Lars Hallnäs

Professor in Interaction Design
The Swedish School of textiles, University College of Borås

The dark room fashion show
- fashion design research through experimental design

Background

The challenge to further develop fashion design, as an academic subject is implicitly also a challenge to further develop fashion design research. Although this clearly follows the general trend of developing design as an academic subject at our design schools through the introduction of design research, it is far from obvious what this means with respect to fashion design. It is not only the strong focus on the expressional aspects of design that makes fashion design a bit special, but also that it so directly deals with expressing people rather than expressing function of things.

As an empirical phenomenon fashion has been studied in a number of research areas from studies in sociology to critical work in art history. But academic research as to develop the practice of fashion design itself in a systematic way is less prominent – this is in particular true for fashion design aesthetics.

The research program referred to here is based on the idea that the introduction of an interaction design perspective of fashion design will provide a natural foundation for research. It is an interpretation that put focus on the acts that defines wearing expressions and thus explains the meaning of “expressing people” in terms of act design. To develop this aspect of fashion design is then closely related to the development of basic interaction design (“Formenlehre”) where an explanation of the notions of “interaction form” and “interaction expression” is in focus. Fashion expression is always a matter of wearing expressions.

There is a certainly a strong tradition of experimental fashion design which constitute a practice somewhere in between art and practice based design research, i.e. the haute couture tradition, anti-fashion, deconstruction fashion, techno fashion etc. But to further develop this type of experimental practice in the direction of a more systematical practice based design research there is a clear need for experimental work with a more direct link to the issue of theoretical foundations. Not experiments to test a given hypothesis, but experiments to interpret and explore basic conceptual issues through experimental examples.

The challenge is then not to introduce new theories about fashion, but to further develop the foundational concepts that establish fashion design as an academic subject in its own right. This is basically a matter of design aesthetics and can never be a derivative of empirical studies in psychology, sociology, market analysis etc.

Knowledge is not the issue. The goal is to introduce a notion of design, a conceptual and methodological framework that can define and provide foundations for practice. Such a notion is not propositional knowledge, but the basic concepts that makes the formulation of a program, a proposition possible. The task of experimental design research is to provide the guiding examples. This is design, not with a focus on product development, but with a focus on the examples that open up for the formulation of a concept. In science in general this correspond to the development of a theory where canonical examples guides the formulation of basic definitions. As research it is up side down compared with empirical analysis of what is already given. The guiding examples are also a sort of no-results.

The Dark Room Fashion Show is such an experimental example; visual expression is clearly basic in fashion design, but is that really the whole story?

The dark room fashion show

Visual expressions are dominant in fashion aesthetics – we show fashion and see the garment. The basic design aesthetics we learn within the regular fashion design curriculum is all about spatial form and visual expression. It seems somehow natural to train our perception of forgotten aesthetical issues by bracketing this dominant perspective.

The Dark Room Fashion Show is a program for fashion shows presenting fashion with a total focus on the sounds of garment in use; consider some type of garment (defined with respect to wearing expressions), focus on some fragment, some small detail of the given garment, try to describe the sound characteristics of the fragment, the detail in question, design such a fragment, such a detail as fashion with total focus on wearing expressions as something we hear. Then “show” a given collection of fashion garment fragments through a sound installation, expose distinctly fashion as a matter of sound gestalt, refrain from all references to visual expressions, work with live performances where the sound installation performances substitute the visual acting of models in a traditional “visual” fashion show. The experiment in question exposes a certain expressional property of fashion design in terms of a sound installation and thus represents an open presentation of an investigation. It is at the same time a methodological exercise; what does it mean, from a methodological perspective, to focus on sound gestalt in the fashion design process?

Lars Hallnäs lars.hallnas@hb.se
www.hb.se/ths/research
Professor in interaction design, composer
The Swedish School of Textiles
University College of Borås
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Chalmers University of Technology