The exhibition Making FASHION Sense showcases the radical transformation of fashion through technology. Robot arms and mixed reality, holograms and drones have all paraded down international catwalks. Making FASHION Sense focuses on the impact of technology upon creative processes in the fashion industry, as well as on artistic paths leading towards increasing sustainability: Fashion which makes sense.
The exhibition explores technology as a transformative tool for artists, designers, as well as for the wearers of clothing, generating a reinvention of fashion systems. While hyperfunctional materials already monitor our biometric data in everyday life and sports activities, this exhibition showcases artists and designers who develop experimental augmented fashion objects, investigating new perceptions of our environment and human interaction which make us think in new ways. Using new materiality, they create creative fashion processes which stimulate the human senses, perceive the wearers and their surroundings, change our perspectives, and make sense in the current geopolitical context.
Experiencing fashion ranges from spiritual solace to discomfort. Garments can enforce uniformity or foster artistic expression. How do programmable garments express our bodies? Can fashion technology reorient not only our gestures, our wellbeing, our experience of others, but also our creative perspectives? Can fashion shelter us from others, from a dystopian future, or is it distorting the collective notions of ourselves?
These artists and designers create fashion that – by using technology – is not only transforming silhouettes, but production systems. Based on sustainable production ethics, they create new fashion semantics with a deeper purpose. A selection of works were created for the exhibition, such as the new designs by Freya Probst, BioBabes and KnitGeekResearch.