Fit But You Know It: Practice-Research Project: Sensory workshopping methods to decolonise fashion fitting

The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion's ability to sell, ship and scale products globally. Enlightenment values of universalism underpinning global trade also see to the erasure of our (designers and wearer’s) tacit understanding of how to fit fabric to our own bodies.

Industrially-produced clothing has fit ‘built-in’ using pattern-cutting techniques of darts and seam shaping. By contrast, pre-industrial or contemporary examples of non-western garment archetypes, such as the West African wrapper dress, the Southeast Asian Longi, rely on fitting techniques deployed by wearers’ hands when wrapping, knotting, or rolling.

Art schools and universities are ideal settings to challenge deeply embedded industrial-colonial practices and shift epistemic power relations. This project aims to reconfigure understandings of fit that contribute to academic discourse on social change in fashion education and practice, and encourage pluriversal and collaborative design approaches by future fashion practitioners.