Contesting Meaning and Infrastructures of Agency in Contemporary Fashion: The Case of A Sewing Machine of One’s Own

Abstract

This paper examines how fashion design practices operate not only as systems of representation, but as material and semiotic infrastructures that shape the production and circulation of meaning. While vernacular aesthetics and subcultural codes are increasingly mobilised within contemporary fashion, their incorporation into broader circuits of visibility often transforms their symbolic charge. Rather than framing this process through oppositions such as authenticity versus co-optation, the study approaches meaning as an unstable and negotiated outcome.

The research adopts a practice-based, situated methodology, combining co-design, participant observation, and material analysis. It focuses on the case study A Sewing Machine of One’s Own, developed within a social tailoring atelier in Scampia (Naples), involving designers, seamstresses, and students in a collaborative production process. Through the analysis of garments, design decisions, and exhibition practices, the paper identifies specific operations—such as juxtaposition, citation, and visible construction—that foreground the instability of signs and prevent their naturalisation. These are interpreted through cultural studies and camp sensibility to examine how fashion practices can both engage with and destabilise processes of incorporation.

The study argues that fashion can assume a critical role not by representing contexts “authentically”, but by intervening in the material and relational conditions that enable forms of agency and ongoing renegotiation of meaning.