The Daily Selection

In this PhD thesis, The Daily Selection, I will be addressing the overall question of how research on wardrobes can contribute to a more effective connection between the production and the consumption of dress objects. The thesis builds on exemplary studies of people in their wardrobes, with the aim of focusing on theoretical and methodological concerns and implications. It is structured in three parts, each of which consists - independently - of its own introductory framing, its own literature review, its own methods chapter, its own field work study, and its own conclusive reflections. As such, the parts, when taken as a whole, represent an evolving process through which my overall research questions are being filtered and reflected. My scholarly approach builds on the fusing of fashion and dress research and design research, in this way closing a gap between dress practice as, on the one hand, symbolic discourse and, on the other, as an embodied practice that is 'physically embedded' in the material capacities of dress objects. In Part I, I frame this view by addressing the concept of dressing as a 'bodily situated practice', as defined by Entwistle (2000), combined with a processual view on design and everyday practices, as defined by Shove et al. (2008). Based on these perspectives, I contribute with my own explanatory frameworks of 'sartorial systems' and 'sensory anchoring', on which I base the entire thesis. In order to operationalise these frameworks in my field work, I have developed a personal methodology for the wardrobe method that embraces the sensory and temporal aspects of dress practice. In Part II, I filter this through the vehicle of a collaborative project with Danish designer Mads Nørgaard, wherein I observe how dress objects from Nørgaard's collection are appropriated and used in the wardrobes of informants. In this way, I point to discrepancies between the production and the dissemination of dress objects that take place in the fashion industry, and to the ways that people use and experience these objects in their everyday lives. In Part III, I conduct a series of ‘wardrobe sessions’ with informants in collaboration with a designer, in order to explore how use practice might cast reflections back onto design processes. In my concluding chapter, I argue that my thesis contributes with a more facetted and reflected set of thinking in relation to dress practice, and that this way of thinking could potentially bring about radical changes in the way dress objects are currently produced, disseminated and sold. All together, this thesis shows that in order to establish a more tight fit between the production and consumption of dress objects, there is very good reason to look into the dress practices that are taking place in people’s wardrobes.