Reflexive Framework for Sensory Fashion and Textiles Design

This contribution presents the Reflexive framework for sensory fashion and textiles design that opens pathways for a deeper, contextual understanding of clothing lifetimes, through the focus on sensory aspects of users’ long-term relationships with clothes. It was developed as an extension of the sensory wardrobe methodology established in author’s doctoral research that investigated emotional durability of everyday clothing. The framework constitutes a design brief that cultivates designers’ sensitivity towards multi-sensory perceptions of clothing and focuses imagination beyond the visual aspects of design. Since 2020, it has been used as a teaching tool within the Sensory Fashion Unit at London College of Fashion, and as a live design brief for the Sustainable Fashion and Textile Design course at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University. The framework can be equally adapted for use within design teams in fashion and textiles MSEs and larger organisations, to facilitate contextual understanding of clothing longevity and to shift creative focus away from the still prevailing cult of newness.

Transformative Fashion Pedagogies responds to recent calls to action (see Timmo, 2017; Barry, 2021; Cheang, 2020 and Stevenson, 2022) for educators to radically rethink the role of fashion education in relation to industry and wider debates around positionality, power and social and climate justice. While the fashion industry continues along a damaging path of exploitative environmental and social practices, there is a renewed pressure on fashion education to challenge the status quo and equip a new generation of students with the practical and intellectual skills to create lasting change.

This symposium offers an intimate and supportive space for fashion educators from London College of Fashion and Parsons School of Fashion to share the progressive and inclusive pedagogies we are implementing in our courses and institutions across business, product, design, textiles, media, concept, history and theory. The symposium will foreground fashion pedagogy as critical research, asserting the interconnectedness of research, teaching and industry and/or community organizations and the role we play as educators in enacting impactful social and political change with our students.