Fabric First, Language Last? Reframing Fashion’s Epistemic Infrastructures through Material Intelligence

Abstract

This paper examines how certain contemporary design practices constitute a form of material intelligence, situated, process-based knowledge-making that emerges through sustained engagement with materials, and that operates at the productive periphery of fashion’s dominant discursive economy. Through close readings of three designer practices, Elena Velez, Craig Green, and Amber Jae Slooten, the paper argues that fabric, whether physical or computational, functions not merely as a medium of expression but as a site of epistemic labour: a way of producing knowledge that precedes and exceeds its linguistic translation. Drawing on feminist materialism (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2018), affect theory (Ahmed, 2004), anthropologies of making (Ingold, 2013), resonance theory (Rosa, 2020), and posthuman critique (Haraway, 2016; Bratton, 2016), the paper develops three provisional analytical categories, collapse, ritual, and speculation, to distinguish the distinct epistemic orientations enacted by each practice. Velez transforms industrial debris into a feminist ethics of material survival; Green constructs knowledge through ritual constraint and the patient correspondence of hand and cloth; and Slooten tests the framework’s limits by asking what material intelligence looks like when the material is computational. Together, these practices challenge fashion studies to attend not only to what fashion signifies, but to what it makes possible through making, and to recognise design practice as a form of situated inquiry that fashion’s accelerationist discursive economy consistently renders peripheral. The paper contributes a sharpened set of conceptual tools for this reorientation, building on and extending existing materialist scholarship in fashion studies.