Feeling Fashion

Book excerpt: Fashion is the experience of pleasure we take in the gamble of dress. It is an emotional phenomenon that is embodied and intimately connected to biological processes in the body, our cognition, and in resonance with embodied social dynamics. The fashion industry taps into the excitement and pleasure we feel in our bodies when being admired and adored by our peers. If we are unpack fashion as a gamble, sustainable fashion is not restricted to garments and their environmental impact, but we can radically reimagine how to play the game of fashion. What if the task of clothing designers is to design a new game that facilitates new social-emotional relationships between players? In this book, von Busch and Hwang offer a theoretical framework to reimagine fashion through affective and embodied perspectives on play and gambling, and through this move put experience as the foundation of understanding of fashion as a socially embodied phenomenon.