Moving Garments Meditations: Exercises for reimagining fashion through sound and touch.

BACKGROUND: The role of embodied knowledge and sensory creative practice in fashion is an emerging and highly relevant area of academic enquiry. The fashion industry functions through a visual dominance framework concealing the means of production and desensitizing individuals from the realities of fast fashion supply chains. In contrast, this creative work encourages critical provocations on fashion as an expanded sensory practice by incorporating yoga and meditation as tools to feel through these critical issues. CONTRIBUTION: The creative practice conference organised in conjunction with RMIT University and ArtEZ University of the Arts is the first to present peer reviewed and curated fashion practice research. This work consists of an AI-guided performance integrating novel ways of embodying and feeling fashion industry’s critical issues. This creative work offers new knowledge at the intersection of aesthetic sustainability, practices of care in fashion and creative practice and social justice. This intersection also provides the benefit of the expansion of critical and creative academic methodologies to tackle critical fashion issues with innovation and sensibility. SIGNIFICANCE: This performance was presented at The Dialogical Bodies conference at the Swedish School of Textiles in Boräs (April 2024). Conference submission was peer reviewed by top scholars in the field and presented amongst 40 fashion researchers and practitioners including Central Saint Martins, Parsons and Aalto. The conference proceedings were edited by leading fashion scholars: Ricarda Bigolin (RMIT), Daniëlle Brugemann (ArtEZ) and Clemens Thornquist (Swedish School of Textiles). Invitation to submit a paper or the special issue of the online journal APRIA on ‘Dialogical Bodies’ after peer-reviewed process. This creative work has also been awarded the School of Fashion and Textiles seed funding and has a successful ethics application.