This article reflects on the conceptual frameworks central to the project Phenomenal Dress and aspects of its methodological approach and realisation. Through a localised, practice-led process, informed by material thinking, posthuman theory from Māori perspectives and processes of 'making-with' we collaborated with the environment through relational entanglement. Engaging with nonhuman phenomena, cultural and scientific experts, we developed mediated materials and textile surfaces as new forms of dress. These were not functional, fashionable products, they were matter flows, formed at a junction of diverse perspectives and collaborative processes. This process recognised dress as material-aesthetic activations, opening pathways towards coemergent understanding. Through this approach, the ecosystem was recognised as the primary collaborator, repositioning human and more-than-human relationships. This strategy was informed by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and ways of knowing), through perspectives of kaitiakitanga (stewardship) and deeper relationship with the lifeworld through acts of sensing, noticing, making, and following. The methodology was grounded in an ontological shift away from human-centredness, focussing on matter as vital collaborator and place as habitat where interconnections between things could be explored and articulated. These conceptual framings are discussed in relation to artefacts and assemblages produced through this collaborative process.

imagining and imaging future fashion abstractThis project takes the researcher's established fashion and textile design practice into a new space of the virtual and digital as a context for creative enquiry. Through discussion on two speculative experiments that use motion capture technology, this enquiry considers the transformational potential of a digital materiality as an environment in which to re-imagine and re-image the surfaces of future fashion. Specifically, it asks what influence the virtual/digital environment will have in shaping the aesthetics of the experiments. These acts of transformation, through morphing surfaces and shape-shifting material forms, question contemporary norms of using, consuming, engaging with and understanding fashion and textiles. Enfolded in this creative research is the recognition of how these shifts from matter to metaphor, from object to ephemeral, from dress to transformable interface could ignite alternatives to the current fashion manufacture and consumption process.

No abstract