Abstract combinations

Fashion is a practice involving diverse habits of coordination by which affects, signs, sensations and desires are transmitted between bodies in varied spatial, temporal, material and affective encounters. Reflecting on fashion design pedagogies and their somatic resonances in the classroom, this article expands the traditional definition of fashion beyond its formal materiality such that it becomes understood as an intensive encounter between a body and an object in an event of wearing. Grounded in a discussion of a series of pedagogical experiments for teaching new habits of the body, I emphasize new ways of paying attention to the diverse sensations and affects that encounters with abstracted fashion garments can give rise to. This article concludes with the need to consider the practice-based extensive, material dimensions that constitutes the making of fashion in an attempt to work through the production of intensity, affect and sensation in the body.