Blue Air Dress

This project has focused on the clothed body as a site for production of meaning, performance and communication through design. It exposes the role of clothing design as a generator of performance and communication through design. The project has explored the clothed body as visual and embodied narrative and the outcome of the work is three short ‘fashion performance’ films produced in collaboration with a dancer Fukiko Takase (Wayne McGregor’s ‘Random Dance’), filmmaker Timothy Keeling and myself as the designer. This work has enabled me to take into account how the emotional and physical factors as well as the location and site of the body itself contributes to the making, intention and reading of work in the context of hybrid fashion and performance practice.

The project has extended through design and analysis an exploration of memory, emotion, psychology, embodied and haptic experience drawing on interviews with a wide range of participants to record personal histories, experience and recollections of wearing clothing. Design is informed by this research into how the memory of clothing effects behavioural and emotional response and seeks to engage and communicate with wearers and viewers through this shared embodied understanding of clothing and emotion.

From these interviews the most common emotional associations and retelling of embodied experience of wearing clothing were in relation to the feeling and sensory aspects of clothing, for example comfortable clothing, restrictive clothing, movement and freedom of movement some of these particular stories are designed into the Blue Air dress and film. Aesthetic aspects were evident in all the interviews but varied hugely, the aesthetic of the work comes from the particular emotions and memories and through the design process. The garment tells a story of being dressed up, feminine and desirable but feeling uncomfortable and wanting to feel the air between the body and clothing, to achieve freedom and a different form of sensuality. The garment references a range of cultures and experiences from the stories told.