Conference: Responsible Fashion Series Antwerp

The following presents my paper that was submitted and virtually presented as part of the Responsible Fashion Series Conference in Antwerp in October 2021.

Title: Realising Fashion through Place: an exploration of Fashion Rituals on Gadigal Land

Keywords: Place, Fashion Design for Sustainability, Earth Logic, Pluriversality, Relationality, Rituals, Co-creation.

Relation to Conference Themes: Breaking the Rules - Reflecting on Fashion Education and Breaking the mould – developing new types contributors to the fashion world.

Abstract:
This paper presents the first year of my practice-based fashion PhD project exploring shifting understandings of sustainable fashion towards an Earth Logic (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) through conducting fashion rituals on colonised Gadigal Land. We see numerous sustainability initiatives arising, however, the industry and higher fashion education continue to perpetuate surface-level sustainability fixes that fail to address the deeply rooted onto-epistemological issues of our time. Modern fashion on the most part sees itself as separate from all life on this planet, and this disconnect allows for the continual extraction, exploitation and desecration of the Earth and all of its beings. This project is grounded within Earth Logic, a radical fashion action research plan (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) that presents a holistic and visionary approach to fashion research that prioritises the Earth and people. Colonised Gadigal Land, otherwise known as Sydney, is the starting point for fashion designerly enquiry. There has been an increased interest in place-based fashion, however, there remains a lack of practical exploration into how disciplinary understandings of locality can be formed and how a sense of place can play a role in sustainable fashion design. In Australia, we are so often looking outwards to other countries for fashion direction, and little attention has been given to the richness of this place as a starting point for fashion knowledge-making. This research aims to deconstruct very settler-based ideas of fashion as a globalised industry in ways that open up for the pluriverse to emerge (Escobar, 2018), a form of decoloniality that shifts perspectives towards heterogeneous ways of being in the world and discovers new ways of thinking and doing fashion research.

The practice component of the research is underpinned by the action research imperative of Earth Logic and takes the form of fashion design rituals, a series of iterative, collaborative, contemplative and critical experiments that attempt to explore diverse ways of knowing and being with place and fashion. These rituals adopt an experimental approach towards methods that include learning from place, deep listening, mindfulness, embodiment, and visioning. These processes research what emerges when connecting to and developing an intimate relationship with place, the many relations that occur there, and how interweaving fashion and textile practices into this dynamic can shift fashion perspectives towards pluriversality.

Acknowledgement & Positionality

I have lived, worked and met primarily on Gadigal as well as Worimi Land during the research for this paper. I start off with acknowledging the traditional custodians of the Gadigal and Worimi Lands, and pay my deepest reverence and respect to these elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded and I recognise the ongoing erasure, denial, and desecration of First Nations ways of being within this entire continent and globally.

My PhD research and this paper that summarises its first-year investigations is an accumulation of the many spaces, places and relationships that I have been privileged to experience, all of which permeate and inform the research. I am a woman in her thirties, the first generation to be born in what is now called Australia, on Naarm Country, to refugee parents that escaped communist Poland in the 1980s. Immigration to these foreign lands brought forth many difficulties, particularly living between two worlds, yet they were treated better than the First peoples of these Lands. After graduating in fashion design, I spent eight years in and out of Europe and the UK, working for high-end fashion companies, following the pre-ordained pathway. Industry insight brought with it amazing opportunities and connections, of which I am deeply grateful for, yet bewilderment arose into the many practices and values that I saw being perpetuated within these spaces that felt disconnected to what I knew fashion could be. Asking deeper and more critical questions of the status quo saw me gradually move into sustainability and then academia. All of this and more permeate this research and presents points for consideration and tensions in going forth.

We do not exist on our own, and seldom do we create anything on our own. Inspired by trawlwulwuy woman and researcher Lauren Tynan’s writings (2020), this research has become a living process of relationality and co-creation, as relationships and responsibilities toward care and reciprocity are being created in the process. I am grateful for the opportunity to do this research and for being so supported by many incredible scholars and creatives, the more-than- human, and the places this research resides upon and with.

Introduction

This paper presents a glimpse into some of the first year explorations of my practice-based fashion PhD research project that explores place-based, relational and pluriversal fashion design transitions on colonised Gadigal Land. Sustainability within the fashion and textile design space is increasing. Yet, responses to fashion's detrimental effects on the world have been and continue to be "over-simplified, fragmented and obstructed by growth logic" (UCRF, 2019). Current strategies undertaken to fix the industry's socio-ecological issues have been of a linear and technocratic nature that fail to address the onto-epistemological root causes of unsustainability. Many of these ‘solutions’ operate at the methods and material phase of change, which is essential, however, there are deeper cultural and societal layers to unpack, address and restore if we are to transition to more just and flourishing fashion systems. This project is not about presenting practical solutions toward sustainability issues within fashion. Instead, I am interested in how diverse ways of fashioning fashion and fashioning the body can emerge, exist and thrive in their own way, that decentre euro-centric fashion logics and its violent practices. There are divergent forms of fashioning that are emergent outside of modern-colonial universalism, and these may be more compatible with sustainable fashion transitions. This research employs the Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) as the foundational and radical framework for sustainability for fashion design. The plan proposes a visionary approach to fashion research that calls out and challenges the notion that sustainability can be brought about within the modern economic and growth paradigm (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) and prioritises nature and people before profit to create sustainable fashion futures. Colonised Gadigal Land is the starting point for fashion designerly enquiry as this is where I am mainly living, working and researching. In Australia, we often look outwards to other countries for fashion direction, and little attention has been given to the richness of this place as a starting point for fashion design knowledge and practice. There has been an increased interest in place-based fashion, however, there remains a lack of practical inquiry into how disciplinary understandings of locality can be formed and how a sense of place can play a role in sustainable fashion design. This first stage of the project sees me exploring these concepts through conducting ‘fashion rituals’ in place - a series of iterative, co-creative, contemplative material experiments. The fashion rituals have adopted experimental and experiential fashion methods that are the practical embodiment of the theory. This research aims to focus on heterogeneous, experiential, embodied and emergent ontologies and material practices grounded in a relational embeddedness with place and have been granted little space within fashion universalisms thus far.

An Ontological Redirection for Fashion Design

Fashion holds immense ontological power (Fry, 2017) as worlds are made and unmade through fashioning fashion and fashioning the body. As it is currently brought into being, much of contemporary fashion creates worlds based upon extraction, pollution, desecration, and more, what Fry (2011, p.21) refers to as an act of ‘defuturing’. Fashion’s efforts toward sustainability require more than surface-level band-aid fixes in the form of changes in technologies, materials and processes, toward a redirection and shift in ontologies. This entails listening to and acknowledging other onto-epistemologies outside of modernity that decenters the production of fashion knowledge as it is today (Jansen, 2020) toward fashion as otherwise. Fashion as otherwise is inspired by Escobar’s discourse, as he presents ‘border thinking’ or ‘thinking otherwise’ as diverse onto-epistemologies that are formed beyond the borders of modern-colonial narratives (Escobar, 2007). Critical to highlight is that these are ontologies that First Nations cultures have been situated within for eons (Smith, 2012), and it is imperative to not re-colonise by recasting pluriversal, relational, place-based cosmologies as ‘new’, as they are not.

Escobar links ontological design as imperative to pluriversality, as design is a process of world- making (Escobar, 2018). For fashion, pluriversality can be a pathway for holistic, sustainable practices to emerge through practice and research. The notion of a pluriverse was championed by the Zapatista resistance movement in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1990s, through their decolonial political vision of “a world in which many worlds co-exist” (Escobar, 2018, p.xvi). Numerous socio-political movements have further reflected this notion in defying neo-liberalism and globalisation (Albarrán Gonzalez, 2020, p.102). These many worlds within the pluriverse are continually transforming, adapting and negotiating, and instead of attempting to find similarities between them, their diverse onto-epistemologies are celebrated as all “narratives are valid and questionable” (Albarrán Gonzalez, 2020, p.14). Whenever I say "toward pluriversality", this is shorthand for "toward ways of being that are compatible with other ways of being in the same place". Pluriversality is an indirect effect rather than what is approached directly, and an essential element and trajectory for redirection away from modern destructive fashion practices toward sustainable and Earth Logic (Fletcher & Tham, 2019) transitions. This project aims to highlight some of these, which are not new, yet have been hidden, erased, and devalued in the modern world and are rarely interlinked with contemporary ways of fashioning. There are brands, practitioners and communities doing fashion differently, mainly on the outskirts of the primary system. This is not about completely eradicating western modes of knowledge and fashioning, but instead redirecting away from universality so that many ways of being and fashioning can co-exist in their own right (Escobar, 2018).

Imperative for transitions toward pluriversal fashion futures is understanding the modern- colonial order, its history and how it permeates in fashion systems and logic today. Sociologist Vazquez (2018, p.185) suggests that modernity-coloniality cannot be detached from the genealogy of earthlessness, genocide and pillaging (Vazquez, 2017) that further extends to acquisition over “subjectivity, knowledge, bodies, gender, sexuality, cultural practices and spirituality” (Mareis & Paim, 2021, p.12). Contemporary fashion design has been built upon these modern-colonial ways of being that have and continue to impose fashion universalisms and deny space for heterogeneous fashion onto-epistemologies to emerge in their own way (Jansen, 2020). Important for fashion is that modernity-coloniality and its effects further extend to the colonisation of the mind, where senses, perceptions and aesthetics, are also part of this control (Mignolo & Vazquez, 2013). Pluriversality is a decolonial concept (Tlostanova, 2017), as decoloniality is counter thinking and action to the continual devaluing and erasing of other modes of being and knowing brought about by these universalisms.

Additionally, an ontological redirection includes a shift toward relational ways of being in the world that view everything in the universe as intrinsically interconnected within the web of life (Capra & Luisi, 2015). Christianity and modernity-coloniality disconnected many cultures from these cosmo-ontologies as they ushered in reductionist and mechanistic worldviews that saw humans detached from everything else in the universe (Merchant, 1989). The rise of rationalism and hyper-individualism that these separationist beliefs further gave birth to saw not only nature but with her emotions, spirit and the feminine, increasingly devalued (Merchant, 1989), evident today. Meanjin Elder Mary Graham (2014) shares that this mechanistic worldview has disconnected humans from themselves and community and further alienated people from place, culture, and spirit. This severing from our relational nature makes it so apparent why very little resistance has been made in the last few decades towards increasingly polluting, extractive and degrading fashion practices (Jansen, 2020). Sustainability initiatives within the fashion and textile design space are rising, however, these responses operate from a separationist worldview that maintains the deeply-rooted logic responsible for the negative socio-ecological effects that fashion has on the world. A relational worldview further defies the sameness that modernity- coloniality enforces. Homogeneity is readily seen in the contemporary fashion sphere through fast fashion products, influencer culture on social media and trends, where there is a slight variation between localities. Relational ways of being view cosmological and physical differences in all places and this challenges the homogeneity imposed by the universalism of eurocentrism.

Fashion Research in & with Place: Gadigal Land

The current exposed lack of resiliency of the modern fashion industry, as unmasked further during the pandemic, calls for a shift in practices that are solely dependent on the global corporate marketplace towards a diversified cosmopolitan localism (Irwin et al., 2015) that embeds humans and ecological well-being front and centre (Norberg-Hodge, 2019). There has been an increased interest in localism within fashion, yet there remains a minimal investigation into how place informs the production of fashion knowledge (Hancock, 2020). In Australia, we often look outwards to Europe, the UK and the USA for fashion direction, and little attention is attributed to the richness of this place for fashion designerly inquiry. Johnson & Larsen’s ‘Being- Together-in-Place’ (2017) ascribes place as the emerging point for all relationality, as human and non-human communities gather in communal circumstances. This contributes to pluriversal ways of being, as relations are interconnected yet unbalanced, occasionally peaceful, and sometimes in conflict (Larsen & Johnson, 2017). Inspiring is Tuck & McKenzie’s (2015) notion of place, as ‘Land’ is referred to not just as physical matter, but further extends to its “spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects”. These more profound layers of place and its relations are seen sprouting their way through the design experiments as conducted relationally on and with place. Jay T. Johnson (2012) conceptualises place as a pathway toward knowing, sensing, and learning about the world as place is an “embodied location of the everyday struggle for meaning; political, cultural and economic”. He says that through connecting to place and its stories, we can sense into worlds otherwise, beyond the homogeneity of modern development (Johnson, 2012). Place was and still is considered a teacher by many cultures, a ‘conduit of memory’ that activates an ethic of relationality (Larsen & Johnson, 2017). Uncle Charles Moran, Uncle Greg Harrington & Norm Sheehan (2018) contend that developing relationships to Country and sensing into its patterns allows for a redirection in awareness that moves beyond the mind and into deeper layers of knowing.

Colonised Gadigal Land in the context of this research and practice and, therefore, understandings of place, fashion’s modern-colonial order, and pursuits toward decoloniality within this country and the contemporary fashion realm must be acknowledged alongside one another. Additionally, notions of place and Indigenous knowledge are intrinsically interlinked (De Santolo, 2018), and discussing place and the politics of design without exploring its colonial impacts is only a partial project (Schultz et al, 2018). The Australian government continues to erase and other the rich and diverse cosmologies of First Nations people. Although the Australian fashion industry is beginning to include Indigenous voices within its discourses and spaces, this is still a relatively new phenomenon that fails to recognise Indigenous contributions to fashion that predate coloniality (Carmichael, 2017). Moran et al. (2018) suggest that decolonising design begins with the synergies that are developed through cultivating relationships with Country, as place is an intelligent partner for designing with earthly cognitive patterns written into it vital for our world (Moran et al., 2018). Coincidingly, Clare Land (2015) outlines that decolonial solidarity needs to be based upon “supporting local (land) struggles”, as colonialist thinking asserts the insignificance and insentience of the Earth. Un-rootedness in place or placelessness is a dominant element of the modern western order (Parada 2020; Yunkaporta 2019; Escobar 2018; Johnson 2012; Rose 2004; Plumwood 2009). Merchant (1989) links this physical, cultural and spiritual displacement to the dualist ontology that separated culture from nature and disconnected people from their environment and its vast knowledge systems (Johnson, 2012). Therefore reconnecting to places and their cultural, historical and spiritual forces contrasts the placelessness that permeates modern ways of being. As I live on and do research and practice relationally with place, locality is a central element to the knowledge-making of this project, as it holds all of this. Due to the recent pandemic lockdown, my locality has shifted to Worimi Country, which now also informs the research. As I conduct research away from Gadigal Land and inspired by Tynan’s (2020) provocation, how can I be mindful of “the material, political and spiritual aspects of land, in the places where I now live and write” as well as to where I recently was?

Fashion Rituals in Place

The second part of the research is the practice-based component, underpinned by the action research imperative of Earth Logic (Fletcher & Tham, 2019), the practical embodiment of the theoretical concepts. These processes research what emerges when connecting to and developing an intimate relationship with place, the many relations that occur there, and how interweaving fashion and textile practices into this dynamic could onto-epistemologically redirect toward place-based, relational, decolonial and pluriversal fashioning ways. At this early stage, the experiments have been conducted on myself, and the second stage of research will see these extend towards including others in these processes.

Inspired by Bertulis’ (2019, p.50) the design experiments explore; “Can simple, intuitive and repetitive research activities embody a shift toward relational, place-based, decolonial and as a result pluriversal fashion politics?” Over the past six months, eleven design experiments have been conducted, some with multiple iterations, out at various locations on Gadigal, such as around the university city campus, areas of the eastern beaches, local and national parks and around my home. Some of the design experiments include interviewing and listening to materials, observing and documenting places through materials and processes, intuitive embroidering as a response to theoretical concepts, sensing into places and their relations, weaving, listening to places, contemplative walks, meditative material engagements and more.
I call these ‘fashion rituals’ due to their contemplative, intuitive nature, which required a deep presence and connection to the process, a diversity of rhythms and sensing into their many interrelations. Rituals bring magic into our lives, interweaving the sacred with the mundane, reverence and respect for the symbols and worlds brought into being through the ritualisations. Many spiritual, religious and Indigenous communities integrate rituals into their daily life practices that bring ceremony into the pragmatic (Eisenstein, 2019). Ritualising these material practices endeavours to move beyond dualist ontologies toward unification of material and immaterial worlds, and as within animist traditions, the materials and processes are seen as alive, sentient, and as teachers. I am grateful to the Earth for creating these fibres and materials and the many relations it took to get them to me today, acknowledging the worlds that these have created and continue to create. This animist ontology allows me to embrace the material world and these design experiments in a co-creative way that sees the materials guide me in how they want to be handled and what they want to reveal to me. Animism allows for respect and reverence toward others beyond the human (St. Pierre, 2020, p.7), and embracing this worldview activates practices of care and reciprocity (Kimmerer, 2013) (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Such a shift in relating requires letting go of needing to control all outcomes and opening oneself to a range of possibilities to emerge (Bai, 2001). Communicating with place, materials, and other beings such as trees, rocks, landscapes, materials have been an integral element of the research so far that

sees me coming into a relationship with Gadigal and giving agency to non-human entities that transcends conceptual boundaries. Compatibly, animism points toward decoloniality and post- humanism, which grants pluriversal narratives and (un)learnings to emerge that decenter the human (Fletcher, Tham, St. Pierre, 2019).

I sit with her, eyes closed, holding her close to me.

I’m not sure this is what you’re supposed to do with an interviewee.
She feels warm and cosy, her shiny surface of sheer layers upon my body.
Comforting. Calming.
I thank her for being here and give gratitude to the petroleum it took to create her and the entire fashion ecosystem to get her to me.
An op-shop find from many lifetimes ago. I love those.
‘What do you want to share with me?’ I ask.

...
I can feel her deeply wanting to be used, adored, looked after.
I wonder if this is the longing of all materials that have been left unused, unloved,

misunderstood?
Was this my own projection or did I hear this correctly? I trust it nonetheless.

Reflections on Fashion Ritual #6. ‘A Conversation with Polyester’, 8th March, 2021. Home balcony, North Bondi, Gadigal. This ritual involved conversing with and listening to an old piece of polyester material I had lying around at home. At first, I had many questions for her, but I could feel that a big chunk of this ritual was to just be and sit with her. This presented a different way of relating to materials, allowing it to be a more co-creative process and seeing what emerged. I am still unsure how much of this was my projections upon this experiment and the imbalances created as a result of this.

The experiments have been documented based on the useful guidelines outlined by Zoe Sadokierski in ‘Developing critical documentation practices for design researchers’ (2020). A digital reflective experiment log was documented for each design iteration with aims, methods, and reflection prompts for the practice recorded before each session, throughout, and afterwards on my phone device to remember certain aspects and thoughts that had arisen in the process. These were then further reflected upon days after each experiment, so there was time for integration, and further reflection was made. As the process unfolded, I naturally built upon Sadokierski’s (2020) prompts as well as Camozzi’s (2019, p.146-152), with prompts that allowed me to delve deeper into the practices and theories:

+ What is emerging and unfolding?
+ What imbalances and opportunities did I create through this experiment?
+ What conversations could emerge from these interactions?
+ What further questions have sprung up?
+ What pathways are opening up for sustainable fashion to emerge as something otherwise?

The reflections adopted life writing, otherwise known as autobiography, as a method that utilises the self as the ground for exploration to study and decode experiences (Fletcher, 2021). Inspired by Fletcher’s ‘Wild Dress: Clothing & the Natural World’ (2019), this methodology moves academic writing into a pluriversality of possibilities beyond conventional research traditions (Fletcher, 2021). Delving into embodied experiences with the research on Gadigal and documenting the many connections that occur throughout (visible and invisible) between myself, others, non-humans, environments, histories, cultures and garments, allowed me to connect deeply to place and these concepts that transcended theoretical understandings of the research.

I take my time in place.
I listen.
I surrender to what is wanting to emerge.
No agenda nor preconceived trajectory.
No hustle.
No sense of urgency.
No need to fix, push or find solutions.
Time slows down. I actually don’t even notice it.

Reflections from fashion ritual #7 ‘Listening to Materials & Process’, 16th March, 2021, Gadigal. This ritual involved sitting and contemplating on my balcony, and then intuitively painting and embroidering silk material. Having been deeply entrenched in research concepts since the morning, this material process allowed me to switch off and embody the research (unconsciously) through the practice. This process was later integrated into some of my mornings, as embroidering created an active meditation that allowed me to connect to the present moment and the process at hand, which became a relaxing ritual I looked forward to.

In order to connect to these processes with full presence, each fashion ritual begun with a grounding practice, either a breathing meditation or a walking meditation out in place. This allowed me to centre myself, and bring myself back into my body and environment, to become present for the material practices at hand. Calming the overactive mind through mindfulness practices cultivates awareness and sensitivity to our environment, bodily senses, and mission(s) in the world, fostering empathy and care for ourselves, others, and the world around us (Bai et al., 2016). Modernity-coloniality and, with it modern science, have on the most part dismissed subjective practices and other states of consciousness, as objectivity is often privileged over subjectivity (Bai. et al., 2016). Aligned with this research's pluriversal and decolonial change agenda, this project aims to deconstruct what traditional research methodologies are and takes seriously contemplative, intuitive, creative and experiential methodologies emerging through these fashion rituals. These are all inherently valuable for the research, and as these processes are embodied, esoteric, and not always explainable in a linear way, they are the opposite of rationalistic and reductionist methods (Bai. et al., 2016). The implication of contemplative practices is that they can provide the researcher-practitioner pathways toward journeying through inner and outer worlds with more clarity (Bai. et al., 2016), informing the research in vibrant ways. The fashion rituals are beginning to highlight different states of awareness around our current ways of fashioning and moving toward fashion as otherwise. It will be interesting to gain others perspectives on this in the second phase of research.

As I stepped, leaving imprints in the sand, I wondered if my footprints connected to those who walked these lands hundreds and thousands of years ago.
What was here before?
And how do I now stepping on this Land entwine with these histories, knowledges, all that has been created and all that has been lost?

...
I began once again by grounding into the Earth and taking a few deep breaths to connect me to my body.
I then placed a small piece of white cotton material into a piece of algae moss, seating myself next to it.
I could already see the tiny flies flying around from within the moisture and the grand cobwebs above the material.
The water trickles through a pipe nearby, and the waves crash. Kids swim and play...

Reflections on fashion ritual #3 ‘Co-creating with Cloth, Paints & Thread’, 19th February - 1st March, Gadigal. There were various stages of this fashion ritual that included observing the thousands of washed up blue bottle jellyfish on Bondi beach, connecting an organic cotton piece of material to algae and rocks and observing these interactions, and then utilising this material to intuitively embroider onto it based upon what I had felt and experienced and the systems I had observed throughout. I afterwards pondered on whether I had created a ‘forced’ collaboration between nature, materials and humans, and what conditions I could create in future experiments to ensure an honest and collaborative relationship was established between all.

Entwhistle (2001) reminds us, “clothing cannot be understood without reference to the body”, and as such, the body is discussed in this research in relation to the material practices it is physically creating and its situatedness in place. We dwell in the world (Ingold, 2000), and clothes are a part of this dwelling. The garments that are worn can be viewed as an extension of the body that represents a particular way of being, which Negrin (2016) suggests blurs the borders between self and material. In this research practice, the clothed body is physically taking the actions of connecting threads to materials, pencil to paper, twine to sticks. My body is physically located on Gadigal, and it is the vessel for the theoretical concepts explored to be brought into physicality through the material practices, the mediator between theory, material practice and place. Tuck and McKenzie (2015, p.105) refer to this partnership of mind, body and environment as ‘emplacement’, a notion that moves beyond embodiment with the integral addition of place. Emplacement allows for the reconnection of the body with the mind, with the Land, its stories and the research, making space for relations to emerge in various ways (Tynan, 2020). Experiences with places are always embodied and felt through the bodily senses (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). These relationships between the body and place steer toward deeper perceptions of materiality, which Ingold (2011) names a meshwork.

Going Forth

This project aligns with the “activist knowledge ecology” imperative of Earth Logic (Fletcher & Tham, 2019, p.24) as this work is not designed to just sit on shelves. It is therefore integral to the research to include others in these processes. Going forth into the second stage of the project, the research and practice will explore the conditions needed for an ontological shift to occur for fashion design within and with others. This will be delved into by engaging fashion design educators, students, and practitioners with these ideas and processes by conducting Gadigal Land workshops. The workshops will consist of processes based on the more insightful fashion rituals I conducted in the first stage. A preliminary pilot workshop will determine and inform the structure and processes of the workshops to follow. These aim to test out how a variety of people with diverse fashion understandings engage with these ideas and what arises, transforms, and permeates afterwards. It is hoped that this research project and the processes that emerge from it could help bring light to heterogeneous ways of coming into fashion onto-epistemologies grounded in a relational embededness with place, so that a pluriversality of ways of fashioning fashion and the body can emerge.

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