As discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, my research started with my ex- plorative empirical investigations of the field of techno-fashion. Visiting events and de- sign studios, speaking to experts and designers, and directly observing many different designs during the early stages of my Ph.D. trajectory, I noticed that the mere material presence of techno-fashion on a body, or even on a static mannequin, does something to people and their behavior. This led to the hypothesis that techno-fashion not only strongly affects the experience and material properties of fashion but may also radical- ly transform how people communicate and behave, and relate to themselves as well as to others. It also informed the central question research question: How can we under- stand the ways in which techno-fashion materially mediates the relations between the human body, technology, and fashion?
Within this dissertation, two theoretical approaches help to find an answer to the cen- tral research question, namely postphenomenology and new materialisms. The choice for these two theoretical strands is informed by the four case studies and the four cor- responding aims of my research. In one way or another, all case studies affect the re- lation between the wearer’s body and the world around her: the robotic limbs of the ‘Spider Dress 1.0’ and ‘Spider Dress 2.0’ demarcate and extend the boundaries of the human body, alerting both the wearer and her surroundings of the issue of personal space; the inflatable silicones in Sensoree’s ‘AWE Goosebumps’ externalize and am- plify the wearer’s physical sensation of goosebumps; the LED strings in Pauline van Dongen’s illuminated running shirts affect the visibility of their wearers, both literally and metaphorically; and the biosensors in Byborre’s ‘BB. Suit 0.3’ drastically change the way in which the wearer presents himself to the outside world. Techno-fashion, in sum, does something to the embodied experience and matter of fashion.
There is sufficient literature available that specifically addresses either fashion or technology in terms of embodied experience or material agency, such as Joanne Entwistle’s The Fashioned Body (2015) and Küchler and Miller’s Clothing as Material
Culture (2005); or Don Ihde’s Bodies in Technology (2002) and Peter-Paul Verbeek’s What Things Do (2005a). As techno-fashion has rarely been studied from a socio-cul-
tural perspective, however, there is no coherent theoretical framework or solid body of literature that unites the fields of fashion studies and the philosophy of technolo- gy. Whereby developers and designers of techno-fashion have found fertile ground in combining the practices of fashion and technology, I will attempt to interweave these domains theoretically.
By developing a theoretical framework for the study of how techno-fashion materially mediates the relations between the human body, fashion, and technology, this research brings four different fields of study together: fashion studies, design studies (particu- larly interaction design and industrial design), cultural studies, and the philosophy of technology. To combine these in themselves already interdisciplinary fields, I unite two contemporary philosophical approaches specifically concerned with embodied experi- ence and the material dimensions of culture and society: (1) phenomenology (Husserl 1952/1993; Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 1968) and its recent successor postphenom- enology (Ihde 1990, 2002, 2003b, 2009, 2016; Verbeek 2005a, 2011; Rosenberger and Verbeek eds. 2015); and (2) new materialisms (Barad 2003; Barrett and Bolt 2013; Bennet 2004, 2010; Braidotti 1994, 2013; Bruggeman 2014; Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012; Rocamora and Smelik 2016; Smelik 2018; St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei 2016). Before, I further address how a combination of these two theoretical lenses help to research techno-fashion from a socio-cultural perspective as well as to analyze it in terms of performance, embodied experience, materiality, and surveillance, I will first explain what each of them entails.
1. Phenomenology and Postphenomenology
Phenomenology: Embodied Experience
Phenomenology has always played a central role in the philosophy of technology (Verbeek 2001: 120). Fashion scholars, also, have increasingly turned to phenomenology to research and emphasize the embodied aspects of fashion and dressing (see for exam- ple Entwistle 2015; Negrin 2013, 2016). One of the central arguments of phenomenology is that the classical Cartesian dichotomy between subject and object – in later phenome- nology this becomes ‘human beings’ and ‘world’ – does not hold. From a phenomenolog- ical standpoint, humans and world can only be thought of as always already related and constituting each other in this relation (Verbeek 2001: 120-121). Embodied experience and the perceiving body as “a physical thing that is able to entertain a system of sensations,” are key topics in phenomenological thought (Heinämaa, 2012: 226, original emphasis). These topics are of particular relevance in relation to techno-fashion because technol- ogy-infused garments often involve various sensorial sensations such as touch or vi- sion, as well as technological forms of ‘sensing’ in the form of sensors. Phenomenology provides the conceptual and methodological tools to reflect on the relationship be- tween the human body and techno-fashion and helps to address the ways in which techno-fashion affects the wearer’s bodily experience of self and environment.
The work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty notably illuminates how human beings relate to the world “through objects” and how artifacts may consequently become instruments with which we perceive the world (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002: 176, original emphasis). He illustrates this point with the example of a blind man’s cane: “Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick” (ibid.). This insight is of specific significance for research on and wearable technology in general because wearables are often envisioned as “a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis” as well (1945/2002: 176; cf. Smelik 2012: 133). In itself, clothing is already “an essential tool for people to define their space,” yet techno-fashion may amplify this function by allowing wearers to extend the spatiality and capacities of their bodies (Quinn 2002: 16; cf. Verbeek 2001: 126). A clear example that illustrates how techno-fashion extends the wearer’s body is ‘Navigate’ [Figure 13, 14], an “urban way-finding jacket” developed by the company Wearable Experiments (Wearable X). Using haptic vibrations to indicate when to turn left or right, ‘Navigate’ subtly helps the wearer to explore the city without looking at a screen or map. Whereas our bodily capacity to navigate is normally largely confined to vision, ‘Navigate’ extends this capacity to the sense of touch. The way in which techno- fashion extends and supplements the human body is discussed in chapter two.
Another reason for discussing techno-fashion in light of the phenomenal body – the body as “existence or being in the world through a body” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002: 360) – is that one of the main trends in the overarching field of wearable technology concerns the tracking and registration of physiological signals, such as heart rate, posture, tempera- ture, movement or activity. By permitting the wearer to technologically bear witness and sometimes even manage bodily states and processes, such techno-fashion amplifies the wearer’s body awareness and promote a kind of “self-conscious self-surveillance,” something I will further address in chapter five on ‘wearable surveillance’ (Balsamo 1995: 216). Finally, phenomenology helps to see how techno-fashion is inclined to bring with it a new body consciousness because it combines the technologically acquired data with fashion’s capacity to communicate and express something about the wearer (Quinn
13.
13. Wearable X, ‘Navigate Sydney’. Photography by Rupert Kaldor © Wearable X
Kaldor © Wearable X
2002: 33). As chapter four will explain, techno-fashion can communicate all kinds of in- formation about the wearer to the outside world by translating certain inputs (such as physiological data) into visible output (such as light, color, sound, or vibration).
To sum up, phenomenology is a valuable approach to techno-fashion for three reasons. First, it contributes to a description and better understanding of the possibilities and ef- fects of techno-fashion in relation to the wearer’s “body-in-the-world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002: 164). Techno-fashion, it highlights, has implications for the spatial and physical situatedness of wearers. Second, phenomenology is helpful in understand- ing how some wearables direct attention to and help to monitor phenomena normally taken for granted or even unperceived, such as our body posture, vital signs, or the feel of clothing on our body. Some wearable technologies, therefore, have the capacity to aid the wearer’s embodied experience, enabling a heightened and new form of body consciousness (Ryan 2014: 96). Third, phenomenology illuminates that humans and
the world are inseparably connected and elucidates how human beings can not only extend the perceptual range of their lived bodies through wearable technologies but may perceive with them as well (Verbeek 2001: 126, original emphasis).