Making Sense of Dress: A Sensory Perspective on Wardrobe Research

In this paper, I wish to exemplify how research on bodily experiences of dressing within research on fashion and dress research might be combined with user-oriented approaches from design research. By doing so, I wish to point my finger at the unfortunate wall between these two scholarly areas which to my mind has created a limited understanding of the connection between dress design, the body, and people's day-to-day routines of getting dressed. The case through which I wish to debate this is a wardrobe study of men in the age of 40-50 years old that I conducted in the period of 2010-12. Being a former fashion writer and trained as a fashion scholar within the humanities, I had learned that the logics of fashion is the overall explanatory framework through which people's dress practice is understood. However, issues came up during my research that did not relate to logics of fashion at all, why I had to start searching within other disciplines for alternatives. Issues, which had to do with bodily and temporary aspects of dressing that seemed to be far better explained within so-called user oriented design research. To clarify these standpoints, the paper is structured as follows; after a positioning of the dress-body connection within fashion and dress research I place my own research within the so-called 'wardrobe method'. Next I elaborate on the way I have tried to bridge my methodology with my epistemological departure, through applying methods from user-oriented design research. As I go into my case study, I show examples of how I experienced the dress-body connection of my informants in their wardrobes, and in my final discussion, I suggest how my analysis might cast back potential new endeavours for the scholarly fields with which I engage.
Keywords: wardrobe, sensory experience, fashion, dress practice, temporality