Marie Riegels Melchior: ‘DOING’ FASHION - exploring a praxiographical approach to the study of fashion
PhD Candidate at Denmark’s Design School and the Danish Museum of Art & Design
This paper explores how fashion research might benefit from a praxiographical approach in an effort to overcome the perception of fashion as either a material or an immaterial phenomenon. Instead, fashion should be perceived as enacted in practice. As a consequence fashion is not one thing, but multiple, and always both a material and an immaterial phenomenon. Fashion becomes socio-material defined and defined by how its different realities are related.
The paper demonstrates this approach to fashion through a case study, where the fashion collection design process of a small Danish fashion company is examined. In closing, the paper comments on this alternative research approach’s potential for future fashion research. It is argued that the approach opens insights into how fashion is brought into being through socio-material practices whether the researcher is concerned with fashion production, distribution or consumption. The fashion category becomes open-ended, open for new negotiations and political battles between its different realities.