Can You Wear a Feeling? A Dialogue of Body, Material, and Emotion

Abstract

This research explores what it might mean to wear a feeling through a dialogue between material, body and emotion. The practice examines how fashion can act as a medium for accessing emotional states. Building on phenomenological, tacit, and expressive therapeutic perspectives, the research challenges fashion’s predominantly visual and critical positioning of the body and instead investigates its potential as a tool for re-centring bodily awareness.

Using a bricolage methodology incorporating practice-led, autoethnography and phenomenology, the research situates lived experience and bodily knowledge within the design process. Methods, including criteria-led making, reflective journaling, mapping, and prototyping, emerged from this framework.

The practice-led research develops a defined spectrum of discomfort that operates as both a generative and evaluative criterion. Prototypes are evaluated by their ability to interrupt bodily autopilot, the habitual and unconscious ways the body occupies space in everyday life. As bodily awareness often emerges through moments of friction or tension, the research applies a structured spectrum of discomfort to deliberately disrupt these automatic patterns. This enables making within identified categories to emerge across postural, balance-based, tactile, and sensorial experiences of discomfort.

Findings suggest that structured discomfort can expose habitual patterns of movement and perception, revealing emotions that are often resisted. Through wearable prototypes that engage with discomfort, the research demonstrates how fashion can mediate between sensation, awareness, and emotional states. This research contributes to embodied fashion practice, offering insights for designers, educators, and those living with complex or changing bodies. By reframing discomfort as a generative creative method, the research proposes that wearable interactions can support the embodied practice of wearing a feeling, cultivating resilience and expanding tolerance for navigating uncertainty in everyday life.