This chapter marks a leap from a historical assessment of materialism as a method and of materialist praxis in the study of fashion towards an analysis of contemporary approaches to making garment pieces and accessories. The transitional aspect resides in the combination of fashion design practice and philosophical ideas, whereby the latter look at the way in which materialism has been filtered through the object–subject relationship and the hermeneutics of objectivity and objecthood (Gegenständlichkeit). The relation between the acting, socially and historically conscious subject and the products of his and her environment – as objects that are produced by the social relation of production – is crucial for a critical assessment of fashion. I will describe in the following how a dialectical view of this relationship provides for me the most sustained and nuanced basis for such a critique.

In the approach for this chapter I would also like to discuss the role of representation in the study of fashion. Since materialism and materiality determine the present interpretation of fashion's historic and conceptual values, recourse to representation could be regarded as counter-productive. It might be argued that when fashion does not appear as fashion in the physically conditioned sense of garments and accessories that are worn on the body, but in the form of fashion as theoretical, in particular philosophical, text, as something that is conceptualised as a reflection only of its form and appearance, it loses the very materiality that is at stake here. Therefore an effort is sustained in this book to describe fashion in its materialisation, as developed product, as designed object, as a commodity within systems of exchange and, in its finality, as an embodied performance of power structures. In my view fashion should not be shown essentially through photographs or drawings but needs to be articulated as processes of making. This view, as I will explain further below, determined the choice of my case study of one particular design studio and manufacturer.

At the same time, an object – not only in fashion, but particularly so, due to its proximity to the body – represents itself to the subject.