Abstract
This paper examines how the digitalization of fashion design practices intensifies the primacy of visual immediacy, contributing to the displacement of what Ben Barry terms enclothed knowledge: the embodied, relational, and generative understanding of clothing as a site of lived and sensorial experience. Within today’s cultural regime, garments are increasingly designed, consumed, and circulated as images, curated for their visual impact across digital platforms, rather than for their tactile, gestural, or somatic affordances. The current modes of fashion production, consumption, and visualization enable the progressive erasure of a dialogic relationship with garments as co-agents of the body. I argue that this aesthetic shift results in a form of transparency: clothing no longer mediates between self and other but becomes a surface for instant legibility and self-donation. The dematerialization of consumption (e-commerce, Web 3.0) and the virtualization of dissemination (Web 2.0, social networks) unravel our embodied connection to dress. Verticalized (scroll-based), algorithmically shaped, and bi-dimensionally framed within screens, fashion is mediated through images as associative cues (Küchler, 2005), rather than as structuring forces of imagination (Brady, 1998). Rather than enhancing subjectivity, this condition paradoxically incapacitates it: aesthetic experience is reduced to its communicative function. The garment ceases to shelter ambiguity, becoming a performative interface emptied of interiority for tactile and visual concerns. Drawing on somaesthetics, and aesthetic materialism, this paper interrogates the consequences of fashion’s visual hegemony and proposes a renewed ethics of re-embodied, re-materialized design.
Presenters
Cyana Djoher Anaïs HadjaliPhD Candidate, Doctoral School APESA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture
KEYWORDS
FASHION, AESTHETICS, ENCLOTHED KNOWLEDGE, IMAGE-CLOTHING, DIGITALIZATION
