Qualitative Analysis in Fashion

Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS series 

'Qualitative Analysis in Fashion'  

This is the fifth session in the ten-part series: Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS. The aim of this series is to showcase and celebrate the diverse and innovative ways UTS researchers are working with qualitative data.

In this session two very different examinations of methodology in fashion will be explored*

Firstly, Associate Professor Toby Slade will discuss his work on the multi-country Fashion and Authoritarianism Project, an examination of the nature of fashion before and after authoritarian regimes. This project, funded by the Japanese government, studied the sudden arrival of political, social and economic freedom with the often accompanying impulses toward newness, foreignness and the modern, exposing the relationship between national political structure and expression in clothing. The relationship between political authority and fashion seems to be an obvious one for examination however it is rarely studied and when it is only amongst ruling elites. The need to record the aesthetic choices, judgments and attitudes of ordinary people is important and a useful tool to calibrate minute shifts in popular feeling. Fashion is often only considered at the centre rather than the periphery but this focus denies other perspectives to this quintessential and ubiquitous human activity. Fieldwork was conducted in Tibet, Mongolia, Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, and Japan in an attempt to find correlations and patterns across multiple cultural and political contexts. The multinational nature of this research bought out linguistic, cultural, and logistical challenges for its methodological frameworks.

In addition, Dr Todd Robinson will discuss a practice-based research approach he developed to examine the processes of sartorial embodiment in fashion. The approach synthesizes insights from Sensory ethnography, the use of purpose-designed fashion garments, design probes in combination with work on embodiment, digital technology and movement to make possible the capture and qualitative analysis of sartorial movements unavailable to unmediated perception.

These two very different approaches will together show the interaction between theoretical, historical, and practice-based research in fashion.

* please note, this session will be recorded.