Exploring Research Space in Fashion: The Fluidity of Knowledge between Designers, Individuals and Society

This chapter addresses the interdisciplinary roots of fashion studies and introduces a research framework proposing the meaning-making process as a step towards achieving relevance and longevity. It describes the study and research of fashion against historical and sociological perspectives. The chapter introduces a framework relating design knowledge to the systems of design, fashion, and culture. It also presents three systems affecting design, fashion, and culture. Each of these systems contains tensions between the micro-internal and macro-external levels, as they are mediated by the respective roles of artifact, product, and values. Through the transactional system, the conversational activity of fashion culminates in the exchange of embedded, constructed, and co-created meanings. The research space, as a system of meaning-making, results from how design knowledge affects the dialectical relationships of the problem space. The design, fashion, and cultural systems are, therefore, interdependent in how they relate and interact.