A body-neutral inclusive practice for dress and clothing
Creators: name: KENNEDY, Katherine
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330315
subject: Textile and fashion design

description: Throughout my career I have designed and developed clothing for people to wear to work. Dressing large workforce populations across sectors, such as healthcare, defence, security, telecommunications, sport, community services and education, requires a knowledge framework that respects and understands how to design clothing that is fit for purpose for every ‘body’ according to the work they perform. In Australia, the duty to treat people fairly and with respect within their place of work is enacted through legislation. Since the mid 1980s statutes across Commonwealth, state and territory governments have created the regulatory framework for equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws. Within the design, development and provision of workwear no one can be excluded. The necessity to dress a broader range of people outside the boundaries of existing clothing size preferences common to the fashion system, has for me, highlighted a range of technical and cultural knowledge gaps within the standards of clothing size. 

The imperative to dress ‘every body’ irrespective of, for example, ethnicity, gender identity, age, ability, physical features, religious belief has led me to question the dominant paradigm of clothing design and development based on a standard sized view of the body. Specifically, I have questioned how the legacy of the ‘fashionable’ aesthetically thin body type as the preferred product design and development model for fashion product misrepresents the anthropometric requirements of total workforce populations.

Through this practice-based research project I have come to realise that there is an advantage in making clothing through not working within the narrow confines of fashion’s standard ‘ideal’ body size. The advantage is encountering difference through working with a broad range of people from diverse backgrounds. This pathway is not intentionally anti fashion, rather I see it as an advantageous non-fashion approach. My view offers a different gaze. One that is separate to the performative demands and cycles of the fashion system, outside the trend driven zeitgeist, that must be non-exclusive and factor a garment’s ‘designed life’ and ‘after life’. Making garments that fit people and encourage a sense of belonging is a valuable (and a far from radical) step towards reducing clothing waste.

These realisations led me to develop a methodology, or as termed by Candy et al. (2022b), a system of methods that can be applied to any body type to facilitate body-neutral strategies and techniques for inclusive dress and clothing practice. My practice has primarily involved creating artifacts as scaled physical and digital replicas of real people’s bodies, from one sixteenth tiny scale to one-to-one full scale. These artifacts are both technical 3D data sources and cultural performance objects. They also form the methods and the outcomes of my practice, thus creating my system of methods. The practice-based actions and system of methods (methodology) of my practice involved 6 stages: forming, mapping, observing, belonging, connecting, and engaging. These stages function as the activity scaffold for the practice ‘doing’ (the verb), which when acted upon by the protagonist (the subject) forms the (object-orientated) response. Reflection on and through these practice actions provides the means to feed-forward and feed-back to generate new knowledge, or epistemic insight. The artifacts created within this research are therefore central to the research process.

I have made and exhibited my replicas of real people’s bodies; I have invited others through workshops to make bodies. Through the public showing of these bodies, I have considered deeply the ethical dimensions of my practice and my replicas’ bodies as being real people’s bodies. Through the reflective process of being a practice-based researcher and through undertaking the university’s rigorous ethics application process, I set up ethical protocols to protect my replicas’ bodies. I have also written and published on these bodies and my practice. Through peer review and public engagement of my work I have come to understand the cultural, political and social dimensions of real people’s bodies.

The act of making my ‘human’ effigies through 3D body scanning, laser cutting, 3D printing, and virtual reality (VR) has also provoked me to adopt an allegorical connection to Mary Shelly’s (1818) gothic novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, through a practice trope I have called Studio Frankenstein and the Modern post Prometheus. Shelly’s original tale of creation and duty has a connection for my practice intent on forming human effigies. In my case, from actual human de-identified biometric data. Thus, Studio Frankenstein adopted several ethical messages learnt from Shelly’s original novel, such as searching for a sense of belonging through naming my humanoid artifacts and not abandoning them as Victor Frankenstein did his creature. A further connection is made to the development of the tailoring profession within the same historical circumstances of the time of Shelly’s writing in the early nineteenth century, brought about by the development of the tape measure, the technical innovation that combined science and mathematics to form anthropometric rules for coding the body, which in many ways remain until this day. Thus, Studio Frankenstein has revealed, through a theoretical decoding of the quantification and classification (anthropometrics) of the human form, as applied to the production of clothing, an underlying co-narrative that has imposed a strong racial dimension. A condition that was amplified in the twentieth century and is now seeking retribution in the twenty-first.

Through the transformation of my practice and the outcomes of this practice-based PhD, I have realised that for clothing design and development practice within the fashion and apparel sectors to be more inclusive of body type identities, we must shift our ways of being, doing and knowing away from the premise of a ‘standard size’. What has transpired is a model of practice driven by the actions of experimenting, making and exhibiting artifacts formed by human body scan data. The findings of this research offer a contribution to new knowledge through being a system of methods for a body-neutral model of inclusive dress and clothing practice. It is a system that can be applied to shift a practice that is limited by an existing paradigm into a new trajectory to enable participation in a diverse future.