Investigating Sensory Perception as
a Material for Fashion Design
2021
Research Publication
Design Project
Workshop
The project investigates sensory perception as a material for fashion design by questioning the prevailing separation between body and dress within both physical and digital design practices. While contemporary fashion technologies primarily address dress from an external, visual perspective, the project argues that the internal, bodily experience of wearing dress, how one sees, hears, and feels through it, remains largely unarticulated within design processes.
Through an artistic design research approach, an exploratory workshop was conducted with undergraduate fashion design students using a previously self-developed technologically augmented bodysuit. The bodysuit displaced the senses of sight, sound, and touch away from the wearer’s skin and relocated them onto an outer textile layer through cameras, microphones, sensors, and haptic actuators. This sensory relocation produced body-ownership illusions that destabilised habitual distinctions between body and dress, prompting participants to experience the bodysuit as an extension of their body rather than as a garment worn upon it.
Participants described moments of perceptual disorientation, emotional vulnerability, and heightened bodily awareness, followed by gradual adaptation and exploration. As the senses were collectively designed and adjusted, the workshop shifted from an instrumental manipulation of perception toward a collaborative negotiation of embodied experience. This process foregrounded the relational and experiential dimensions of designing with sensory perception.
The observations suggest that altering bodily perception through dress can expand fashion design beyond surface, silhouette, and materiality toward experiential and somatic expressions. By treating perception as a material, the project reframes dress as an interface that mediates bodily presence and self-awareness across internal and external perspectives, suggesting that integrating sensory perception into fashion design practice opens new avenues for artistic expression and calls for more holistic, body-centred approaches to digital and technological fashion design.
Author: Jan Tepe
