Dialogical Bodies: Everything and Everybody as Material explores how artistic research in the field of fashion (design) practice can negotiate the relationship between bodies and materials. It explores what bodies and materials are—and could be(come)—in fashion design and practice. In doing so, it focuses on different kinds of fashion matter and materiality, including the physical materiality of dressed bodies and identities, to highlight fashion’s sensorial, embodied and affective potential. Through artistic and creative practice research, it underlines the experiential dimensions of fashion, fashion design and fashion practice, opening up alternative ways of making, designing and engaging with fashion.

Practising Solidarity explores how to make and wear clothes in a solidary way. Fashion practitioners, designers and artistic researchers have engaged in a participatory practice of collectively investigating what it entails to practise solidarity in fashion. It is high time to move beyond systemic de-humanization, beyond the intersectional inequalities as well as Eurocentric and exploitative approaches inherent to the current industrial fashion system. In this book, we recognize the urgency of practising more care – for other human beings, animals, organisms, species as well as more care for nature’s matter and the other material inhabitants of the earth that we live with.

Practising Solidarity offers a variety of possible answers to the question with whom or what we need to be solidary with, and how to put solidarity into practice. How can we activate radical visions and imaginations of alternative, more solidary fashion systems? And how could we respect the agency of human beings in precarious positions, while acknowledging the lives of other living (non-human) beings like animals of different species? In doing so, this book presents critical strategies, affirmative approaches and embodied practices that help to practise more solidarity for all living beings and all (living) matter related to fashion, clothing and textiles.

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This article argues for a shift toward more ecocentric, rather anthropocentric, biodesign processes for clothing and textile design. It discusses mainstream understandings of biomimicry and biodesign, rethinking these approaches in a more-than-human and ecocentric direction. The article analyzes the cases of mycelium-based garments and bacterial textile dyes to, on the one hand, show how current biodesigners are already successfully working with natural resources by growing, collaborating with, regenerating, and restoring nature. On the other hand, these two cases are used to show the potential for biodesign practices to move even further beyond a human-centered understanding of designing with nature.

In the introduction of the volume Materials of Culture, László Munteán and Liedeke Plate advocate for a 'materials turn' within the larger sweep of the material turn in the humanities and the social sciences. Drawing on theories of material culture studies, new materialism, and material agency, as well as on recent scholarship in anthropology, archaeology, and art history, the authors lay the groundwork for a materials-based perspective in cultural studies. Rather than taking objects, things, and the concept of materiality, as points of departure for analysis, this perspective focuses on materials and highlights their relevance to culture and vice versa. In their essay “Becoming-with: On Textile Companions and Fungi Friends,” Daniëlle Bruggeman and Lianne Toussaint focus on textile design practices that reinvent the aesthetics, matter, and meaning of fashion, and on the emotional connections between human subjects and the new material “things” they can wear. Using innovative Dutch design practices as a source of inspiration, the authors think through their new materialist and posthuman theoretical and methodological implications. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunks/media/ePDFs_chunks/bis%206699/9783839466971/9783839466971-021/9783839466971-021.pdf?

This article explores three recent cases of alternative, critical fashion practices from the Netherlands that create more agency for makers, wearers and matter. The cases are as follows: (1) the project ‘JOIN Collective Clothes’ by designer Anouk Beckers; (2) the ‘Feminist Needlework Party’; and (3) ‘The Linen Project’. By facilitating collective, participatory practices of making, these cases explore how to give more attention to the actual material aspects of textiles and clothes – and especially to the material aspects of making that hardly get any attention in a globalized market-driven fashion industry. All case studies highlight different material practices of working with matter – e.g. growing flax or doing needlework – that we have generally lost touch with in western consumer culture. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the importance of offering more attention to matter, these case studies have been analysed by drawing upon the theoretical discourse of ‘new materialism’ as well as the theoretical notion of ‘making-with’. By exploring these participatory cases of making-with, this article aims to offer more attention to the material aspects of fashion beyond a consumerist conception – showing how agency matters.

https://sampol.be/2021/04/textiel-wat-met-mode-een-jaar-na-de-grote-stilstand

https://apria.artez.nl/sensorial-nourishment/

https://apria.artez.nl/living-with-and-dying-with/

https://pressandfoldmagazine.com/

https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/unfolding-fashion-tech/

http://airs.artez.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AIRs-Adele-Varcoe_2-april-2018.pdf

What opportunities does the integration of digital technologies in clothing offer? How do wearable technologies transform embodied experience? And can they enable new relationships between human beings and the clothing they wear?

Until now, wearables have not become integrated into everyday fashion and so their meaningful role remains limited. In this book, fashion designer and researcher Pauline van Dongen shows how this can be changed and how the integration of both can be encouraged.

By combining design research with philosophy of technology, Van Dongen provides a new way of looking at the role of technology in fashion, offering interesting alternatives for a sustainable future. Building on the concept of material aesthetics, she emphasizes that technologies are a material concern. Through reflections on her own experiences that are richly illustrated with many examples and many images, she gives practical insights with the aim of better informing the practice of designing wearable technology. Her analysis of unique design exemplars such as the Solar Shirt and Phototrope reveals what wearable technologies do beyond their functional promise and what they mean beyond their symbolic value.