Abstract
Entanglement, affect and experience: wearing (shoes) as experimental research methodology.
By Ellen Sampson, Chelsea College of Arts, UK
Wearing is fundamental to our experience of clothing; though we experience our garments through other senses it is a relationship predicated on touch. It is through the tactile experience of our garments that we come to know them; to comprehend texture, fit and form. Drawing upon a phenomenological and a psychoanalytic approach to touch and wear this article examines the possibility of wearing as a methodology for practice and performance based research, wearing as a means of ‘doing’ research. This paper explores the possibility of a wearing based research, as an addendum or adjunct to the more widely understood practice and performance based researches. It asks if wearing as a research practice might open up new avenues in fashion and textile knowledge, uncovering different aspects of our lived experience of cloth and clothes. It presents the act of wearing, the embodied experience of clothing and the body together, as a tool for developing knowledge, of ‘being in’ or ‘being with’ rather than observing from outside. It builds on the work of phenomenologists Schilder (1935) and Meleau-Ponty (1962) proposing a methodology of entanglement; a methodology which draws upon and abstracts the idea of participant observation.
Author keywords
Wearing Clothes Bodies, Experience, Methodologies