The Sound of Fashion Thinking

Sonic responses to garments and fabrics that explore the concept of Fashion Thinking.

This text by Jonathan Faiers establishes Fashion Thinking as a new field of critical inquiry, utilizing the many ways fashion is produced as a methodology with which to explore a range of contemporary cultural, political, economic, and social concerns. Taking its cue from earlier etymological definitions of fashion, understood as making, or bringing into existence, Fashion Thinking is inspired by the very act of fashioning. In the same way fabric can be fashioned into a coat—something produced from next to nothing—that same material can easily be unpicked and refashioned, even reworked into a completely new garment or object. Fashion Thinking is characterized by this potential, fluid state, approaching each new topic according to specific demands and desires, cutting its cloth and finding its voice accordingly—whether poetic, analytical, autobiographical, technical, or discursive.

Like fashion itself, Fashion Thinking is social, ludic, anticipatory, transformative, reciprocal, and aims beyond interdisciplinarity to a state of indisciplinarity. Such a term implies the state of being among disciplines but also being outside of or oblivious to them—indeed, unwilling to be “disciplined” per se, preferring instead the often turbulent, unruly, and invariably seductive margins where fields of activity overlap.

Taking the form of a guide to an imaginary fashion exhibition that ironically displays no clothing, The Sound of Fashion Thinking inhabits the space of the museum solely through sound. Each “chapter” or “room” is constructed from a series of reflections and discussions on different aspects of fashion, including its production, reception, dissemination, and development, all inspired by the sonic experiences encountered therein.

• Foreword: Discussion of concept of Fashion Thinking. "The Sound of Fashion Thinking" an unrealised exhibition.
• Room 1 Bells: Viktor & Rolf a/w 2000. Bell head figures of Nigeria. Expectation, warnings and summonings. The sanctification of fashion and the sound of anticipation. The resonance of the new.
• Room 2 Bespoke: Tailors’ measured speaking. The bespoke tradition, speaking garments, talking the idealised body. The promise of exclusivity.
• Room 3 Frou Frou: Scenes from "Frou Frou" 1869, a play by Meilhac and Halévy. The ‘language’ of fashionable sound. Textile semantics. Le demimonde/le dernier cri/celebrity. "Speak low."
• Room 4 Dark Satanic Mills: Industrial soundscape. The sound of fashion production. Fashion’s "noise." The noise of commerce from fabrication to marketing. Manufacturing sound.
• Room 5 Muse: Empty vitrines. Stifled by fashion. The failure of the fashion exhibition. The absent, unruly objects of fashion. Tomb, silence, retrospective.
• Room 6 Fashionland" Cinematic soundscape of fashion. Announcing the space of fashion from ‘Rainbow Over the Everglades’ to "Trouble in the Afternoon." The sound of selling. Danger and betrayal, listening to filmic fashion.
• Room 7 Atelier: Design studio as tableaux vivant. The sonics of creativity. Clamour, exclamation and calm.

Jonathan Faiers is Professor of Fashion Thinking, University of Southampton, U.K., where his research examines the interface between popular culture, fashion and textiles. His publications include Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (2013), Fur: A Sensitive History (2020), and Tartan (2008), the conceptual framework for his role as consultant curator for the exhibition “Tartan” (2023) at V&A Dundee. Faiers co-curated “The Lore of Loverboy” (2024) at Somerset House, London, celebrating the career of fashion designer Charles Jeffrey. Training as a designer and a subsequent career in visual arts are fundamental to his interdisciplinary approach to teaching, writing, and curation.