Feel-able Fashion : Dress and the Sensory Knowledge of Blindness

In an industry in which appearances, images and looks dominate, have you ever considered what lies beyond the visual? Drawing on the embodied experience of blindness, this book attends to a “feel-able” world, revealing alternative ways of knowing and experiencing fashion and dress through the complexity of non-visual sensory knowledge.

Bringing together sensory fashion studies and disability studies, Julie Gork combines in-depth interviews and reflexive autoethnographic practice to challenge and complicate the assumption that participation in the visuality of fashion is either necessary or desirable.

Joining people who are blind in their wardrobes and in retail spaces, we learn how the interaction of the senses, materiality and affect unsettles sighted expertise. By revealing the constellation of sensory skills and knowledge used to make sense of and appreciate fashion and dress, this powerful study offers new and transformative ways to experience fashion.