Feel-able: The Sensory Knowledge of Fashion, Dress, and Blindness

This research explores a nuanced understanding of fashion, dress, and embodiment through the sensory knowledge of people who are blind. It reveals how the embodied experience of blindness results in significant sensory knowledge to navigate the ocularcentrism of fashion alongside personal dress practices. Consequently, the study expands empirical research on sensory experience through diverse embodiments, while complicating research on fashion, disability, and blindness that typically assumes participation in the visuality of fashion is both necessary and desirable. Rather than an anthropological or material culture approach to the sensory experience of dress, this study takes a sociological approach to sensory knowledge related to both fashion and dress to allow an examination of the ways in which sensory modes are culturally structured and attributed. This sociological approach understands the senses as a source of knowledge, acquired skills, and a collective form of common sense to discover how sensory knowledge is learnt, developed, and shared. The methodology of the study responds to my subjective position as a nondisabled, sighted researcher by adopting a reflexive, sensory ethnographic approach to qualitative research, attending to the senses while decentring sight in the production of knowledge. Research methods included in-depth interviews, participant observation, and autoethnographic activities to address different sites of fashion and dress, while adapting to the needs of people with blindness. Twenty-one people with varying degrees of vision impairments from metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria, Australia, participated in the research. Sixteen participants identified as female and five as male, with participants ranging from twenty to eighty years of age. Through attending to a “feel-able” world (Miles 60s, blind since childhood), the research reveals how blindness creates an alternative experience of fashion and dress. Despite a perceived “performativity-free zone” (Marina 20s, blind since birth), the embodiment of blindness negotiates a social appearance in the context of visual norms, stereotypes, and taste. Language, as a verbal mirror, becomes the common sense through which the body and garments are understood, functioning as an intersubjective intermediary between the personal and the social. But the assumption of sighted expertise is challenged when considering the significant sensory capital demonstrated by people with blindness in making sense of fashion and dress. The complexity of sensory knowledge is examined through specific interactions between the senses, materiality, and affect, adding to a critique of ocularcentrism. Consequently, the inclusion of people with blindness in fashion studies offers significant value for the understanding of fashion and dress, from the sociocultural contexts in which sensory knowledge is acquired and shared to the adaptable human sensorium and constellation of sensory capacities that shape how we orient ourselves in the world.