WEARABLE UTOPIAS
HISTORIES + FUTURES + FABULATIONS
as pedagogy?
as spatial practice?
as tools of resistance?
as sites of political struggle?
as creative experiments in futuring?
as doings of queer dis-identification?
as extra-ordinary acts of citizenship?
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On Monday 16th September 2024, POP hosted a small, day-long, networking seminar to celebrate the launch of the new edited collection Wearable Utopias and the approaching end of the POP project.
We brought together a diverse group of artists, researchers and practitioners taking unique and inventive approaches to wearables. Together we used historical explorations, examples of industry engagement, design experiments, pedagogical re-workings and speculative futuring to explore pressing present-day concerns.
In the spirit of creative practice, we encouraged multi-dimensional show & tell, material practices and provocations.
The symposium was held in the beautiful River Rooms at Somerset House, London.
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Key speakers included:
Ben Barry
Dean and Associate Professor of Equity and Inclusion in the School of Fashion at Parsons
Alison Matthews David
Associate Professor in the School of Fashion, University of Toronto
Laura Forlano
Professor, Art + Design and Communication Studies at Northeastern University
Melissa Gregg
Sustainability advisor, Meta Reality Labs and incoming Professor of Digital Futures at BDFI
Lucy Orta
Professor of Visual Arts at UAL and award-winning visual artist with Studio Orta
Kat Jungnickel
Professor in Sociology, Goldsmiths
We also had shorter presentations from:
Eldina Begic
Creator of ‘Dresstopia’ and curator of the exhibition ‘Workwear’ in Rotterdam 2023
Bastien Lefebvre
Studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture
Qian Yang
Studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture
Yunpei Li
Studying at the London College of Fashion
Silvia Bombardini
Studying Visual Sociology, Goldsmiths
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Outline of the symposium
In his classic book Cruising Utopia (2009), queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz encouraged readers to refuse to settle for the status quo. He argued that “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures; other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” His hopeful text rejects the flat, routinised, heteronormative structures of the privileged few and instead calls for colourful reimaginings of expansive and diverse futures. Inspired by this work, we call our symposium (and new book) Wearable Utopias. The ubiquity of wearables, their proximity to bodies, and their transformative potential make them a potent platform for imagining not only new worlds, but also ways of interrupting and inhabiting existing ones.
What we wear has always been a site of inequality and a powerful tool for change, radical action, and Do-It-Yourself democracy. Wearables connect the body to social life and the political world, so everything from swimsuits to spacesuits can be seen as “sites of political struggle” (Parkins 2002; Entwistle 2015). Wearables are an ordinary – yet critical – socio-technology of everyday life that touch every single body; central to ideas around identity, participation, belonging and connection, dynamic sites of joyful freedom as well as devices of discrimination. For centuries marginalised people have creatively mis/used what they have worn to claim multiple identities, conceal radical practices, push at conventional boundaries and transgress into new territories, in the process defying and resisting socio-political limitations. We explore wearables from multi-disciplinary perspectives as complex socio-political devices that hold the potential for changing worlds one stitch at a time.
Together we explored wearables as embodied acts, practices and imaginaries of how worlds “might be otherwise”.
The symposium explored wearable world-making in histories, futures and fabulations. We looked for wearable “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielson 2008) and practices of “material participation” (Marres 2015) where people creatively break with codes or conventions, often in mundane and ground-up ways, to express new forms of civic engagement and protest.
We took inspiration from Mimi Sheller (2014) who explores unconventional knowledge sites to theorise “citizenship from below” and from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of “misfits” which powerfully reframes assumptions tied to specific bodies in specific places by “highlighting adaptability, resourcefulness, and subjugated knowledge as potential effects of misfitting.”
We looked for desire lines which, Sara Ahmed (2006, 2016) explains, show “where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow” and “queer uses” of ordinary things used in extra-ordinary ways. We reflected on speculative fabulation both as a “mode of attention, a theory of history and a practice of worlding” (Haraway 2016) and also a way to “experiment with what could be rather than what is or what should be” (Forlano 2019). Overall, we sought interdisciplinary dialogues about wearables as world-making devices that invite us to consider how things “might be otherwise” (Bijker and Law 1992).
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Some of the questions we asked:
What are the “queer uses” of wearables?
What role do wearables play in urgent social, environmental and political issues?
How can wearables connect socio-political pasts to alternative futures?
In what ways do wearables reproduce or resist pre-determined narratives and tropes?
What role can wearables play in making possible or re-imagining more equitable and just futures?
In other words – what do arts, humanities and social sciences bring to understandings, developments and possibilities of wearables?
Enormous thanks to everyone involved!
