The Body and Textiles at the Intersection of the Physical and the Digital Through Movement
Jan Tepe & Faseeh Saleem
2022 (English). In Bruyns, G. & Wei, H (eds.) With Design: Reinventing Design Methods. Published by Springer Nature. Switzerland. Chapter 142. pp. 1-13. (Refereed) [Artistic Work] Published
The prevalent body-dress paradigms in fashion education and industry primarily consider the physical interaction of the human body in relation to the textile material. This needs to be further investigated due to the ongoing digitalisation of the fashion system, which often results in a limited understanding of design methods with regard to how the body and dress influence each other. The research presented in this article aims to challenge the prevalent body-dress paradigms in fashion design by suggesting alternative methods for designing in the digital space using the human body and textiles. In this research, we investigated the artistic potential for fashion design by inverting the prevalent body-dress movement paradigm using motion-capture technology. A mixed-reality installation was developed as a design tool and used as a sketching method to translate textile movement in physical space into human-body movement in digital space. Alternative body-textile expressions were recorded and analysed based on sketching methods. The findings suggest that the resulting physical and digital bodily forms created possibilities for designing alternative types of dress, beyond jackets, shirts, and trouser. The findings contribute to the fashion design field in both academia and industry by suggesting alternative body-textile expressions as the starting points and criteria for designing dress from a different perspective than is commonly practiced. This could support designers in creating alternative types of dress that are not predominated by established characterisations of dress in the fashion field.