Wearing fashion images: reimagining fashion images through material and participatory fashion practices

Wearing Fashion-Images investigates how material and participatory fashion practices, involving garments and wearers, can critique and expand the narrow frame of representation typically promoted by visual fashion-images. The research proposes that while the fashion industry predominantly employs visual fashion-images to market fashion-products to wearers – idealising, automating, and commodifying how they see themselves – that material and participatory fashion practices can be activated by wearers to reimagine these images for themselves. These ideas are explored across a series of practice-based projects that iteratively combine visual, material, and participatory image-making methods, including photography, digital manipulation, printmaking, scanning, pattern-cutting, machine-sewing, collage, décollage, and wearing. These outcomes – which include both fashion-images and image-making apparatuses – are likewise critically interpreted through visual, material, and participatory theories including Vilém Flusser’s critical photographic theory, Barthesian semiotics, and practice-based research in which clothes are positioned as tools. The outcomes of the study contribute to fashion-practice by demonstrating that: i) that garments function representationally as material fashion-images, ii) that garments can be activated as participatory image-making apparatuses, and iii) that wearing is an accessible image-making practice with which wearers can fashion their own representations.<p></p>