Wearing nightlife: Affective fashion and musical embodiment

This paper explores the relationship between fashion, music and nightlife as a site of affective and embodied experience. It seeks to extend existing work around fashion and popular music to consider how dress and sound work in tandem to produce specific ways of feeling, moving and relating in nightlife contexts, as well as how this goes on to shape subsequent forms of creative practice.

Fashion is not only visual, nor music is not solely auditory. Both operate as affective forces which co-construct the experience of nightlife. They generate atmosphere and produce shared intensities which are felt through and within the body, creating affective states that are embodied rather than explicitly articulated.

The paper examines how fashion practices emerging from club culture continue to engage music as a central force within their design process. It considers how references to the sight, sound and smell of nightlife help to shape the emotional tone of fashion collections, through styling, design and performance.

It argues that, through the tactile and material qualities of fashion, fashion design can conjure up the feeling of a specific club culture. Through its tactility and sensual capacities, it reanimates the fleeting sensations of nightlife in the present, transforming memory and feeling into the tangible. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to broader conversations in fashion, performance and popular music studies around affect, embodiment and the sensory dimensions of cultural participation.