Ms Alison Gill
Design Studies
University of Western Sydney
a.gill@uws.edu.au
Alison has lectured at the University of Western Sydney for more than 10 years in a design school and has published on fashion, corporeality and branding.
Wearing Clothes
Exploring human relationships with the object world of clothing, their related accessories and effects both spectacular and mundane, involves negotiating the semantic minefield of terms/distinctions in common and theoretical usage. The English language has so many words for aspects of both the object(s) and the practice of clothing including fashion, costume, clothes, dress, apparel and wearing. The burgeoning discipline of Dress Studies has focused attention on the terms dress and fashion while theorizing predominantly the cultural practices of making appearances and identity, and the multiple dimensions of dress as symbol/image, commodity and functional practice. Intrinsic to the effects of dress and fashion is the life-practice of wearing, and this paper proposes to subject the term and practice of wearing to phenomenological and cultural analysis while proposing that this vital aspect of human-clothing relations has received less sustained theoretical attention for the level of investments that are made in our vestments as clothes-wearing people. Indeed the conference presentation will propose that wearing represents a convergence of life, world and death that structures our relationships to the object world of clothing and is revealing of the fictive and material productions that are essential to figural and physical Being. Importantly, particular insights about wearing appear to underpin and ground prevalent theoretical understandings of fashion as a cyclical phenomenon that propels the individual toward ephemeral appearance and renewal and dress as an identity structuring practice. The more abstract propositions will be combined and thrown-into-relief via reference to contemporary research and development into new wearable electronic technology by Philips electronics sometimes called Smart or Intelligent Clothing. This research is based in an understanding of wearing clothes as a primary dimension of human-technology relations and as a vital bodily and figural practice intrinsic to the manufacture of contemporary product and identity appearances.
Top of page
