Fashion and Affect: Exploring Affective Method

Abstract

This research explores the possibilities of approaching non-representational and material manifestations of fashion through the lens of affect theory. This is done by exploring the main tenets of affect theory, and its use for the study of fashion. Placing affect theory within a wider scope of new materialism and posthumanism creates a basis for a methodology that circumvents the traditional dichotomies mind-matter, and nature-culture. By exploring recently developed affective methodologies and by reassessing methods from the field of fashion studies a groundwork is provided for affective methods that investigate what fashion does instead of what fashion is. Three case studies concerning high fashion, the production of fashion, and fast fashion serve as testing grounds for an affective analysis that uses experiential data, combined with material or ethnographic approaches. Affective methods provide more insight in how fashion touches humans by attending to the unconscious and emotional processes that drive the consumption and appreciation of fashion.