The newest APRIA Journal issue titled Dialogical Bodies: Everything and Everybody as Material was made in close collaboration with the Fashion Professorship of ArtEZ. This Journal issue explores how artistic research in the field of fashion (design) practice can negotiate the relationship between bodies and materials. It explores what bodies and materials are—and could be(come)—in fashion design and practice. In doing so, it focuses on different kinds of fashion matter and materiality, including the physical materiality of dressed bodies and identities, to highlight fashion’s sensorial, embodied and affective potential. Through artistic and creative practice research, it underlines the experiential dimensions of fashion, fashion design and fashion practice, opening up alternative ways of making, designing and engaging with fashion.

The issue was edited by Ricarda Bigolin, Chet Bugter, Jan Tepe, Hanka van der Voet, Clemens Thornquist and Daniëlle Bruggeman and is born out of the conference ‘Dialogical Bodies: Everything and Everybody as Material,’ held in April 2024, which explored how artistic research in the field of fashion (design) practice can negotiate the relationship between bodies and materials within different socio-cultural and ecological systems. Organised by the Swedish School of Textiles, RMIT University, and ArtEZ University of the Arts, the conference addressed the shift in practice research to be more attentive to how these provocations of creative practice surface key political and societal issues, and how these research methods offer potential in real life impact. Eight contributions from the conference were selected for publication in this special issue of APRIA.