How Does Fashion Theory Look?
Fashionable form may be created through a creative form that involves visual research, textile experiments, draping, construction and staging. Fashion theory may provide context for these forms but can also function as abstract or conceptual sketching tools.
In a course on Fashion Methodology, the students were asked to visualize in 3D the theory they had read and discussed for the teaching sessions. This was a way of appropriating the often abstract theory to the individual practice of the student in a double motion of understanding the academic theory and using it as an active in the creative process. One student worked with Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” and his idea of the margin as an ambiguous space visualized through a black-and white dress that foregrounded the destabilization of binaries. Another brought the concept of the “haptic” to life with a woolen bathing suits that prompted an itching sensation even without an active act of touching. The embodied memory of wet wool against the body was enough to provoke a physical reaction.