The Body and Textiles at the Intersection of the Physical and the Digital Through Movement
Research Publication
2022
Design Project
This project investigates alternative body–textile expressions at the intersection of the physical and the digital by challenging prevailing body–dress paradigms in fashion design. While dominant digital fashion tools simulate textiles as responsive to pre-defined human bodies, they rarely acknowledge the reciprocal influence of dress on bodily movement that characterises lived, embodied experience. The project responds to this asymmetry by inverting the conventional movement hierarchy: instead of bodies animating textiles, textile movement is used to animate and transform digital bodies.
Through an artistic design research approach, a mixed-reality installation was developed that connects the movement of a physical textile, activated by wind, to a digital human-body representation via motion-capture technology. Guided by the Moving and Making Strange methodology, the installation functions both as a design tool and as a sketching method, enabling the systematic observation, abstraction, and analysis of movement as an ephemeral material.
The resulting body–textile expressions reveal bodily forms that deviate from normative human silhouettes, producing digital bodies that twist, dissolve, and reconfigure in response to textile dynamics. Through visual analysis and sketching, these transformed bodies emerge as alternative starting points for designing dress; forms that resist established garment typologies such as shirts, trousers, or jackets and instead suggest new construction logics grounded in movement, temporality, and textile agency.
By granting textiles an active role in shaping bodily form in digital space, the project proposes a shift in fashion design practice: from designing for the body toward designing with movement as material. This contribution opens up new perspectives for digital fashion design in both academia and industry, foregrounding the generative potential of body–textile relations beyond conventional categories of dress.
Authors: Jan Tepe, Faseeh Saleem
