Fashion beyond clothing: Practice Led Exploration into Supporting Child Expression through Fashion Artefacts

This paper focuses upon an interactive wearable artefact designed for children as part of a practice led PhD that investigates how wearables can be a tool enabling children between the ages of 8 and 12 to express mood and feelings. It comprises a series of modular textile panels and decorative elements in diverse colours that incorporate a range of fashion and textile techniques and processes including print, quilting, embroidery, a customisable structure and moveable embellishment, but do not represent a conventional fashion product (garment). These elements have all been developed in response to primary qualitative data collection (through a series of creative workshops with child participants), and extensive secondary research into areas including child psychology, social media, child centered media, literature for a child audience, colour theory and more. The artefact is intended to support children’s creative expression through their engagement with the individual modules and their ability to construct the artefact from these modules in many different ways.
This paper will introduce the artefact with explanation of some of its key features. It will consider the outcomes of the workshops and how these and the other primary and secondary research have fed into the ideas that are manifested in this wearable.