Fold, Stand and Drape: Unweaving Physical vs Digital Textile Design Considerations

Fashion design has rapidly become a digital process where textiles are simulated as soft, conformable materials on a digital body. The embodied experience and physical interaction with the textile have been replaced by screen-based media, resulting in a gap in understanding between physical and digital textile material. Consequently, understanding digitized textile properties and characteristics has become challenging for practitioners. This research investigates fashion designers’ implicit understanding when selecting textiles, specifically how interactions with physical textiles influence design considerations. Twenty digital fashion designers interacted with ten physical textile materials via tangible and scientific drape measurements, reflecting upon their design considerations. In digital environments, a tangible understanding of material properties is vital, and scientific drape measurements add significant understanding to digital design. The research advances our understanding of integrating digital tools in textile and soft material practices, where a postphenomenological approach is employed to help formulate the design considerations in selecting materials.