The Future of Fashion Among Smart Textile, Postphenomenology, and Mediation Theory

• In Event: Postphenomenology - I: Smart Technologies

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to understand how the introduction of new digital technologies will change the way we think of fashion.
New digital technologies are getting pervasive and they touch every aspect of our everyday life. Computers are getting into every single aspect and into every object we use and we wear. For example, smart textile and wearable computers are often used to couple our activities with digital monitoring and digital outputs like the visualization of the statistics of our personal data.
Fashion is progressively opening to these new technologies by embedding computers into clothes, but it is not clear yet the effects of the use of these technologies in the fashion industry.
Postphenomenological researches clearly show how the presences of these technologies change the way users relate to the technologies and to themselves. However, very few attentions are given to the effects on the idea of fashion per se.
This presentation, through the use of mediation theory and postphenomenology, will show how the use of these novel technologies will affect (or at least has the potentiality to affect) the very idea of fashion as we know it. It will suggest also that many of the ordinary praxes related to it can be designed in a different way in order to follow the introduction of this novel technologies.

Author

• Nicola Liberati, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente