Bloodline: An Experiment in Knit and Proximity is research by practice that has its origin in an affective encounter experienced during the performance of two women knitting together, a mother and daughter – who simultaneously knit a conjoined red line, Bloodline – initiated by the daughter, who is, in this context, both artist and writer. The research responds to this question: how might I account for a moment of affect, to explain its manifestation in association with knitting and the knitted thing, and to substantiate my hypothesis that the knitted object, and knitting as process, have a unique capacity to explore the issues of proximity and distance that are encountered and negotiated in Bloodline? This research adopts an auto ethnographic and mixed methodology approach to investigate the context, practice and outcomes of hand knitting as illuminating the experience and meanings of attachment, separation and loss – the problematic of being in relation with and to another. It seeks to contribute, through a process of ‘close looking’ and the production of evocative objects (Turkle, 2011), to a language of textile practice that is as much concerned with the sticky, unpleasant and unknown as it might be with the sensuous and warm.

This practice-led research examines how the emerging role of the ‘material designer’ can enrich the design process in Human Computer Interaction. It advocates embodiment as a design methodology by employing tacit knowledge; focusing on a subjective, affective and visceral engagement with computational materials. This theoretical premise is explored by drawing on the fields of soft robotics, as well as transitive and programmable materials. With the advancement and democratisation of physical computing and digital fabrication, it is now possible for designers to process, or even invent and composite new programmable materials, merging both their physical and digital capabilities. This study questions how the notion of soft can develop a distinct space for the design of novel user interfaces. This premise is applied through a phenomenological understanding of technology development—as opposed to generating data which is solely reliant on observable and measurable evidence. Bio-engineered technologies such as electroactive polymer, pneumatic and hydraulic actuator systems are deployed to explore a new type of responsive, sensual and organic materiality. Here, traditional medical diagnostic applications such as microfluidics are transferred into the experimental contexts of textiles and wearable technology. Therefore, by thinking through physical prototyping, a bodily engagement with materials and the interpretation of the elements of water, air and steam; a designer can create a fertile ground for a polyvalent imagination. Together, this methodology is used as a qualitative system for collecting and evaluating data on the significance of design-led thinking in soft robotic materials. This research concludes that there are insights to be gained from the creative practice and exploratory methods of material-led thinking in HCI that can contribute to the commercial research and development fields of wearable technology. Outputs include a prototype box of ‘Invention Tools’ for textile designers and the identification and creation of the role 04 of embodied making in relation to the imagination. Further, soft composite hybrids, incorporating elastomers, have potential applications in colour, texture and shape changing surfaces. Thus, this thesis argues that it is within the creative soft sciences that the next advancements in soft robotics may emerge.

This dissertation is a written component of a thesis, which was developed and articulated over four years in the construction of a narrative of the fashion designer and their practice. The hypothesis developed by the fashion designer as practitioner, is that it is both possible and necessary, by careful notation and reflective practice, to arrive at a better understanding of the fashion design practitioners cognitive and behavioural reasoning through the creative practice process than exists in current literature and archive. In comparison with the archiving of materials that testify to the complexity of creativity in painting, sculpture and orchestral composition, for example, the archiving of the process and practice of fashion design is negligible. Collections of designers' ephemera often constitute little more than ‘the retrospective’ or materials of celebrity culture that further mystify the 'author function' role (Foucault, 1969, p.113-138) of the fashion design practitioner. This research aims to suggest a critical visual method for and in support of constructing a narrative of fashion practice as it is lived towards a new culture of compiling, recording, noting, classifying and analysing the tacit process of the fashion design practitioners relationship to their practice. The practice therefore comprises the designing, draping, cutting and making of an eight-piece collection of fashion womenswear. The research comprises extensive documentation of the (research) practitioner’s subjective-objective1 dialogues as purposeful acts of thought (Burnette, 2009b) and action whilst developing a body of creative work. In addition to the researcher's journey this narrative inquiry extends documentation to include the responses of five other practitioners as willing participants in the project aim: to develop a new research method for documenting and understanding the fashion design practitioners cognitive and behavioural narratives. Whereas there is a significant literature on design theory written by theorists and not necessarily practitioners, and a considerable literature on fashion as object of sociological, historical, cultural, anthropological, semiotic, psychological, political, philosophical, economic study, there exists almost no serious study of fashion design practice from the perspective of the fashion designer (as practitioner). This research aims, without artificial abstraction of the creative practice from its cultural and social milieu, to start a serious, scholarly, rigorous study of fashion practice as design method. It may be that such method will be met with reactions that it could meddle with the illusion of a designer's intuitive sense of knowing and that it is an unwelcome complication of what should remain an invisible or tacit (because as yet unrecognised) process. The aim of the research is to develop a method that can be customised and adopted by the fashion design and design research communities and fashion designers in training and in professional practice, to understand more about their creative practice process in both cognitive and behavioural terms. To this end I use the forms of auto ethnography to collect data through sketchbook work, diarised journals, photographic and film reportage and interview in order to consider how a method of (doing) practice may refer to theories of practice. Literary theory of Bakhtin is offered as an example of a dialogical method to consider how the process of fashion practice can be considered as communicable knowledge. The Kantian philosophy of the 'a priori' knowledge and Foucault’s relational systems of thought and knowledge are also offered as discourse and a foundation of thought that structures the tacit dialogues in the here and now as a telling of a knowing of a doing of fashion practice. The written dissertation is a text, which co-exists with the narrative traced through the making and visual realisation of the collection exhibited and photographed at the viva voce (Figure 1 & Appendix H).

This research by practice explores our relationship with and attachment to shoes. Focusing upon the shoe as an everyday object, and on the embodied experience of wearing, it examines how through touch and use we become entangled with the things we wear. Drawing on anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives on attachment, affect and the self, it asks: How can the act of wearing create attachment between the wearer and the worn? What is our relationship with the used and empty shoe – the shoe without the body, the shoe no longer worn? It suggests that our particular relationship to footwear is located in our intimate and tactile relationship to it; that touch and duration of wear create attachment. This research suggests that through use and wear shoes become, not only a record of the wearer’s lived experience, but also an extended part of them - a distributed aspect of the self. That the affective power of the worn shoe is a result of this intermingling, the cleaving of garment and self. Despite a growing body of research on footwear, the worn and the used shoe is absent from much of fashion research. The shoe tends to be interpreted as a symbolic, metaphorical, or imaginary artefact; its material qualities and the embodied experience of wearing the shoe are seldom referred to. This research seeks to place the artefact, the shoe, at its centre. Through an iterative process of making, wear, and observation, it aims to make apparent the intimacies of our relationship with shoes. Rather than record the narratives which we apply to footwear, it seeks to highlight the material traces of these relationships: to present the ways they are embodied within the artefacts themselves. This research is research through practice, into the nature of our relationships with shoes, through making artefacts and images (installation, film and photographs). It is material culture research enacted through the production of artefacts. It situates itself as art practice; the shoes produced are not footwear in a conventional sense but instead are objects designed to amplify and make explicit their role as records of gesture and experience. These empty shoes are records of an absent performance, of gestures which are lost to the viewer, so that only their traces, the marks upon the shoe, remain.

The London couturier, Sir Norman Bishop Hartnell (1901-1979) is famous today for dressing Their Majesties Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002) and the current British Monarch, Elizabeth II (1926) from 1937 until his death in 1979. His legacy is understood to lie in the establishment of the fixed British royal style devised for Queen Elizabeth in 1937, still worn by Her Majesty the Queen today. Hartnell was, however, far more than a provider of dress to British royalty. Evidence in the form of bound volumes of international press cuttings extant in a private archive indicates that he commanded great respect as a couture fashion designer between 1923-1953. He was also the first British fashion designer to attempt to develop as an international fashion brand in the immediate post war period. Neither Hartnell' s production of two couture collections per year between 1923- 1979 and ready-to-wear from 1963 nor his signature looks or house style, have been examined in-depth to date in terms of his legacy. This thesis unpicks Hartnell's work, closely analysing his sketched designs, fabric swatches, embroideries, couture and ready-to-wear garments extant in a vast, privately owned and relatively unknown archive. I suggest that the roots of this signature house style lies in the identity of the man, which is also scrutinised here, in particular, his sexuality and life-long cross-dressing. Hartnell's taste in overtly feminine styles is evident in his use of colour, fabric and embellishment and is present in his all his fashion work. This is rooted in his personal taste and the use of these signature elements in garments designed and made at his couture house for his own personal use. The major business decisions taken at his couture house between 1946-1979 will also be discussed in the context of his complex gendered identity and reputation as the royal couturier. The research on the life and work of the London couturier Norman Hartnell undertaken for this PhD, probes through his vast, privately owned archive and collection of possessions, hidden from public view since 1985. This interdisciplinary investigation will track the relationship between Hartnell' s identity, both the public professional 'face' of Hartnell and the impact of his private life, in the design work of Britain's most prominent couturier. Theoretical 10 approaches to Hartnell' s life and work include material culture approaches to analysing these specific objects of couture and decorative art objects collected by him. Issues of self-presentation, performance and memory are addressed in order to unpick his personal choice in interior design as well as his wardrobe of normative masculine styles and his coded style of dressing, and his queer identity, using studio photographic portraits taken between 1928 and 1970. Oral histories recorded between 2006-2011 with those that worked with him and were close to him in life, offer unique insight into the working regime at the House of Hartnell and a further understanding of Hartnell's personality and character. This research re-evaluates Hartnell' s contribution to British couture in order to position him, and the design and production of couture at the House of Hartnell, at the centre ofthe finally emerging, growing body of research on London couture recently established by Breward, de la Haye and Erhman. This thesis addressed how the identity of a person can be read through what they leave behind and, in particular, what can be read of the celebrity couturier Norman Hartnell's identity through the residue of his life and work.

Can a sound itself be a garment? This practice-led research explores the sound of garments and fashion, which is unheard, unspoken or overheard, to suggest a new perspective for reconsidering garments and fashion. Through experiments with making, wearing and displaying, the research examines the sound, voice or silence embedded in garments and fashion and affective experiences aroused from garments as atmospheric spaces. A new term, ‘dress-scape’, is introduced and discussed through a series of practical and theoretical approaches to the concept. The research suggests that the dress-scape of a garment emerges as the resonance of sound, voice, noise or silence from the interplay between the garment and the maker, the wearer or the viewer. As the research attempts to locate fashion in a new place, the practice varies significantly from that in conventional garments. The maker rather explores non-wearable garments, other artefacts, installation, film and sound-making using diverse mediums. The practice, in turn, oscillates between fashion and art practice. The journal entries exist as a documentation of the maker’s reflections on the research journey and contribute to the development of both practical and theoretical renderings of the research. Inspired by the notion of ‘tacet’ (broadly, ‘silence’) as used in John Cage’s work, 4’33”, the research aims to invite the reader, the viewer and the listener to be silent and to ‘listen’ to the research, together with the maker, who also acts as the author and the composer. Thus, rather than acting as a series of problem-solving investigations for knowledge acquisition, the research is essentially the journey of the investigation of the maker’s tacit awareness of other related issues including modernist artists, film, architecture, the relationship between fashion and art, and curatorial display. This, in turn, adds to the value of the practice-led research, elevating it to an interdisciplinary study.

This practice-led PhD research explores the nature of embodied knowledge acquired and practised through the rhythms and patterns of hand-stitching processes, such as embroidery, plain sewing and patchwork quilting, undertaken by individuals alone and in dedicated groups as recreational craft, artistic expression and social life. The scale and pace of hand-stitching match those of the body, grounding cognitive and emotional experience in a tangible process. The hand-eye-mind coordination required cultivates a distinctive form of attention to the self, which has renewed importance in the context of the anti- haptic experiences of screen technologies that infiltrate our daily routines in the home and the workplace. Working with the premise that skilled hand-stitching concerns more than technical ability, I examine how these activities articulate dimensions of subjective experience. In turn, I explore ways in which the relationship between an individual and a group is constructed through their crafting skills. My previous experiences of textile crafting as a social activity drew me to this question, and my interest as a practitioner and teacher in the contemporary and future relevance of skilful work motivates me to better understand what it is that I, and many other stitch practitioners, do. With the tacit knowledge of a practitioner I know how to stitch, and from my investigations into the history and theory of textile art, craft and material culture I know about stitch. However, my view is that when absorbed in the process of making other more immediate and personal sensations take over. An exploration of haptic sensations relative to these processes underpins the investigation, and I focus instead on the dynamic relationship between practical skill, the body and its proximity to tools, materials and other people during actual experiences of making – the repeated gestures, coordinated hand movements and the skilled precision of tool use and fingertip manipulation – to provide a new context for the study of embodied knowledge known in and through hand-stitching. In order to explore this I have used a combination of ethnographic, auto-ethnographic and creative research methods including interviews, observation, video recording of a patchwork quilting group, participation in practical stitching sessions with a village embroidery group, undertaking workshops with students, and my own reflective stitching practice. It has emerged from the research that patterns of hand-stitching processes share characteristics with certain modes of social interaction sought by participants in order to experience sensations of participation, belonging or interdependence. Similarly to other oral traditions, an embodied knowledge of the practice includes patterns of interaction and particular attitudes and behaviours that are inseparable from the practical skills. However, people also stitch on their own; as a private, contemplative activity, hand-stitching allows a person to carve out time and space for introspective reflection. Whilst this could be thought of as a different kind of experience altogether, I suggest that mastery of these skills enables control over when and how to use them, which, I have found, allows a practitioner to adjust the type of experience sought: participation in a shared conversation or activity can be exchanged for isolated contemplation and a sense of self-reliance. I conclude that hand-stitching surpasses its technical or artistic attributes when considered as a material practice that offers particular metaphors for other processes of joining, collaboration, integrity – or even separation and isolation. Practising these skills is possibly the only way to acquire this embodied knowledge, which needs to be understood as a mode of interaction if it is not merely trivialised as quaint, as domestic labour or archived as ethnographic curiosity or as art object.

This practice-led research explores the significance of Qi energy for fashion by materialising the East Asian culturally-specific concept of Qi. Qi features prominently in the traditional philosophy of everyday life in East Asia and my research aims to show how this philosophy can also provide an understanding of the relationship between body, garment and making, which is new to more Western concepts of fashion culture. This reflective journey unravels fashion practice in this context, focusing on the making process and the methods that were developed during that process. I engaged in significant handwork in the field of contemporary womenswear, integrating concepts of the body and garment as a circulatory system for Qi energy. It is the objective of this research to realise garments which help the understanding of Qi as a communication tool in relationships that arise in fashion, namely those that exist between the material and the maker during the making process, the body and the garment, and the wearer and the viewer. My research question originates from a desire to find a way to materialise Qi in garments through the making process. To pursue this, I explore a range of fields including anthropology, material culture, psychoanalysis, literature, cultural theory, and language. Apart from contextual studies, I adopted conversations and filming as methods to develop my research further. In practice, I investigate the meridians (as seaming which constructs garments), the finishing and the openings of the garment, all of which amount to a transitional interface. I view this as a concrete way of injecting Qi energy into the garment on a material level. I have reflected deeply on my making experience; this reflection has led the entire process and also given me a much better understanding of body and garment. Through my making process, aimed at materialising Qi in the garment, I essentially tried to establish a better connection between body and garment. This thesis oscillates between practice and theory. My research suggests Qi energy as a new perspective on fashion making; it offers a new understanding of the body in fashion and tries to fill the gap between practice and theory through embodied knowledge.

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Great changes characterized the mid- to late nineteenth century in the field of dye chemistry, including many innovations in the production of colours across the spectrum, especially the development of synthetic dyes from coal-tar aniline. From 1840 to 1875, textile manufacturers offered a wide variety of colourful dress textiles to female fashion consumers in both Great Britain and the United States. Middle-class women were urged to educate themselves about dyeing, science, and colour, while cultivating appropriate, moderate attention to fashion in dress. This thesis examines the mid-nineteenth century relationship of fashion, dye chemistry, and everyday science, exploring consumers’ responses to these phenomena of modernity. Paying special attention to the appreciation of chemistry and colour theory during the period, this project considers how the development of new dyes affected middle-class uses and discussions of colours in women’s dress.