[-empyre-] thoughts on dress

[Kettley, Sarah]

On the subject of wearable technology on the social dimension, I'd like to add some examples of projects that have explored this, and also some theorists that are being looked to by researchers to inform these approaches.

We also have to tease apart what is being made visible in the social realm and by whom. The model whereby internal information of one wearer is made visible to 'other's cannot really be said to be social, whereas a work like Katherine Moriwaki's umbrella.net (with Jonah Brucker Cohen) which explores communication hopping, creates a platform for the shared creation of an expression. Where internal bodily information is shared rather than simply transmitted, there may be more of a social element, such as in Leah Heiss' Inner project (2007), in which she explores intrapersonal emotional states.

The distributed nature of ubiquitous computing platforms, I think, call also for a more distributed model of wearable systems both technologically and as social objects, wherein expression and experience also become distributed. Hence collections of jewellery based on Speckled Computing (see www.specknet.org<http://www.specknet.org>), in which wearers social networks (in the everyday) and collaborative and sometimes competitive turn taking (in a gallery installation) are the platforms for light or sound outputs. It is easy to assume that identifiable social groups work through the shared visual language of dress, but this is not necessarily true of all groups. I worked with a friendship group of older women in the UK, all of whom had differing approaches to dress as an expression of their identities, and yet who would collectively identify themselves as a friendship group. We have to be careful not to assume such sociological norms extrapolate from sub cultures where the use of dress as a code may be deliberate, or where systems of fashion are in place at certain life stages.

I have found the work of Erving Goffman very useful for thinking about the sociology of presentation of the self, and the complexes of accountability and normativity that are constantly co-created and negotiated expressively through all behaviour. More recently, Joanna Entwistle has written about the creativity of body dressing, and Fiona Jane Candy about the complicity of dress and carried artefacts in the creation of social demeanour. In order to research distributed networks of people and things with friends, I also looked to Latour and Actor Network Theory, although Tim Ingold is increasingly talking about not so much about 'nodes' implicit in ANT, but entanglements and the interplay of intention and what might be called craft - situated response to material. It is interesting to think carefully about what is being made visible, and the control that a wearer has over that - early issues with engineered wearables, focused on eventual everyday scenarios, centred around hidden technology, but struggled with the visibility of the interaction itself. Now there are more considered approaches to the materiality of the technology itself, as well as research into gestures as social phenomena - see Julie Rico's work at Glasgow University, which differentiates acceptability of gestures according to social context.

Finally, the roles of the accessory have been interrogated by a group of academics publishing through the Geneva University of Design (this is hard to find so here is the reference: V. Durschei & L. Neri-Belkaïd (Eds.). Access to Accessory, pp.16-17. Geneva: Geneva University of Design). Claiming that systems of fashion have become so globalised, that the accessory has moved to become the key garment instead of the peripheral object. Certainly in a contemporary jewellery context, it is accepted that the act of dressing should start with the jewel and work out towards the whole outfit.

Best wishes,
Sarah

Sarah Kettley
Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies :: Product Design
Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street NG1 4BU
+44 (0)115 848 4581
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