Textiles as Material Gestalt: Cloth as a Catalyst in the Co-designing Process

Abstract

is an associate professor in Fashion and Textile Crafts in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. She has a background in the fashion and textile industry where she co-directed two independent labels based and worked as a freelance designer. Her current research projects, "Emotional Fit: Developing a new fashion methodology with mature women" and "The Electric Corset and Other Future Histories", explore material and cultural issues in fashion, textiles and ageing and the use of costume archives to inform the design of e-textiles and wearables. Her research into the role of embodied knowledge in the digital crafting of textiles was recently published in the chapter Closely Held Secrets, in Crafting Textiles in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2016

Bargaining our emotions: Exploring the lived experience of purchasing luxury fashion counterfeit

“…Ten participants, two men and eight women, aged between 20 and 34 (Table 1) were recruited using opportunity and snowball sampling. This sample size was appropriate for our qualitative methodology and based on the sample's homogeneity (Boddy, 2016;Marshall et al, 2013;Smith et al, 2009), and in line with previous qualitative research in emotion and fashion (Carr & Mercer, 2017;Fleetwood-Smith et al, 2019;Sadkowska et al, 2015;Smith & Yates, 2018;Townsend & Sadkowska, 2017). Three participants were early-career employees, and seven were students living in France or England, who had knowingly purchased at least one counterfeit luxury fashion product in the past 2 years.…”

Re-Making fashion experience: A model for ‘participatory research through clothing design’

“…Analysis of the transcripts identified five superordinate (master) themes and subordinate variations, as detailed in Table 2. In this case study we particularly focus on themes 4 and 5; the participants embodied experiences of fashion and the capacity for textiles to act as form of material gestalt, to inform co-creative making (Townsend and Sadkowska 2018). The themes supported the quantitative (measurements) and qualitative (narratives) data accrued in Workshops 1 and 2.…”

“…In Case Study 1: Re-Materialising Mature Men's Experiences of Fashion and Clothing (CS1), (concluded 2016) the male participants' lived experiences of fashion were used as inspiration for upcycled interpretations of second-hand tailored jackets, re-made by the researcher (Sadkowska 2018). Case Study 2: Emotional Fit: Developing a new fashion methodology with older women (CS2) (concluded 2017) benefitted from reflections on the nature of participation in the creative practice in CS1, by proactively involving the female participants as co-designers throughout the entire research process (Townsend and Sadkowska 2018).…”