Shapeshifting: A Conference on Transformative Paradigms of Fashion and Textile Design

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10292/8553

This publication presents 30 selected papers developed from an initial 47 presentations made at the Shapeshifting Conference held in Auckland in April 2014. The conference explored transformative paradigms in fashion and textile design through four thematic frameworks including Ambiguous & Automated Forms; Surface & Structural Transformations; The Fashion System & The Ephemeral; and Transformational Strategies. Shapeshifting, as a process of change and responsive agency is considered in these papers as a concern with cultures of transformation, navigations of the social and technological and the transversal hacker who unpicks and revises in order to contest what is current and deliver our future.

Editors: Frances Joseph, Mandy Smith, Miranda Smitheram and Jan Hamon

All 30 papers selected for publication were double blind peer reviewed by an international panel of fashion and textile experts and academic reviewers.

The publication has been produced by the Textile and Design Laboratory and Colab at the Auckland University of Technology, February 2015.

ISBN: 978-1-927184-27-1

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 30

Re-shaping the process of design & making: shifting the relationship between designer and client in the context of digital knitwear design and production systems
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Farren, Anne; Yang, Sooyung
New technologies have created a gap in designer knowledge and understanding of the design capabilities and production potential of new CAD software driven equipment. Significantly, within some sectors of the fashion industry, there is an assumption that CAD software run production technologies can eliminate the need for a designer, with production-based technologies “driven” by a technician. Our work with the garment industry supports the emergence of an assumption amongst production machinery manufacturers that CAD software systems can eliminate design input and associated costs (Mohammed, May, & Alavi, 2008; Eckert, Cross, & Johnson, 2000; Eckert, Kelly, & Stacey, 1999). CAD driven production technologies such as the Shima Seiki WholeGarment® knitting system have “predefined garment templates” (preregistered garment shapes in Shima Seiki’s terms) embedded in the software. The manufacturer of this machine claims that these preregistered garment shapes can minimize the creativity gap between the designer and technician. However it is our experience that the system is too complex for cost effective implementation of design innovation. Recent developments in CAD driven knitwear production systems have resulted in changes to the conventional relationships between the client, the designer and the technician. In this context, we have identified a new role, the “designer-interpreter”. Designer-interpreter denotes a professional knitwear designer with additional training in managing computerized seamless knitting machines. Research carried out at Curtin University has identified this as a creative role that is required to optimize design and production using computerized flat V-bed seamless knitting systems. Within current applications of computerised V-bed seamless knitting systems, the textile and garment design processes are fully integrated and cannot be effectivelymanipulated in isolation. There is a current assumption that a knitwear technician can be a design-interpreter. However the designer-interpreter is required to facilitate the creative integration of textile and garment design. This is achieved through the application of their specialist knowledge of knit design, CAD driven software and machine operation. The designer-interpreter can work with either another designer or the end user to develop fully customized garments. With the creative support of the designer-interpreter, a consumer without any design background effectively becomes a “designer”. This system repositions the relationship between designer, manufacturer and consumer. This paper presents research carried out by the Fashion Design & Research HUB at Curtin University into the creative potential of the design process using computerized flat V-bed seamless knitting technology for the client with little or no garment design experience. It reflects on observations made during workshops, of the changing nature in the relationships between designer-interpreter, client, design process and technology.
Writing on the transformative and imaginary body
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Ha, Winnie
"Unable to sense any articulation in your palms and fingers, you realise your arms are now stumps, rounded off where the elbows would have been. All you can feel is clammy, thin film, like loosely stretched latex. You are entirely covered in a milky coalescence forming a semi-translucent, membrane-like film. This new skin stretches over an engorged blob enclosing you like a wrinkly, half-deflated water balloon. Laying there immobilised you think of those whole headless chickens with their appendages neatly tucked under plump bodies, wrapped in plastic bags and sitting in a supermarket cool room along with countless others, their identity registered on barcode stickers, their value calculated in weight." (Ha Mitford, 2012) This article discusses the potential for the literary imagination to extend conceptual and imagistic possibilities of the body in fashion. It posits that writing, as an act of creative production and an expressive tool, can initiate ideation of bodies that are as yet unknown – as potentialities. The narrative form and linguistic devices of metaphor, analogy, allusion and projection are used to draw forth, shape and carry the body from the imaginary (concept or idea) into readable form. The transformative body performs as the subject of imagination, the protagonist in the narrative. It also performs as the agent mediating between the actual and imaginary, who, in this context, relates to both the author (me) and reader (you). This article discusses the author’s writing practice that focuses on “writing the imaginary, embodied and performative.” The intent of the practice is to produce affective sketches of imaginative forays into and beyond one’s own body, coalescing into performative self narratives as well as fictions. "You gasp, in wonder, as you contemplate the forces of collision, disintegration and reconstitution at work. You sense an anticipation growing in you that is so achingly pure – because you expect nothing in return. All you want to know is what would become of you when the transformation is complete." (Ha Mitford, 2012) This article connects Joanne Entwistle’s emphasis on dress as embodied practice, the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard, especially his writings on the poetics of the creative imagination, and the concept of ekphrasis (specifically the use of verbal art to engage a visual one) put forth by literary critics and authors Michael Clune and Ben Lerner. The discussion weaves through a piece of prose fiction entitled Falling which alludes to some of the concepts in this article. Produced as part of the author’s PhD research practice, Falling presents an alternative, narrativebased approach to account for the poetics of fashion, using the transformable/transformative body as the site and subject. The narrative centres on a body undergoing a process of extreme physical transformation, metaphorically referring to the continual disintegration and reconstitution of the self, at the verge of fashion, where fashion is understood, conceptually, as the aesthetic expression of ideas and sensibilities to do with contemporariness and progress (Lehmann, 2000, p. xii), and how this implicates the self. The article mediates literary experiences of what the body could potentially be, and suggests the capacity of writing to account for fashion as an embodied practice and lived experience. Falling performs the propositions put forward in this presentation – to enact, through writing, processes of bodily transformation that drive fashion, stressing the fundamental role of imagination, and the performativity of language in understanding the transformative agency of fashion.
Smart textiles as raw materials for design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Dumitrescu, Delia; Nilsson, Linnéa; Persson, Anna; Worbin, Linda
Materials fabricate the designed artefact, but they can also play an important role in the design process; as a medium or method used to develop the design. Textiles can, with their soft and flexible properties, be easily transformed and altered in numerous ways; for example, by cutting, folding or printing on the material. This transformative character makes textiles interesting sketching media for surface explorations when designing artefacts. The development of transformable materials; for example, fusible yarns and colour changing pigments, have expanded these inherent transformative qualities of textiles and have opened up the design field of smart textiles. Accordingly, this new material context has created a new area for textile designers to explore, where it is possible to enhance and play with the alterable character of their textiles, and control their transformation through physical manipulation and programming. However, these expanded transformative properties also open up a new task for textile designers; to design "smart textiles as raw materials for design". By this term we mean, textiles that are not finished in their design but that can be developed and enhanced when they take part in a product or space design process. In this article, we explore and start to define what smart textiles as raw materials for design can be, and look at how these materials can come into and add something to another design process. The foundation for this exploration is a number of textile examples from the “Smart Textiles sample collection” and our experiences when developing and designing with them. (The Smart Textiles sample collection is a range of textiles that is designed and produced by the Smart Textile Design Lab, to give students, designers and researchers direct access to different types of smart textiles). The possibilities and limitations of smart textiles as raw materials for design are explored by looking at the textile examples from two perspectives: firstly, by looking at the considerations that come with designing this type of textile design, and secondly by looking at what these transformative textiles can bring to another design process. Each example is analyzed and classified according to what transformable design variables for structure and surface change can be embedded in the textile design, and what design variables this subsequently creates for a design process that uses these materials i.e., describing what type of transformation different examples of smart textiles introduce to the design process/design space; whether the change is reversible or irreversible, and whether the change occurs through physical or through digital manipulation of the material. This article ends with a discussion of how smart textiles in the form of raw materials for design could influence how we design textiles and how we design with textiles. Can transformative materials enrich material explorations in a design process? Can further development and alteration of the material design be introduced or defined by the textile designer? Could smart textiles as raw materials for design open up a stronger connection between the design of textiles and the design of the product or spaces where they will be used?
In high heels on shifting ground: fashioning lives in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Cie, Christina
Clothing serves as a marker of identity, but how do you dress when you have nothing left but the clothes that you were wearing when you had to run? Who are you, when dressed entirely in someone else’s choice of clothes? Does the resourcefulness necessary for self-expression under such circumstances also reinforce our ability to cope and survive on a more than material level? What can losing everything help us to remember? Taking the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand as its starting point, this article will examine the usefulness of fashion, sometimes dismissed as a “frivolous” concern, during times of crisis. It will consider examples from these and other catastrophic events, considering how individuals and communities have used fashion as an expression of resilience and to defy the devastation wrought by disaster (Howell, 2012; Labrum, McKergow, & Gibson, 2007). The article will be structured to consider the “epicentre” of the effect of the earthquake, as on the individual, the wider social ramifications as the tremors ripple out, and the aftershocks that can continue to disrupt attempts at re-establishing daily patterns. “Habitus” is defined as a state of mind by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Nice 1977). It is what we practice, what has been “preached” to us, and what we have picked up from our surroundings. However, this mental space, a culmination of personal and cultural memory, requires a habitat, a physical place for its expression and evolution. Analysis of the success of the temporary Re:START mall, created from shipping containers, offers a case study on the role of fashion, as retail and spectacle, in the vigorously debated regeneration of this city. Workplaces, offices, bars and clubs serve as venues for interaction, identification and individuality, but if we dress up to go out, what happens when there is nowhere left to go to? If the street is gone, how could a shop serve “street style”, and act as a site for social interaction as well as retail and revenue? What role can fashion play in reinvigorating public spaces and events in a devastated area? From individual efforts to community initiatives, what is the role of fashion in the recovery of a city, and the cultural life of a region?
Imaginative voyaging: fashion practice as a ‘site’ for wonder and enchantment
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Chant, Armando
The aim of this paper is to explore the state of wonder within a transitional and transformative context and its potential to inform experimental fashion practices. In particular it will focus on the emotionally generative possibilities that wonder and enchantment can have on our experience of fashion. Wonder itself can take a number of forms, whether it entails being “wonder struck” by an event or something that has been seen, or to wonder as in to question, to be curious, to harbour doubt. It is this questioning and openness that is the basis of wonder’s connection to the artistic process and this paper examines how it can be applied within a fashion context. This approach to creative practice and its connection to wonder has its theoretical foundations in the work of authors such as Greenblatt and Kosky. The state of wonder itself has the potential to engage our imagination with fashion “encounters”. Familiar enchanting sites for encounter and possible wonder sites within a fashion context include the fashion show, which in recent times has expanded to encompass installation and presentation formats. These shows and their inducement of a potential sense of wonder, owe much to their large scale and performative nature. Examples of this include the presentations and collaborative projects of designers and practitioners such as Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan. Here the fashion “experience” is transient and ephemeral in nature, where those present gain the full impact or experience of the encounter. As Andrew Bolton (Bolton & Koda, 2011), referencing Alexander McQueen’s immersive and sometimes confronting presentations states, “McQueen validates powerful emotions as compelling and undeniable sources of aesthetic experiences”. This paper explores how, rather than the ephemeral fashion experience or “moment” being seen as a final outcome, one which is the domain of large scale fashion brands, it can also have relevance to small scale experimental fashion practices and within this context be present within the design process itself. The paper focuses on exploring the transitional “moments” or potential encounters that happen within the fashion design process for both practitioners and their audience. The paper reframes the fashion design process as a series of potential wonder sites, where further creative exploration can occur, not within the clearly defined areas of a traditional practice, but those that exist in the shadows or void. This reframing is further enhanced within the context of an interdisciplinary approach, where the oscillation between mediums, creative approaches and technologies has offered opportunity for innovation and for traditional approaches to fashion practice to be broken down. In conclusion the paper explores how an interdisciplinary approach to fashion practice provides a destabilized or disruptive experience of the fashion process, therefore opening up possibilities for our engagement with wonder in fashion, thereby potential sites of fashion encounters are expanded and go beyond traditional final outcomes.
Volumetric shape making and pattern cutting
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Campbell, Lesley
This paper, in light of pedagogical observations, seeks to explore and examine an alternative approach to pattern cutting through volumetric shape making and a practical, process led investigation using Alien body shapes as a teaching resource. The holistic fashion designer explores and engages with both silhouette and pattern cutting, by developing the skills of volumetric shape making. The process of pattern cutting and volumetric shape making is an iterative translation between two dimensions and three dimensions which requires a practical, experimental approach. A sequential series of interactive workshops have been developed using irregular shaped mannequins to facilitate and develop this process, promoting creative outcomes and a deeper understanding of pattern cutting. This hands on improvisational approach without a known outcome allows for design to progress organically. The above process of thinking, “drawing” and pattern cutting in three dimensions can be extremely challenging and alien to fashion students who often have a pattern cutting foundation based on technical drawings and drafting principles mostly in a two dimensional format. The aim is to explore whether a synaptic link created between hand, eye and mind through an algorithm, can assist the holistic fashion designer and enhance creativity. The vehicle of delivery for this investigation is a series of experimental workshops undertaken by all three levels of BA (Hons) Fashion Design students at Sheffield Hallam University. This dynamic working method challenges conventional teaching methods of demonstration, books and handouts and promotes enjoyment of the journey, thus reducing preconceived ideals, allowing more scope for spontaneous outcomes. Student workshops also explore morphology as a challenge to the traditional western convention of body contouring through flat pattern cutting. Morphology is explored through a series of irregular shaped, non-humanoid forms: Alien Bodies. Full-scale Alien Body mannequins are provided as a resource in the workshop on which to apply the method of direct working in three dimensions to generate an initial pattern. Reflection, analysis and discussion of the pattern shape when transformed back to the flat plane, aims to promote comprehension and underpin the holistic designing/pattern cutting approach. “Alien Body - Pushing Pattern Parameters” workshops culminated in an exhibition at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery where a selection of 18 garments and their flat patterns, all created by students during the previous six month period, were displayed. This paper evaluates data captured and draws on anecdotal evidence gathered from students attending these workshops as well as looks at the methodologies used including process led investigation and peer review within the university environment. It forms a cornerstone for further questioning of whether the fashion designer and pattern cutter is the same person.
Past, present and future: transformational approaches to utilizing archives for research, learning and teaching
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Britt, Helena; Stephen-Cran, Jimmy; Shaw, Alan
This article focuses on transformational approaches to utilizing archives in the creation of textile and textile-related products. The existing context in terms of historical resource and archive use by the textile industry and for textile-based creative practice, research, learning and teaching, is discussed. Literature, projects and examples reviewed indicate reproductive, adaptive and transformative approaches to working from historical and archival resources. In the context of this article reproduction involves copying, adaptation refers to alterations and transformation involves complete change in form, nature or appearance. A deficit in existing studies surrounding articulation of approaches to archive utilization is identified. Three projects undertaken at The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) are presented as case studies, which seek to fill the identified gap and contribute to existing research. For each case study, the aims and contributions to research are described and an overview of the project context and methodology is provided. Findings in terms of approaches to archive utilization are discussed, as are the outputs and outreach activities resulting from the projects, which ensures that to some extent, examination of the past informs creative activity in the present and impacts upon the future creation of textiles. The paper concludes by discussing how the case studies have evidenced varying approaches to archive utilization and proposes recommendations to formulate forthcoming strategies and activities.
S.A.R.A.: synesthetic augmented reality application
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Benitez, Margarita; Vogl, Markus
S.A.R.A. (synesthetic augmented reality application) is an App exploring the potential of using a mobile device as a unique and wearable musical interface. S.A.R.A. was originally developed as a standalone App to translate the surrounding environment into sounds on mobile devices (iPhone and Android), creating a digitally augmented synesthetic experience. The imagery captured via the mobile device’s onboard camera is translated into synesthetic-inspired sounds. Our interests in developing this project stemmed from the desire to explore the following research questions. Can technology be used to create a synesthetic augmented reality? What sonochromatic sound mapping should be used? Do we allow for a variety of mapping choices? Should a visual element be used as well? While investigating these research veins it led us to the realization that the S.A.R.A. App and interface would be best explored in a performance setting, therefore we arranged to collaborate with a local dance troupe that agreed to utilize S.A.R.A. as part of their repertoire. The performance version of the S.A.R.A. App is a fully interactive App that generates both its own sounds and visuals based on the camera video input and the movement of the device. The mobile device is complemented by a pico laser and mounted in a sleeve worn by each of the four dancers. S.A.R.A. becomes an extension of the dancer’s arm and allows for natural movement to occur. The role of the performers is also augmented as they are now gatekeepers of what sounds are made, as well as what images are projected, by deciding what live imagery and angles look most appealing to rebroadcast. Performers can choose to project images on themselves, their coperformers, or on to the architectural structures of the venue. This format allows for a completely new interaction with wearable technology; augmenting and mediating their performance via several technological input and output mechanisms while still maintaining choreography, as well as allowing for subjective choices during the performance. The performance setting brought up additional questions. How wearable can these devices be made in their current configuration? What is the best placement on the body for these devices that does not impede movement but allows for maximum control of the App? What does it mean when one performer wears a device like this? Multiple performers? Does wearing this device change the role or mechanism of the performer? Does the lighting need to be thought out differently for the stage and the performers? Should additional light be placed on the dancers if they can’t be lit in traditional methods? Can other dance troupes benefit from the technology? During various beta performances it became obvious that the lighting source needed to be on the performers’ bodies rather than from an external source. In response we are creating custom LED to provide a light source for the camera to pick up imagery more effectively. The LEDs were integrated into a neck cowl and the rest of the costume is designed in white to easily provide a surface to project on. Although within a set choreography, the performer’s role changes as their body’s interactions directly produce sounds. The Human Computer Interaction between the dancers and the technology as an extension of their bodies creates an altered/mediated/mitigated performance environment that is always unique to the specific performance venue. S.A.R.A. is not only an interface and an interactive software application for consumption, play, discovery and joy, but is also a jump off point for a larger discussion on transformational strategies in regards to both S.A.R.A. as a wearable musical/performance interface but additionally in the Open Source distribution of S.A.R.A. as a tool. The technology will be released open source and it is potentially possible to custom craft new versions for every performance or for other dance troupes to adapt the technology with their artistic vision. Creating the App for an existing platform device such as an iPod touch and utilizing a relatively inexpensive laser pico projector (less than $500), S.A.R.A. can be added relatively simply and cheaply as a versatile tool to their technology performance toolkit. Therefore the artwork we created provides a new tool set for other artists.
The Wardrobe Hack and Uncatwalk digital platforms of action and services for positive engagement with clothing
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Whitty, Jennifer
"The choices we make about what we wear are influenced by life present, lives past and our ideas about our future selves. Expressions of values ... build a rationale for dress that transcend narrow commercial views about fashion. Instead they give us broader perspectives that honour our reality as well as our aspirations; and connect our psyche with our fibre and fashion choices." (Fletcher, 2014) This research explores the emerging field of enriching the user experiences of people involved with fashion in the post-production sector and in the post-retail environment. This is an area in which historically the fashion industry has paid little attention. This research addresses the question, can designers create courses of actions or “services” using digital media that enable “users” of clothing to embrace the positive aspects of dress for a creative and satisfying experience of fashion? The research builds on Kate Fletcher’s work within the “Local Wisdom” international fashion research project, which provided a forum for critiquing the dominant logic of growth in a world of finite limits (Daly, 1992; Jackson, 2009) by applying design skills to offer user-initiated examples of resourceful practices (Manzini & Jegou, 2003). The projects “Wardrobe Hack” (2014), developed by researchers Whitty and McQuillan, and “Uncatwalk” (2014), developed by Whitty, explore the emerging field of enriching the fashion user experience by utilizing digital platforms for disseminating and extending this engagement. The Uncatwalk website provides a digital media interface for a democratic virtual global exchange of interactions involving fashion. The Wardrobe Hack site provides a service for empowering and sharing clothing user stories and systems. We currently have a situation in society where there is low participation with clothing, as clothes are disposed of rapidly. This research seeks to address this situation to create a better integration of clothing and meaning in our lives. It aims to get to the heart of the current issues in the fashion industry and propose positive alternative roles for designers and consumers. Ezio Manzini (1997) has long declared that sustainability is a societal journey, brought about by acquiring new awareness and perceptions. Guy Julier (2008) makes a case that design activism builds on what already exists. In keeping with this thinking these research projects have been developed with direct participation from members of the public.
Wear, repair and remake: the evolution of fashion practice by design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Cramer, Jo
Through my postgraduate, fashion practice-based research project, The Living Wardrobe, I have become increasingly interested in garment design that specifically facilitates future alteration and modification. There is potential for such a simple design approach to encourage habits of reduced consumption when garments are kept in use by adapting to wearers’ changing needs. Once a common provision in garments, the capacity for alteration is largely missing from contemporary women’s wear. The economies of mass production reduce seam allowances to the minimum required for assembly, while complex industrial construction methods deter intervention. At the same time, the practical skills of repair and alteration are rarely learnt anymore. So passive has fashion consumption become and so disposable are the products that a dropped hem, ripped seam or missing button usually consigns a garment to the (charity) bin and justifies another trip to the boutiques. In an attempt to disrupt this cycle, my research looks at design strategies with the potential to re-engage the wearer in habits of wear, repair and remake. Designing garments with the adaptability required for prolonged, active use enables garments to better keep up with the times, changing style (not merely fit) over time. This approach to product longevity considers the use of the garment across multiple lifetimes, acknowledging that a garment may have several sequential owners. Through a discussion of recently developed garment prototypes, this paper will outline the challenges I have encountered in designing garments to actively engage consumers in this cycle of wear, repair and remake. These challenges range from the practical, technical and the aesthetic to considerations of participatory design strategies, consumer education, design authorship, and alternative models of fashion production and consumption. This discussion further considers the impact of this research on my fashion practice. The Living Wardrobe aims to be a fashion practice that accepts responsibility for the design agency of the garments it creates. Remaking my practice to this end has fundamentally shifted how I approach design development, fashion production and communication, suggesting a new model of fashion design practice for sustainability.
Flirting with uncertainty: mutability, metamorphosis, and fashionability in the Greco-Roman imagination
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) McFerrin, Neville
For many ancient Greek and Roman men, fashion was fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the other, but most importantly, fear of the uncontrollable. The distinctly female ability to adopt and maintain multiple identities- shifting from daughter to wife to mother- was essential to the success of the creation of stable familial units, ensuring that wives could effectively transfer their loyalties from their natal households to that of their husbands. Despite the fact that Greek and Roman societal structures obligated women to take on multiple guises, their ability to do so fostered deep anxieties in their male counterparts. These anxieties centred on the limits of female mutability. For if change continued unchecked, women who might once have made respectable brides could become literal shapeshifters, monsters such as Medusa and Scylla, existing on the borders of society, out of the boundaries of male control. While living women could not shift from woman to beast in the manner of their mythic counterparts, they had the ability to exert their agency through mimetic acts, deliberately altering their physical appearance using cosmetics, dress accessories, and clothing. Such trappings of femininity loom large in both Greek and Latin textual sources and in visual representations of female dress. This article will explore the range of ways in which Greek and Roman audiences articulated connections between fashionable dress and both physical and mental alteration. By analysing sumptuary legislation and moral discourse on female dress, it will argue that the fear of semiotic confusion central to myths of female monsters was articulated in the real world through a distrust of fashionable women. But while textual sources give insight into the male viewpoint, to grapple with potential female conceptualizations of selfhood and its connection to selfpresentation, we must turn to the visual. Through a close visual analysis of the wall paintings of Room 5 in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, this article will conclude that while Greek and Roman men might have believed that fashion made women into monsters, in the hands of women, fashion was an instrument of transcendence. In the complex visual sphere of Room 5, the reduplication of depicted dress and adornment allowed women to exert the positive aspects of mutability, picturing a metamorphosis from woman to goddess, rather than from woman into beast.
Fashion beyond representation
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Shand, Peter
The promise of transformation is fashion’s most significant gift. In ideal form, fashion is a site of profound elasticity. That ideal appears as both a reflection of constant becoming with its attendant stimulation and as a means by which we might embrace and actively reveal such a state. As a notion, fashion offers almost pure encounter by virtue of: its existence in duration; a directionless or productively purposeless mode of proposition; its social provocation; and an intimate relationship to the body politic. Its ceaselessness and relentlessness activates imagination, memory, wonder, shock. Its proximity to lived experience actualizes degrees of phenomenological and psychological connection with a striking capacity to move us, to reflect in material form a life immanent. As a mode of generative creative practice, fashion has a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for invention, distinction and contestation. It both reflects and anticipates existing social and cultural conditions and contributes to their overhaul. Its capacity for revolution is a condition both internal to its own logic and manifest in its realization in the world. As a means for personal or individual expression it is a toolbox par excellence. Individuals are able to reflect their membership of community and to exhibit idiosyncrasies of temperament, outlook, belief or taste. Nor does fashion of itself constrain those activities – as with any good box of tools ideas and items both may be picked up, worn, discarded, modified, returned to or destroyed at the behest of the user. Fashion enables us self-actualizing exhibition whilst simultaneously pointing to the necessity of its own redundancy. Janus-faced, fashion affords a means by which we may both advance and attempt to still the ceaselessness of our becoming.
Enabling design and business innovation through new textile technologies
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Joseph, Frances; Heslop, Peter
Textile production initiated the first industrial revolution, with James Hargreaves’ invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1766 introducing the beginning of systems of mechanized mass production. More recently, the development of new forms of digital manufacturing has given rise to a “New Industrial Revolution”. This paper considers the introduction of digital textile technologies in relation to this new “maker” economy and to traditional industrial textile and apparel design and production systems. While factors such as high investment costs, technology limitations and the need for specialized technical knowledge initially restricted the uptake of new technologies by traditional textile and fashion design manufacturing companies, technology developments are overcoming many of these problems. However, a lack of access and usability has limited engagement and innovation by designers, makers and technology entrepreneurs. This paper discusses the achievements, opportunities, limitations and impacts of work conducted through a university-based research and development centre that provides access to advanced technologies and associated technical, research and design expertise in areas of digital textile printing and seamless knitting for product development, sampling and training. Drawing on case studies developed from client and staff interviews, product and market analysis, recent theoretical writings and a contextual review, the paper will consider ways in which these technologies are helping designers and companies to do things differently and create value. More immediate and localized design development strategies can support on demand production of specialized, high value products locally and internationally. They have also provided more effective design and production methods to other industries; for example, costume designers for film, theatre and television companies. This facility also provides support for new areas of application and new manufacturing processes, for example in the areas of shaped, seamless knit and e-textiles. Through these studies, traditional fashion production and market problems such as remote global supply chains, the separate and highly specialized roles of designers and technicians in the knitwear industry, the production of pre and post-market textile waste and the minimizing of stock levels are reconsidered. Business concepts and strategies, enabled by new forms of digital manufacturing are related to approaches discussed in the case studies.
Frozen waves: exploring the transformation between sound and object
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) van Melle, Gerbrand; Marks, Stefan
In the project Frozen Waves, audio recordings are translated into physical objects and vice versa. Time is temporarily captured in space – space is released back into time. In doing so, the potential of visual music (Friedlander, 1998) and second order cybernetics (Von Foerster, 1975; Glanville, 2004) are used to develop a new experience that synthesizes sound and visual components into dynamic material form. In this “aesthetically potent environment” (Pask, 1969, p. 76), the research engages with digital ontology, sound visualization, sampling methods, and generative design practice. Similar works are Studio Realität (2008), Fischer (2010), Azzaro (2013), Paul (2012), and Ghassaei (2012). The idea explored in this project is that objects are continuously changing processes in time. Through consecutive iterations of sound recordings, sound spectrum analysis, parametric 3D model creation, and materializing methods such as 3D printing, temporary physical representations of the acoustic world around the observer surface and are recomposed. These objects can, in turn, be immaterialized back to sounds that they were generated from, albeit in a form that is modified and shaped by their transformation process. Emerging design work implies a semiotic polyvalence that is realized through a process of techno-transformative and generative methods. As such new patterns are created, comprising single parts that are restructured into rhythmic patterns. The individual samples do not act as quotes; instead they operate as generative material for systemic combination. This project aims to act as a Front End creative inquiry (Sanders & Stappers, 2012) and its purpose is to trigger the audience to consider the potentials of sound as a form of unique, material user experience.
The beast trilogy: an evolving experiment in fashion ideation
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Splawa-Neyman, Tania; Wilde, Danielle; Mitford Ha, Winnie; Lacey, Jordan
Masses of leathery membranes, wild furs and etched bones. Intangible caresses of bodily fields. Sonic skins stretching on expanded skeletal structures. Answers to the question: What does The Beast unleash? This question, when posed as a series of provocations, acts as catalyst within a setting in which practitioners as pedagogues set the conditions for beastly emergence. As a conceptual device, The Beast realizes unthought potential by forcing interactions with the unfamiliar. When The Beast is channelled through the medium of unyielding materials, an unconventionally framed body, or unidentified sound, the setting for inevitable altercations is established. The Beast does not submit easily. It intimidates, fights and retaliates in response to the practitioners’ grappling and desire to easily know. The process enables a shift from familiar actions, thoughts and processes to states of “unknowing” and affords new, unexpected and surprising outcomes. The asking of “what is beastly?” further coaxes The Beast and moves seeking beyond physical realms. Within the individual, the qualities of “beast” and “the beastly” invoke curiosity and discomfort through searching made internalized. In this circumstance unfamiliarity emerges and the hunter becomes the hunted. Framed within the context of fashion practice; centred around the “body” and “the bodily” and inherently expressed through making: how do we contend with these emergent beastly qualities? Can they be tamed or do they tame us? Investigations are led by moving, making, and through the expanded practice of listening. As a framework for expanding possibilities of practice, The Beast was tested within a series of undergraduate fashion design studios. Through the outcomes emanating from the trilogy of studios, this paper examines The Beast as an innovative tool for fashion ideation. As an enigma defying definition, The Beast pushes to unpack unknown imaginings, blur disciplinary boundaries and irreversibly reshape practice.
Metamorphoric fashion: a transformative practice
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Sgro, Donna
Transformation is embedded in the growth of an organism, while fashion, highly responsive to changing social and physical environments, rides the current of flux like a dreamer wandering through darkness. Through my fashion practice, attempts are made to reflect upon, expand and make possible inroads into the translation of this creative movement, from inspiration to mixed garment and textile outcomes. This involves engaging the imagination of possible futures, new approaches, and unknown outcomes, through mixed material expressions. Translating the life cycle of an organism, which is highly adaptive, evolutionary and responsive, this work forms part of my PhD study, “Metamorphoric Fashion”, being undertaken at RMIT University, Melbourne. Using a practice-led research methodology, which draws upon mixed creative methods, my research attempts to engage with the uncovering of imaginative potentials of fashion and textile processes. The concept of transformation leads this investigation, and initially a study of butterfly metamorphosis was undertaken. This involved “fashion-designer-becoming-lepidopterist”, and engaged a movement between the ordinarily disparate worlds of ecology and creative practice. Using mediums of photography and drawing, a series of transitions were recorded in which the organism underwent both transitional and metamorphic change. Through these methods, meditations on relationships between nature-culture become possible, as thinking about ecology enters the creative process. Through drawing, a series of stylizations developed which recorded the imaginative thinking time, line by line. My particular fashion practice is in the process of transformation and diversification, reflecting the nature of the metamorphic phenomenon, and the particular interpretations of the butterfly study that an individual approach enables. Aiming to uncover the ways in which the practice is able to accommodate these transformations, forms part of this study. Why this might be important for fashion practice more generally perhaps, is because it identifies a type of practice that attempts to evolve itself, to become something it does not yet know. The research aims to capture this state of becoming, and the perpetual sense of movement.
Repeatless: transforming surface pattern with generative design
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Russell, Alex
Much of the initial use of digital technology within the printed textile industry has focused on the particular advantages that it has over previous fabric printing methods. Examples include simplifying workflow, producing relatively cheap short runs, or allowing designers to work with photographic imagery and unlimited colour palettes. This paper firstly identifies that digital fabric printing has a fundamentally different possibility in relation to its forerunners. Formerly, printing was essentially the ability to reproduce the same image (or text) over and over again. Digital printing, however, does not have to work from static information; it can print a design that changes as it is being printed. Secondly, the research demonstrates that digital technology can provide the content with which to do this, creating a design that not only changes as it is being printed, but that never repeats. This is achieved by a generative software application. The resulting code is based on cellular automata, a method of mathematical modelling that allows the elements within a system to evolve in relation to each other. In this case, the elements are the individual motifs or other visual components and the system is the overall design. The rules that govern how the motifs arrange themselves are based on methods used by printed textile designers to ensure the eye can roam freely over a design, balancing the arrangement and scale of the motifs, for example, or the negative space between them. The degree of complexity possible with cellular automata allows the qualitative design process to be modelled with a richness that maps the skills of creating pattern into code. The output is a non-repeating design of infinite length that can be saved section by section to be streamed to a digital printer, exploiting the technology in an entirely novel fashion. Seen individually, digital design and digital printing technology present a large number of new possibilities for the printed textile industry. This paper shows a way that interdisciplinary, practice-led research can integrate them and offer a method to shift the paradigms of what pattern is and the way in which it can be reproduced.
Tactility and experience as transformational strategy
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Riisberg, Vibeke; Louise Bang, Anne; Locher, Laura; Breuil Moat, Alina
The Awareness Project investigates the following question: Can dialogue tools that challenge tactile competencies support the development of fashion and textile design in a sustainable direction? In this article, we pay special attention to user engagement and design education and discuss experiences of tactile sensibility as a means to create increased awareness about the material quality of textiles and garments. The aim of our research is to develop new dialogue tools to be used in the teaching of fashion and textile design students in order to stimulate new ways of thinking and engaging with users. By employing participatory methods in the field of fashion and textiles, we seek to develop an alternative transformational strategy that may further the design of products and services for a more sustainable future. In the initial theoretical section, we define tactile sensibility, which is at the core of our research question. Next, we take a closer look at what constitutes an experience and how scholars in the field of fashion and textiles connect this to sustainability issues. Subsequently, we describe the methodical basis of the dialogue tool and our empirical material. We base our discussion on two experiments conducted as part of the Awareness Project. The outcome of the study shows new ways of establishing dialogue between users and designers, as well as furthering reflection and verbalization of areas within the perception of textile and fashion products that are often considered “tacit knowledge” and a “tacit experience”. Finally, we conclude that if designers wish to promote change related to sustainability, it is likely that an embodied participatory dialogue that builds on the combination of user experience and tactile sensibility can be further developed into didactic tools to support a “new design paradigm” and eventually contribute to changes in the fast fashion system.
Transformational strategies: the Margiela Rabbit and the Gecko Girl
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Bagnall, Catherine; Collier, Katie
Elizabeth Costello, the elderly fiction writer in J.M Coetzee’s novel of the same name, discusses the possibility of how a human being can feel what it is like to be a bat. She believes that to feel thus, one does not need to experience bat life through the sense modalities of being a bat but rather “to be a living bat is to be full of being: being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being” (Coetzee, 2004, p. 69). Elizabeth Costello isn’t interested in clothing but she does believe that to feel what it is like to be a bat one needs the sensations of fullness and embodiedness; the sensation of being a body with limbs that have an extension in space, of being alive to the world. Wearing a dress with more than two sleeves gives me the sense of having more than two arms and in a dress with a tail I have a tail. The feeling of being in certain clothes offers me the potential to “become” something else and to feel expansive. This paper/performance presents findings from the work of two artists and designers who are both using the distinctively cultural form of clothing to explore the human/non-human animal divide. Both artists are putting into practice Deleuzian theories of “becoming other” as a transformational strategy to shift our relationship to our environment and our fellow non- human creatures using clothing, performance, photography and video to do this. The questions we both ask are: in this moment of complexity and uncertainty that the world is currently in, what is the role of imagination in inventing new possible worlds? How can the transformative nature of clothing offer new modes of experience that are possibly more sensual and slower than what we usually give value to and can clothing help to shift our relationship with the environment and other living creatures? Kate Soper argues that if we want to maintain a sustainable world that both humans and non-humans can happily and healthily continue to live in, we need alternative outlets for transcendence” that are not provided by Western industrialist consumerist culture which removes us from a natural simplicity or immanence, rather than returns us to it. (Soper, 1999) Considering these ideas we are interested in attempting to refigure a world where we are the ‘animal’. Two women, possibly wearing tails, will present this paper as a scripted performance.
The shift from 3D body scanned data to the physical world
(Textile and Design Lab and Colab at Auckland University of Technology, 2014) Reilly, Lyle
This paper highlights the technological relationship and opportunities to combine 3D body scan and 3D print technologies for consideration within the fashion sector. Three dimensional (3D) human body scanning technology has been available for more than 20 years; fashion along with a number of other industries such as entertainment, security and medical have successfully extracted computational scanned data to obtain specific body measurement to gain a picture of body shape, proportion and posture. This information can provide valuable insight when dealing with the complexity of the human form, particularly in the context of lifestyle, age, ethnicity and location. Predominately this empirical data has been gathered to develop size/measurement averages for large population studies (11,000 participants were scanned, providing 130 body separate body measurements, in recent commissions in both SizeUK and SizeUSA). In a fashion context, the information provided by these large studies has tended to reflect the mass apparel market, in particular sizing measurements for targeted groups, while customization of 3D body scan data for individuals within the fashion and textile industries has been limited. To date the most prominent examples have come from the niche market arena of men’s suiting and specialized sportswear to aid fit, comfort and performance. Over a similar period of time, 3D printing technology has also grown to the point that commercially available equipment has helped to shift a design approach for modelling and rapid prototyping applications. This technological transformation is having a profound effect on existing industries, for instance engineering, while also providing a fresh platform for emerging designers from many sectors to communicate design ideas as a physical reality. For example, bespoke fashion accessories developed by UK designer Catherine Wales in her 2013 work “Project DNA” illustrates that the fashion and textiles industries can also take part in this industrial transformation. Using a technology focused design thinking framework, the research explores the opportunity for combining both these technologies; in other words utilizing individual 3D body scan data in the form of a point cloud to produce physical 3D modelling for customization purposes. At this stage there is little documentation of the reflective practice to empower designers with the techniques to connect these technologies, or indeed the exploration of creative possibilities and human centred outcomes. This paper documents early stage development of the conversion process from a Symcad 3D body scanner to outputs obtained from a Formiga P100 3D laser sintering system housed within the Design & Creative Technologies Faculty at AUT University, New Zealand. The physical prototype outputs are based on actual body scan data to produce a scaled mannequin. Key research findings and insight clusters are evaluated within a summary framework which highlights potential applications and uses for the fashion sector to engage with such technology to personalize and enrich human engagement.

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