Becoming-with: On Textile Companions and Fungi Friends

Abstract

“The magic of cloth”, Peter Stallybrass writes, “is that it receives us: receives our smells, our sweat and shapes even”. Woven into the fabric, wrinkles and seams of our clothes are traces of past experiences. This contribution focuses on innovative textile design practices that reinvent the matter and meaning of fashion; and thereby redefine emotional connections between human subjects and the new material “things” they wear. Innovative design practices include textiles made from, or in collaboration with, living matter and technological materials. They result in garments created from organisms such as fungi, algae, and bacteria; or from technologies such as solar cells, shape-memory material and sensors. Instead of cut and sewn, the textiles of the future are grown and harvested, printed and wired. How do the new textures, touch and textiles of fashion affect the mnemonic power and agentic qualities of garments? And how do these garments instigate new affective relations between wearers and clothes? Using innovative Dutch design practices as source of inspiration, we think through their new materialist and posthuman theoretical and methodological implications. The aim of the contribution is to offer insight into how these two theoretical approaches help to understand the mnemonic and affective connections new textile materials instigate between wearers and garments.