Draft: Digital Fashion and the Body

Course Description

Fashion holds capacity, as well as responsibility, in the shaping of body images and ideals in our everyday lives. We see and experience certain bodies as desirable, while others are subjected to stigmatization. Is fashion by default an oppressing force that limits diverse representation of the body, or can fashion equally be used as a tool of body inclusivity? In this course, you can experiment, debate, and create design expressions within conceptual fashion that bridge body and garment in new, alternative ways. Our primary goal is to explore nonconforming and abstract ways of carrying and displaying the body through fashion – what do we understand as a body, what is the premise of beauty, and how can fashion serve as a vehicle for these stories?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will have a working knowledge of CLO3D and Blender design programs, as well as a deeper understanding of the cross-implications, underriding theories and critical reading of the role of fashion in our understanding, perception, and biases of the human form.

The course introduces students to digital state-of-the-art software tools for fashion design, using specifically CLO3D and Blender to create innovative shape and silhouette expressions. Especially CLO3D is innovating the fashion industry in terms of design and production methods, and increasingly becoming a necessity for designers in the fashion industry. CLO3D is already being incorporated in fashion brands/companies as well as many design schools in Denmark and Europe.

Instead of focusing on the intent of the software for fashion production methods within the commercial fashion industry, this course takes the potential further to explore the digital design process as a methodology to sketch, sculpt, conceptualize, and create design in a more abstract, free, and forward-thinking approach to body and fashion, introducing and enabling concepts and tools not possible in traditional and physical pattern construction.

The students will learn digital tools and processes of each program (CLO3D and Blender), making them capable of using the 3D software to create and sculpt complex concepts, shape, and constructions within digital fashion, that can then be turned into real physical versions of the clothes.

Faculty

Jeppe Juel Rishøj
M.A, Cand.Des, (Fashion Design, The Royal Danish Academy). Jeppe works with an artistic and experimental approach to fashion design, working in a cross field between the digital and analogue, mixing traditional clothing construction with digital art and sculpting methods. In his projects, Jeppe explores clothes as an extension of the body, and fashion's ability to transform and abstract our physical self. With DIS since 2021.

Readings

Readings will be front-loaded in the course, to provide theoretical foundations for design explorations.  Readings and reflections on Canvas should be done ahead of the class session for which they are required. This list will be developed and expanded before the start of the course; the below readings are indicative of some topics that will be addressed in the course:

• de Perthuis, Karen. 2005. The Syntheic Ideal: the Fashion Model and Photographic Manipulation. Fashion Theory: 9:4, 407.424.
• Entwistle, Joanne. 2000. Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as an Embodied Practice. Fashion Theory: 4:3, 323-347
• Svendsen, Lars. 2006. Fashion: A philosophy. London, Reaktion Books: 76-89
  

Field Studies

A significant component of the learning will take place outside the classroom, visiting exhibitions and studios to deepen students' understanding of and exposure to Danish fashion designers. 

Approach to Teaching

This will be a very hands-on course and students must be engaged in discussions, field studies and design development in the computer lab.

Expectations of the Students

Students are expected to uphold an open-minded learning environment, and to engage fully in discussions on readings and other topics related to the course. Students are expected furthermore to develop their ideas and designs outside of class time, using class time to work through challenges with faculty and with each other.

Evaluation and Grading

Evaluation is based on daily work in class, demonstrated design/thought development outside of class, and on final presentations. Assignments are generally presented to a panel of jurors including the student’s own instructor. Grades are given by the instructor in accordance with other jurors.

To be eligible for a passing grade, you must complete all of the assigned work.

All assignments in this course contribute to a continuous design process, leading towards the final product. Each assignment conclusion and delivery functions as a moment of reflection and dialogue, between the students themselves and the faculty and should help to clarify the direction of the next assignment.

The end result will be a digital mini fashion collection (3-5 outfits) for each student's own digital avatar(s). Project
work will primarily be individual, but on agreement with faculty, can be done in pairs, in which case the Final Product collection would instead be 6-10 outfits.

Academic Regulations 

Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:

• Course Enrollment and Grading
• Academic Expectations and Honor Code

DIS - Study Abroad in Scandinavia - www.DISabroad.org