Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines a 2023 design installation where ‘extreme’ experiences, sensorialities and imaginations were stimulated by ground-breaking new digital fabrics. It analyses emergent futures in a space of codesign which veered between aspirations for frictionlessness and for intense feelings.

Paper Abstract:

Contemporary fashion design not only engages with the forms, styles and materials of clothing, but is simultaneously a significant vehicle for rethinking global human futures. Digital fabrics are renderings of cottons, linens, wools and other textiles, with programmed properties of movement, light, colour, and sound, which are then used to produce various digital garments. Exploring the designing and manufacturing of these digital fashion materials offers anthropology routes to examine how more sustainable global human futures are being envisaged and negotiated at a human scale, on human bodies.

This research is based on design anthropology work as a part of the four-year Business of Fashion and Textile Technology (BFTT) research cluster. It examines how digital fabrics were experienced in the 2023 public installation ‘Made in Code’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum, an installation where participants worked to push these technologies to extremes and discover their limits. The paper shows how these fabrics carry a huge sociopolitical, environmental, and personal aspiration and potential, envisioning possibilities to directly address the environmental and emotional problems associated with fast fashion. They destabilise the contemporary centricity of ‘image’ to selfhood, and are imagined as bridging global gaps between people who design, manufacture and consume clothing. Focussing on the emerging sensorialities of digital fabrics, how they ‘feel’, the paper argues that this work opens a conceptual space between two extreme kinds of future imagination, one frictionless and the other intensely sensorial, and offers a model for how fashion design is mediating vernacular and professional design communities.