This article explores three recent cases of alternative, critical fashion practices from the Netherlands that create more agency for makers, wearers and matter. The cases are as follows: (1) the project ‘JOIN Collective Clothes’ by designer Anouk Beckers; (2) the ‘Feminist Needlework Party’; and (3) ‘The Linen Project’. By facilitating collective, participatory practices of making, these cases explore how to give more attention to the actual material aspects of textiles and clothes – and especially to the material aspects of making that hardly get any attention in a globalized market-driven fashion industry. All case studies highlight different material practices of working with matter – e.g. growing flax or doing needlework – that we have generally lost touch with in western consumer culture. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the importance of offering more attention to matter, these case studies have been analysed by drawing upon the theoretical discourse of ‘new materialism’ as well as the theoretical notion of ‘making-with’. By exploring these participatory cases of making-with, this article aims to offer more attention to the material aspects of fashion beyond a consumerist conception – showing how agency matters.

https://sampol.be/2021/04/textiel-wat-met-mode-een-jaar-na-de-grote-stilstand

https://apria.artez.nl/sensorial-nourishment/

https://apria.artez.nl/living-with-and-dying-with/

https://pressandfoldmagazine.com/

https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/unfolding-fashion-tech/

http://airs.artez.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AIRs-Adele-Varcoe_2-april-2018.pdf

What opportunities does the integration of digital technologies in clothing offer? How do wearable technologies transform embodied experience? And can they enable new relationships between human beings and the clothing they wear?

Until now, wearables have not become integrated into everyday fashion and so their meaningful role remains limited. In this book, fashion designer and researcher Pauline van Dongen shows how this can be changed and how the integration of both can be encouraged.

By combining design research with philosophy of technology, Van Dongen provides a new way of looking at the role of technology in fashion, offering interesting alternatives for a sustainable future. Building on the concept of material aesthetics, she emphasizes that technologies are a material concern. Through reflections on her own experiences that are richly illustrated with many examples and many images, she gives practical insights with the aim of better informing the practice of designing wearable technology. Her analysis of unique design exemplars such as the Solar Shirt and Phototrope reveals what wearable technologies do beyond their functional promise and what they mean beyond their symbolic value.

The Fashion Colloquium explored how fashion can serve as a tool for societal transformation, starting from the urgency to rethink the role fashion plays in relation to socio-cultural, environmental, and economic challenges in contemporary society. A diversity of creative practices, peer-reviewed papers, and keynote lectures provided the context as well as concrete examples to analyse and critically reflect on the cracks in the system. These contributions also suggested alternative approaches to revalue the practice of making fashion and to redefine the value systems from which we live and work. The Fashion Colloquium hosted more than 40 contributors who presented their academic research, visions, designs, concepts, future scenarios, and new materials. This offered a deeper insight into questions such as: how can we activate the power of fashion—highlighting the role of design, imagination, and aesthetics—to act differently and to move towards resilient futures and equitable societies? How can we envision and create an alternative and more engaged future of fashion that does more justice to fashion’s human dimension? And how can academic research, critical thinking, and creative interventions help to (re)imagine and build another kind of future where ‘fashioned’ human beings and materials have more agency?

This special first edition of the online journal APRIA offers a continuation of the conversations that we started during the Fashion Colloquium. In a variety of media—film, photography, live recordings, interviews, and a podcast of a radio show—this edition presents a selection of creative practices, academic articles, and keynote lectures that touch upon central themes that require further research to contribute to realizing our shared visions. 

Dissolving the Ego of Fashion: Engaging with Human Matters explores critical theories and practices that help to better understand and rethink the cracks in the fashion system. In doing so, this publication examines the role that fashion plays – and could potentially play – in urgent socio-cultural, environmental and political developments in contemporary society. Daniëlle Bruggeman focuses on the importance of envisioning a more engaged future of fashion that does more justice to fashion’s human dimension. This entails fundamentally redefining the value systems from which we work and live, as well as reconsidering how we engage with each other and the material resources of the earth. Due to its power of imagination, fashion can function as a tool to conceptualize and realize a more meaningful, inclusive, resilient – and above all more human – future society.

Contemporary fashion in the Netherlands shows a unique mix of playful individualism, conceptual strength, and organisational innovation. Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion maps the landscape or Dutch fashion in all its rich variety and complexity. Luxuriously illustrated in colour, the book uncovers the cultural roots of Dutch fashion in a globalized context. The authors debunk myths surrounding Dutch fashion, dig up new facts and stories, and explore the creative relation or fashion design to cultural heritage. Written by experts in the field, Delft Blue to Denim Blue gives a rich overview of designers, ranging from G-Star jeans, and affordable retailer C&A, to a savvy brand like Vanilia, and from the famous designer duo Viktor & Rolf to a futuristic designer like Iris van Herpen. The book assesses the diversity of Dutch fashion designers, firms and brands in their historical and cultural contexts.

Author(s): Daniëlle Bruggeman, Maaike Feitsma, Anja Köppchen, Constantin von Maltzahn, Michiel Scheffer, Anneke Smelik, José Teunissen, Lianne Toussaint

More Than Meets the Eye: Dutch Fashion, Identity and New Materialism is a research on the fluid, performative and embodied dimensions of identity in various case studies or Dutch fashion. This research was part of the larger interdisciplinary project "Dutch Fashion Identity in a Globalized World" at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. This project was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Research team: prof.dr. Anneke Smelik (project leader), prof.dr. Dany Jacobs, Dr Michiel Scheffer, José Teunissen, Constantin von Maltzahn, Maaike Feitsma and Anja Köppchen.