Intra-active fashion

<p>This practice-based research proposes designing fashion intra-actions as an approach that draws from new materialist perspectives. There are those who have argued that the fashion industry is broken, has lost social relevance (Edelkoort 2015; Fletcher & Tham 2019) or has unimagined potential to be realised through reconceptualization (Breward 2016, Vanska 2018). Drawing from my experience as a designer in the fashion industry and as an academic, I respond to these arguments by engaging in reflective practice (Schön 1983, 1992) to examine how activating new materialist perspectives can challenge, shift or extend the role of a fashion practitioner, ways of making fashion, and the outcomes of a fashion practice. Through critical reflection on five creative practice projects that explore applied understandings of new materialist concepts, I expand how fashion materials can be understood. I also demonstrate how exploring what I characterise as the performative relationships between these materials can enhance the creative potential and relevance of a fashion practice. Informed by Otto von Busch (2020, p. 211) who reframes fashion practice as ‘an embodied experience’ and an alchemic process of ‘transgressive intra-actions’ I reframe what I term the fleshy human body as an active, agential, experiential fashion material, and develop insights about the material and discursive qualities of the ongoing, dialogic, performative relationships of influence the body has with other materials. As a result, the research effectively responds to arguments that fashion should be studied as both a material and social phenomenon (Miller 2005; Schiermer 2010; Woodward 2016; Jenss 2016; Steele 2018; Vänskä 2018), and addresses identified gaps in fashion research exploring both materials and materiality (Küchler & Miller 2005; Jenss & Hofmann 2019; Kaiser & Smelik 2020). Drawing from notions of ‘intra-action’ defined by Karen Barad’s (2003) agential realism as well as the ‘logic of collage’ (Etgar 2017), I critically reflect on my approach to designing fashion intra-actions as a process of selecting and arranging materials using methods that leave a degree of space for these materials to influence and shape the realisation of the work. I discuss how my approach activates new materialist perspectives to challenge a range of prevalent, rigid binaries in fashion practice, such as those between designers and consumers, and human and non-human materials. To contextualise my approach, I explore Umberto Eco’s (2006 [1989]) notion of ‘Open Work’ and examine creative outcomes from fashion and performance practitioners, such as Jessica Bugg, Olivier Saillard, Ulrick Martin Larsen and Adele Varcoe, who cultivate open and improvisational qualities in their work, and in doing so, produce an expanded range of outcomes that challenge prevalent models of fashion practice. By charting the development of my own approach to designing fashion intra-actions, this research also develops the critical contexts and advocates for the development of other related new materialist approaches and models of fashion practice that I characterise as Intra-active Fashion. Through this research, my fashion practice becomes an example of how fashion practitioners who have been trained to follow industry-focused approaches can activate new materialist perspectives in their work to develop more responsive, socially relevant, and resilient ways of making fashion. Through critical reflection on my own fashion practice, I demonstrate how adopting new materialist perspectives to practise Intra-active Fashion can enhance what Belkaid-Nerï (2019, p. 188) defines as the ‘spectrum of action’ fashion practitioners engage in, and I speculate on how this expansion could inform more inclusive and flexible models of fashion practice that enhance the way we live and meaningfully engage with each other and the world around us.</p>