This visual essay offers a perspective designed to extend and complicate the dialogue surrounding rural fashion through a consideration of just one of the spaces it (recognizably) inhabits. As a case study, the spectacle of Badminton Horse Trials provides a multitude of associations: an internationally renowned sporting event, geographically and culturally located within the English countryside; an affiliated and substantial ‘pop-up’ shopping village, which makes the Trials a retail and fashion event as much as an equestrian event; a landscape setting that supports a temporarily constructed space, embracing aspects of both the rural and the urban(e); and a frame/stage for a series of socially codified interactions informed by dress and communicated through visible appearance and self-presentation. The combination of word and image presented here invites interrogation of the field of fashion and the overlapping contingencies of visual/verbal communication, with a view towards opening up a discourse within fashion to a wider theoretical and practice-led visual community.

This article reflects upon a pilot project crafting textile samples/prototypes for people who are visually impaired. It explores the role that sensorial empathy and further understanding of the language of touch play in the textile crafting process for makers working with people who are visually impaired, and that aesthetic and experiential textiles (while important to all) are especially important to people who are visually impaired. The project undertakes craft research in an area that is generally overlooked by textile designers. The makers/participants were sighted second-year undergraduate textile design students at Nottingham Trent University and the end users, who acted as informants, were service users at My Sight Nottinghamshire (a charity in the United Kingdom addressing visual impairment). The project is situated within human-centred design, with a focus on physically intuitive designs crafted for people with visual impairments. The application and usage of the samples/prototypes are aimed at inclusivity, with engagement centred primarily around haptic touch, and so looking at the textiles may not reveal their potential application, which becomes more apparent through physical engagement. The project was inspired by work within sensory studies, including the concept of sensorial empathy, and research relating to the language of touch through tactile encounters with art objects from a visually impaired perspective. The methods used in the project drew upon empathic design processes, which were informed by sensory ethnography ‐ particularly 'emplacement' and the holistic consideration of mind, body and place ‐ and selected aspects of social haptics, particularly 'environmental description'. Recommendations include further development of the language of touch to support textile craft when working with people who are visually impaired and further consideration of 'grounding' as a concept regularly described by the informants.

Rural spaces have often been overlooked in contemporary fashion scholarship. Academic analysis of modernity has diminished the significance of the rural and has frequently kept separate the rural and the urban. The focus within scholarly study has tended towards an alliance between the ‘un-naturalness’ of the city and the ‘un-naturalness’ of fashion, informed by the (non-verbal) codes and conventions that define social and cultural meaning within urban centres. This article suggests that the discipline of fashion theory is currently limited by a metro-centric bias and proposes the ‘field as mall’ as an example of an alternative space of fashion. This proposition, which literally focuses upon open fields that are temporarily transformed into urban ‘mall-like’ spaces, disrupts the problematic construct of the rural–urban divide. Based on ethnographic ­fieldwork, this article presents a sociological analysis of retailing, consumption and the phenomenon of the ‘pop up’ shopping village at the Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials in Gloucestershire, England. It is argued here that this event is positioned between the rural and the urban, complicating the familiar urban–rural divide by locating aspects of the urban within the rural and the rural within the urban. Furthermore, we contend that the discourses of fashion (from the products on sale through to the symbolic significance of the geographical setting in which this event takes place) evidenced at this site complicates rural and urban relationships. Thus we call here for a re-evaluation of the rural in, for and by fashion scholarship.

Sensory studies have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a significant influence upon the arts, humanities and the social sciences. Study of the senses naturally tends towards the interdisciplinary because such studies provide a point of convergence between a broad range of scientific and socio-cultural research. Fashion theory is a subject area that is inherently concerned with issues of sensorial response. This article explores the concepts of sensorial empathy and crossmodal correspondences-whereby one form of sensory experience generates (or corresponds with) a response in another sense-through a case study of the relationship between film and fashion. In particular, this article analyses Johan Ku's "Selma" fashion collection for Spring/Summer 2014, which was inspired by the character of Selma (as portrayed by Björk) in Lars von Trier's 2000 film Dancer in the Dark. The article suggests that the filmic experience (of watching and hearing) evokes certain textural and sensorial responses that Ku thematically and conceptually transforms into physical and tactile designs as the basis for his "Selma" fashion collection.

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