Uncategorised – Fit But You Know It

4S 2022

“Fit But You Know It” is at 4S/ESOCITE 2022, the conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), this year hosted by the Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla in Cholula, México. We’re running a workshop at Making and Doing, the conference track devoted to practice, action and collaboration.

Join us on the afternoon of Thursday December 8th in the Gimnasio as we explore ideas about fit through hands-on fitting and making activities. Bring an object, fabric or textile to work with – or use some of the materials we’ve gathered along the way.Join us on Thursday afternoon as we explore these ideas together through hands-on fitting and making activities. Bring an object, fabric or textile to work with – or use some of the materials we’ve gathered along the way.

Invitation to Fit But You Know It at 4S/ESOCITE, Spanish

Invitation to Fit But You Know It at 4S/ESOCITE, English

Fit But You Know It interrogates fashion industry norms around clothing fit – by centring ways of knowing revealed in the making process. We’re a group of design practitioners, educators and researchers confronting every-day colonial practices in industry and education.

Universidad de Navarra Workshop

Workshop at Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. September 2022.

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“Fit But You Know It” is a collaborative practice research project to decolonise fashion industry norms around fit. It brings together design practitioners, educators and STS researchers.

Through hands-on workshops we address the challenge of decolonising art school education by exploring a core concept in industrially-produced clothing: fit.

The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion’s ability to sell, ship and scale products globally. The legacy of Enlightenment values of universalism underpinning global trade also sees to the erasure of our tacit understanding of how to fit fabric to our own bodies.

Industrially-produced clothing has fit ‘built-in’ using pattern-cutting techniques of darts and seam shaping. By contrast, pre-industrial or contemporary examples of non-western garments, such as a West African wrapper dress, rely on fitting techniques deployed by the wearer’s hands in wrapping, knotting, or rolling.

If deeply embedded industrial-colonial practices are to be challenged, art schools and universities are the places to start an urgently needed shift in epistemic power relations. The project aims to reconfigure understandings of fit to allow for pluriversal design approaches by future fashion practitioners.