Drawing on Jules Prown's material culture method of object analysis to investigate sensory engagement with everyday dress

This is a contribution to a collection of Working Papers in Fashion Studies, produced by London College of Fashion to showcase recent and ongoing PhD work

The Ambient Gaze: Sensory Atmosphere and the Dressed Body

This book chapter theorises the dressed body as having a 'sensory atmosphere' and considers how an empathetic 'ambient gaze' might complicate how dressed bodies are understood and interpreted, enabling a more nuanced understanding of the role dress plays in everyday life, from the perspective of the wearer. In so doing it questions the power of the social gaze and the importance given to appearance within the experience of being dressed in everyday life within existing academic research

Fashion and Memory

Elizabeth Wilson writes that fashion can be understood as ‘poised ambiguously between present and past’ (2003 [1985]: vii). Being bound up intimately with time, as well as having a selective – and sometimes skewed – perspective on the past, fashion provides a lens through which to explore the cultural practices of remembering and forgetting. These themes informed ‘Fashion and Re-collection’, an interdisciplinary symposium held at London College of Fashion in January 2013.1 Memory provided a common point of departure, facilitating meaningful exchange between scholars from different disciplines. This thematic issue on fashion and memory brings together a selection of articles developed from, and in response to, the symposium theme. Although diverse in conceptual vocabulary, the papers share an emphasis on what could be remembered, or remembered differently, through the critical study of fashion. All contributions come from postgraduate scholars and so the issue also serves to showcase emerging doctoral research in the field

Making Sense of Everyday Dress: Integrating multisensory experience within our understanding of contemporary dress in the UK

Multisensory perception is fundamental to the wearer’s experience of everyday dress, yet this remains an under-researched area within fashion and dress studies.Dress is predominantly described in visual terms, while much less attention has been paid to other relevant sensory aspects such as; touch, sound,smell - and to a lesser degree taste - and to the ways in which these interact.Similarly, within the now established field of sensory scholarship, little attention has been paid to the topic of dress. One of the contributions of this thesis is to address the above gaps in relation to both male and female contemporary UK dress(and more generally, dress within a Western context). It also attends to the wider academic neglect of male dressed experience. This thesis draws upon sensory scholarship to bring a fresh perspective to current embodied understandings of everyday dress, thereby contributing to the field of dress studies by explicitly focussing on the sensory nature of dress. This research aims to foster an inter-disciplinary research field of ‘fashion, dress and the senses’. A new body of data, based on individual testimony around sensory experience of dress, has been collected using life-world interviews with twenty participants, both men and women, incorporating material culture analysis. Contextualised within the specific social and cultural lives of the participants, the analysis of this data is distinctive in that it weaves together material, cultural,social, phenomenological and sensory perspectives. The analysis explores how sensory engagement with dress affected both the materiality of the dress items and the participants by triggering behaviour,thoughts, memories and emotions. Felt on the boundaries of the body, dress is positioned as providing a sensory atmosphere for the wearer, one that negotiates the tensions between private and public experience, enabling the participants to push out into and pull back from the world. It is therefore argued that sensory engagement with dress is an integral part of the wearer’s everyday negotiation of the self within social life

Fit But You Know It: Walking Workshop at Multilogue

120-minute collaborative workshop (in-person) In this dynamic ‘walking workshop’ we will address the challenge of decolonising art school education by exploring a core concept in industrially-produced clothing: fit. The workshop draws on sensory and embodied methods to interrogate an embodied practice. Participants will use movement, textiles, and their hands and bodies to explore fit as a fluid and open-ended process, allowing for diverse perspectives from designers, makers and wearers in knowledge-building. The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion's ability to sell, ship and scale products globally. Enlightenment values of universalism underpinning global trade also see to the erasure of our (designers and wearer’s) tacit understanding of how to fit fabric to our own bodies. Industrially-produced clothing has fit ‘built-in’ using pattern-cutting techniques of darts and seam shaping. By contrast, pre-industrial or contemporary examples of non-western garment archetypes, such as the West African wrapper dress, the Southeast Asian Longi, rely on fitting techniques deployed by wearers’ hands when wrapping, knotting, or rolling. Art schools and universities are ideal settings to challenge deeply embedded industrial-colonial practices and shift epistemic power relations. This project aims to reconfigure understandings of fit that contribute to academic discourse on social change in fashion education and practice, and encourage pluriversal and collaborative design approaches by future fashion practitioners. The workshop will take place physically in Berlin. Participation is open to all bodies and abilities

Fit but you Know it: Workshopping Methods for Decolonising Fashion Education

Fit But You Know It addresses the challenge of decolonising fashion education by exploring a core fashion concept: fit. Industrially-produced clothing has fit ‘built-in’ using pattern-cutting techniques of darts and seam shaping. By contrast, pre-industrial or contemporary examples of non-western garments, rely on fitting techniques deployed by wearers’ hands when wrapping, knotting, or rolling. The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion's ability to sell, ship and scale products globally. Informed by Enlightenment values of universalism underpinning global trade, Fashion commits ‘episitemicide’ - the destruction of existing knowledge. In this case, that’s the tacit embodied knowledge of how to fit fabric to our bodies. Art schools are ideal settings to challenge deeply embedded industrial-colonial practices and shift epistemic power relations. In this presentation, we will share the workshopping methods developed for this ongoing research project, alongside initial findings from a range of participants, including design educators and students. The workshops are intended to pilot pluriversal design methods for future fashion practice and education

Characterization of 3D Voronoi Tessellation Nearest Neighbor Lipid Shells Provides Atomistic Lipid Disruption Profile of Protein Containing Lipid Membranes

Quantifying protein-induced lipid disruptions at the atomistic level is a challenging problem in membrane biophysics. Here we propose a novel 3D Voronoi tessellation nearest-atom-neighbor shell method to classify and characterize lipid domains into discrete concentric lipid shells surrounding membrane proteins in structurally heterogeneous lipid membranes. This method needs only the coordinates of the system and is independent of force fields and simulation conditions. As a proof-of-principle, we use this multiple lipid shell method to analyze the lipid disruption profiles of three simulated membrane systems: phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylcholine/cholesterol, and beta-amyloid/phosphatidylcholine/cholesterol. We observed different atomic volume disruption mechanisms due to cholesterol and beta-amyloid. Additionally, several lipid fractional groups and lipid-interfacial water did not converge to their control values with increasing distance or shell order from the protein. This volume divergent behavior was confirmed by bilayer thickness and chain orientational order calculations. Our method can also be used to analyze high-resolution structural experimental data

Identifying substitutional oxygen as a prolific point defect in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides with experiment and theory

Chalcogen vacancies are considered to be the most abundant point defects in two-dimensional (2D) transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors, and predicted to result in deep in-gap states (IGS). As a result, important features in the optical response of 2D-TMDs have typically been attributed to chalcogen vacancies, with indirect support from Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) images. However, TEM imaging measurements do not provide direct access to the electronic structure of individual defects; and while Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy (STS) is a direct probe of local electronic structure, the interpretation of the chemical nature of atomically-resolved STM images of point defects in 2D-TMDs can be ambiguous. As a result, the assignment of point defects as vacancies or substitutional atoms of different kinds in 2D-TMDs, and their influence on their electronic properties, has been inconsistent and lacks consensus. Here, we combine low-temperature non-contact atomic force microscopy (nc-AFM), STS, and state-of-the-art ab initio density functional theory (DFT) and GW calculations to determine both the structure and electronic properties of the most abundant individual chalcogen-site defects common to 2D-TMDs. Surprisingly, we observe no IGS for any of the chalcogen defects probed. Our results and analysis strongly suggest that the common chalcogen defects in our 2D-TMDs, prepared and measured in standard environments, are substitutional oxygen rather than vacancies

Coaching through technology: a systematic review into efficacy and effectiveness for the ageing population

Background: Despite the evidence on the positive role of self-management, the adoption ofhealth coaching strategies for older people is still limited. To address these gaps, recent efforts havebeen made in the ICT sector in order to develop systems for delivering coaching and overcomingbarriers relating to scarcity of resources. The aim of this review is to examine the efficacy of personalhealth coaching systems for older adults using digital virtual agents.Methods: A systematic reviewof the literature was conducted in December 2019 analyzing manuscripts from four databases overthe last 10 years. Nine papers were included.Results: Despite the low number of studies, there wasevidence that technology-integrated interventions can deliver benefits for health over usual care.However, the review raises important questions about how to maintain benefits and permanence ofbehavior change produced by short-term interventions.Conclusion: These systems offer a potentialtool to reduce costs, minimize therapist burden and training, and expand the range of clients who canbenefit from them. It is desirable that in the future the number of studies will grow, considering otheraspects such as the role of the virtual coaches’ characteristics, social-presence, empathy, usability,and health literac