the life of the ballerina, the pristine surface exists in sharp contrast to the stains of sweat and makeup combined with the tang of anxiety embedded in the layers, illuminating the signs of a ballerina’s work. The trained and honed contours of the ballerina body become transformed in the adoption of the carapace that is the bodice bordered with a wide froth of pleated netting. The garment offers a fragile, protective space that defines a boundary between the unfinished, vulnerable, leaky-at-the-margins body and the pristine and glittering seamless surface. The geometric and architectural shapes performed by the ballerina present an infinitely recognizable silhouette on the stage. The ballet costume sustains and is sustained by the aristocratic codes of manners and behaviour, and has continued to transform itself innumerable times during its history. If classical ballet is about movement, theatrical presentation and storytelling, the tutu becomes the only material evidence of the performance while the dance itself remains an ephemeral art form, leaving no record.
In high heels on shifting ground: fashioning lives in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Cie, Christina
Clothing serves as a marker of identity, but how do you dress when you have nothing left but the clothes that you were wearing when you had to run? Who are you, when dressed entirely in someone else’s choice of clothes? Does the resourcefulness necessary for self-expression under such circumstances also reinforce our ability to cope and survive on a more than material level? What can losing everything help us to remember? Taking the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand as its starting point, this article will examine the usefulness of fashion, sometimes dismissed as a “frivolous” concern, during times of crisis. It will consider examples from these and other catastrophic events, considering how individuals and communities have used fashion as an expression of resilience and to defy the devastation wrought by disaster (Howell, 2012; Labrum, McKergow, & Gibson, 2007). The article will be structured to consider the “epicentre” of the effect of the earthquake, as on the individual, the wider social ramifications as the tremors ripple out, and the aftershocks that can continue to disrupt attempts at re-establishing daily patterns. “Habitus” is defined as a state of mind by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Nice 1977). It is what we practice, what has been “preached” to us, and what we have picked up from our surroundings. However, this mental space, a culmination of personal and cultural memory, requires a habitat, a physical place for its expression and evolution. Analysis of the success of the temporary Re:START mall, created from shipping containers, offers a case study on the role of fashion, as retail and spectacle, in the vigorously debated regeneration of this city. Workplaces, offices, bars and clubs serve as venues for interaction, identification and individuality, but if we dress up to go out, what happens when there is nowhere left to go to? If the street is gone, how could a shop serve “street style”, and act as a site for social interaction as well as retail and revenue? What role can fashion play in reinvigorating public spaces and events in a devastated area? From individual efforts to community initiatives, what is the role of fashion in the recovery of a city, and the cultural life of a region?
Volumetric shape making and pattern cutting
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Campbell, Lesley
This paper, in light of pedagogical observations, seeks to explore and examine an alternative approach to pattern cutting through volumetric shape making and a practical, process led investigation using Alien body shapes as a teaching resource. The holistic fashion designer explores and engages with both silhouette and pattern cutting, by developing the skills of volumetric shape making. The process of pattern cutting and volumetric shape making is an iterative translation between two dimensions and three dimensions which requires a practical, experimental approach. A sequential series of interactive workshops have been developed using irregular shaped mannequins to facilitate and develop this process, promoting creative outcomes and a deeper understanding of pattern cutting. This hands on improvisational approach without a known outcome allows for design to progress organically. The above process of thinking, “drawing” and pattern cutting in three dimensions can be extremely challenging and alien to fashion students who often have a pattern cutting foundation based on technical drawings and drafting principles mostly in a two dimensional format. The aim is to explore whether a synaptic link created between hand, eye and mind through an algorithm, can assist the holistic fashion designer and enhance creativity. The vehicle of delivery for this investigation is a series of experimental workshops undertaken by all three levels of BA (Hons) Fashion Design students at Sheffield Hallam University. This dynamic working method challenges conventional teaching methods of demonstration, books and handouts and promotes enjoyment of the journey, thus reducing preconceived ideals, allowing more scope for spontaneous outcomes. Student workshops also explore morphology as a challenge to the traditional western convention of body contouring through flat pattern cutting. Morphology is explored through a series of irregular shaped, non-humanoid forms: Alien Bodies. Full-scale Alien Body mannequins are provided as a resource in the workshop on which to apply the method of direct working in three dimensions to generate an initial pattern. Reflection, analysis and discussion of the pattern shape when transformed back to the flat plane, aims to promote comprehension and underpin the holistic designing/pattern cutting approach. “Alien Body - Pushing Pattern Parameters” workshops culminated in an exhibition at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery where a selection of 18 garments and their flat patterns, all created by students during the previous six month period, were displayed. This paper evaluates data captured and draws on anecdotal evidence gathered from students attending these workshops as well as looks at the methodologies used including process led investigation and peer review within the university environment. It forms a cornerstone for further questioning of whether the fashion designer and pattern cutter is the same person.
Transformational strategies: the Margiela Rabbit and the Gecko Girl
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Bagnall, Catherine; Collier, Katie
Elizabeth Costello, the elderly fiction writer in J.M Coetzee’s novel of the same name, discusses the possibility of how a human being can feel what it is like to be a bat. She believes that to feel thus, one does not need to experience bat life through the sense modalities of being a bat but rather “to be a living bat is to be full of being: being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being” (Coetzee, 2004, p. 69). Elizabeth Costello isn’t interested in clothing but she does believe that to feel what it is like to be a bat one needs the sensations of fullness and embodiedness; the sensation of being a body with limbs that have an extension in space, of being alive to the world. Wearing a dress with more than two sleeves gives me the sense of having more than two arms and in a dress with a tail I have a tail. The feeling of being in certain clothes offers me the potential to “become” something else and to feel expansive. This paper/performance presents findings from the work of two artists and designers who are both using the distinctively cultural form of clothing to explore the human/non-human animal divide. Both artists are putting into practice Deleuzian theories of “becoming other” as a transformational strategy to shift our relationship to our environment and our fellow non- human creatures using clothing, performance, photography and video to do this. The questions we both ask are: in this moment of complexity and uncertainty that the world is currently in, what is the role of imagination in inventing new possible worlds? How can the transformative nature of clothing offer new modes of experience that are possibly more sensual and slower than what we usually give value to and can clothing help to shift our relationship with the environment and other living creatures? Kate Soper argues that if we want to maintain a sustainable world that both humans and non-humans can happily and healthily continue to live in, we need alternative outlets for transcendence” that are not provided by Western industrialist consumerist culture which removes us from a natural simplicity or immanence, rather than returns us to it. (Soper, 1999) Considering these ideas we are interested in attempting to refigure a world where we are the ‘animal’. Two women, possibly wearing tails, will present this paper as a scripted performance.

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