A collective search for the lived experience of dress

In fashion theory, the body is often treated as a silent final destination. A passive mannequin for an aesthetic design. But what happens when we leave the abstract and seek the friction of the act of dressing?

I met artist Iva Aga in a busy café in Brussel, armed with my research Extending the Body and a set of cards I made specifically for our first encounter. Iva’s research—much like her graduation work at KASK & Conservatorium—focuses on the corporeal and performative activation of clothing. She views garments not as static objects, but as entities that only come into existence through the movement and sensory experience of the wearer. Our practices overlap in a shared frustration: the “hallucinatory” lack of (academic) sources documenting the actual, corporeal experience of wearing clothes. How it actually feels to inhabit a garment.

I brought the set of five physical cards, each featuring a keyword that entails the overlap between our research: Activation, Friction, Imprint, Extension, and Carrying. I wanted to use these cards as tactile prompts, not to impose my definitions on her, not to have a question-answer conversation, but to see how her physical practice would rearrange or even reject my theoretical framework.

Iva’s reaction was immediate and intuitive. I asked her to rank them by their emotional and physical resonance. She was drawn to Activation as a starting point the most, found Friction to be an essential necessity for awareness, and challenged my use of Extension, preferring the term “interaction” to describe the dialogue between skin and cloth.

To document this gathering of minds, we moved from the café to a shared digital document the week after. In the silence of a video call, accompanied only by the rhythmic tapping of our keys, we performed a series of writing experiments designed to bridge the gap between our practices. We didn’t interview each other again; we allowed our voices—mine historical and societal, Iva’s physical and sensory—to clash and merge. First through a visceral ‘COLLISION’ and secondly through ‘A SHARED VOCUBULARY .’

During our first encounter, we talked about several everyday acts of dressing that carry a hidden weight. For our writing session, I selected two of these acts to serve as a shared site for our collision: the industrial closure of a zipper and the ceremonial placement of a hat. We wrote in parallel, observing how the same movement triggers vastly different reflection

Moving from these specific, physical collisions, we realized that our shared vocabulary needed a place to land. The cards I had brought to the café—originally featuring my own theoretical interpretations of Iva’s practice—served as our initial anchor. But through dialogue, it became clear that these terms couldn’t remain my ‘theories’ alone; they had to be lived in.

So to ensure this text wouldn’t just be my ‘guess’ at her research, we decided to rewrite them together. We didn’t want to define them as they appear in a dictionary, but as they exist in the moment of ‘dressing.’ What follows is our first attempt at mapping actions that bridges our research. 

ACTIVATION is not just putting on a garment; it is the moment when…
people’s hands work raw materials, processing them into larger movable surfaces, ironing, drawing, cutting into different shapes. Sewing, knotting, wrapping those surfaces (‘fabric’ of course but… we know there’s more)... and three-dimensional shapes always emerge in relation to the body. It is the moment in the morning. I lock eyes with the clothing pieces hanging in my closet. Running my hand through the clothes, making contact with different materials and textures. Trying to feel which piece I want to entrust my body to today. Of course, activation is practically effective in moments of movement. Wearing is a total process; dressing, moving, and undressing cannot exist separately; they are interdependent.

FRICTION is necessary because without resistance, the body…

becomes an echo of the garment rather than its inhabitant. In the tension of a seam or the constraint of a collar, the high-cut armhole that limits a gesture, the rigid waist that hush-hushes the breath; the invisible walls of decorum become physical. Friction within the act of dressing is the tactile reminder that your autonomy begins exactly where social expectation starts to pinch. The wearer is no longer merely ‘dressed’ but is actively negotiating their existence against the weight of the norm.

CARRYING is the emotional weight of history, but on a physical level, it feels like…

the transition from being the one who is carried (child) to the one who carries (adult). In our dialogue, we looked at the echoes of childhood—the passivity of being dressed by another—and the eventual shift of dressing oneself. As Sara Ahmed writes in The Killjoy Manifesto: “We begin to feel the weight of histories more and more; the more we expose the weight of history, the heavier it becomes.” Physically, to carry is to feel how a garment supports the back while simultaneously acting as a vessel for a human archive. It is the weight of where we come from, held up by the fabric of who we are becoming.

EXTENSION is often seen as a one-way street, but we find it is actually an interaction where…

we enact the world we are aiming for. By moving away from viewing ourselves as ‘deficient beings,’ we step over traditional dichotomies and embrace our status as prosthetic beings. Here, body extensions cease to be mere tools; instead, the body itself becomes a tool for transformation. This is where the garment talks back. It is a politics of movement where wearing becomes a manifesto in motion—a process of deconstructing our perceptions and untangling ourselves from destructive dynamics. Our extended bodies are not just dressed; they are archives of rebellion, (re)shaping every space they inhabit.

IMPRINT is the end of the chain; it is the ghost of the action left in the…

fibers long after the body has left. It is the physical memory of the day. The crease in an elbow, the scent trapped in a weave, the subtle stretch of a knee. If activation is the start of the life of a garment, the imprint is the evidence that a body was actually there. It is the archive of a lived experience, proving that the body and the dress have finally, irrevocably, met. It is the silent testimony of a body that refused to be just a mannequin. 

Iva Aga is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher that graduated from KASK & Conservatorium in textile design (2024). Her research project “Workshop on Dress” explores the role of the body in making and wearing clothing and investigates how clothing and movement shape human experience.