Expanded materiality in the RHITA framework. Towards a manifesto of intra-active fashion
Published 09-03-2026
Keywords
- fashion theory,
- fashion practices,
- neo-materialism,
- quantum physics,
- digital technologies
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2026 Chiara Scarpitti
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The contribution examines the RHITA_Reshaping Made in Italy project as a theoretical and experimental laboratory for rethinking the fashion system critically through the paradigm of expanded materiality. Drawing from Spinoza’s immanentist materialism and extending to Barad’s agential realism, the essay proposes an intra-active vision of the fashion system in which matter, bodies, technologies, data, and territories emerge as co-constituted and relational phenomena. From this perspective, the fashion product results are not a stable or fixed object, but rather a temporary assemblage of heterogeneous forces and dimensions. Relating this complexity, the visual identity of the RHITA project is metaphorically constructed through reference to two observable phenomena in quantum physics — entanglement and the gravitational field — for their symbolic capacity to attract and connect even across distance.
Within the project platform and the practices presented, the digital is never conceived as a device of dematerialization, but rather as a technology of material thickening, multiplying levels of existence, visibility, and agency. In addition, sustainability is reinterpreted not as an optimization of the dominant system, but as systemic friction: a critical device that introduces resistance into extractive and accelerationist logics, making limits and interdependencies visible. The contribution concludes with a framework that synthesizes, in ten principles, the meaning of an intra-active fashion practice oriented toward ecological co-responsibility and the construction of co-evolution futures.
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