Valle Noronha, Becoming with Clothes - Activating wearer-worn engagements through design

Becoming with Clothes explores paths to more active relationships between people and the things they wear. It offers reflections on a matter that touches us all: the ways humans and clothes interact. The work departs from the critical discussion on how fashion, as a field of knowledge and practice, has prioritized investigations on visual perception and cultural values. This priority marginalises other agencies that affect the fashion system and encourage unengaged relationships. To activate wearer-worn engagements, two iterative clothing design projects are developed and examined through lived experiences via a research through design approach. The results of the study speak of the potential of surprise and open-endedness as tools to render visible how wearer and worn mutually affect each other — or in other words, how they become with. This dissertation invites fashion designers, researchers and wearers to be open to clothing's ability to act, and highlights the experience of wearing as a powerful space to be explored.