Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory, and methods that are based on visual language. The workshop Sensoaesthetics: Introducing alternative embodied material expressions in textile and fashion is a part of a three-year research project, Sonic Fashion (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2022-2024). The project aims to expand the discourse of fashion by approaching it from a new and very different—sonic—perspective wherein sound is considered not as a negative aspect, but as a potential source of a new theory and facilitator of the evolution of new methods. The proposed workshop aims to (i) introduce participants to experimental inclusive aesthetics and (ii) expand the vocabularies of material definition - analyzing and defining them by using five experiential levels: functional, sensorial, interpretive, affective and performative. The workshop invites participants from a whole host of design fields and people with a visual impairment to co-create together within sensitizing exercises and sonic design prototyping to develop more inclusive ways of designing, defining, and representing textile and fashion artifacts.

The sensory experience of fashion is complex and nuanced. Yet visual dominance creates an inherent ocularcentric bias that overlooks a rich diversity of sensory knowledge and experience in fashion education.

This article explores sensory approaches to fashion design education as a method for cultivating inclusion and innovation. Three fashion educators, two who are sighted and one who is legally blind, offer a critical reflection on their multisensory teaching practice, represented by workshops and course description on sonic fashion, olfactory considerations of clothing, and sensory design.

In these case studies, sensory experience serves as both subject and method, inviting a critique of norms while considering multiple embodied ways of exploring, knowing and creating fashion. Situated in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework from fashion studies, sensory studies, and disability studies, the findings suggest that this approach creates deeper engagement and access for disabled and nondisabled students, enriching the creative processes by challenging normative visual-centric methods.

The article demonstrates how multisensory fashion pedagogy accomplishes three critical transformations that reimagine fashion education: it displaces visual dominance to expand design possibilities, advocates for the legitimacy and value of embodied knowledge, and builds communities that celebrate diverse ways of knowing to invite authentic representation and counter ableism.

We have a palette of colors, but what if we take sounds as a starting point for designing practice? What could be a sonic palette for sonic wear? This paper introduces new ways of thinking with the body in time and space as a sonic composition. It presents experimental research on fabricating sonic material using 3D printing on textiles technique for developing different sonic expressions as musical notes. This experimental Sonic Palette is seen as a way of bringing awareness about otherness, and commonness with those with visual impairment while exploring alternative possibilities and unusual approaches to materials. Sonic Palette introduces a new experience of wearing, nonetheless, it suggests an experimental language, extended vocabulary, and expressions in the field of fashion and textile design. Aesthetics of interaction and experience rather than aesthetics of appearance propose considering garments as musical composition and musical instruments. The expansion of sensory plentitude and expressiveness of materials with non-visual, experience-based, and time-based expressions is an example of inclusive ways of thinking, designing, and presenting fashion for example for those with diverse visual abilities.

To translate is to listen through difference — to allow one form to echo within another.

In Sonic Translations, the act of listening becomes a philosophical inquiry into transformation itself. The work exists as a translation of translation of translation — a continuous unfolding where sound, matter, image, and algorithm pass through one another. Nothing remains fixed; everything vibrates with its own becoming.

Fashion researchers Vidmina Stasiulytė and Erika Blomgren begin with the Sonic Palette, a collection of 3D-printed textile samples that are both tactile and acoustic entities — bodies with their own sonic potential. Vidmina performs these textiles-instruments, touching them into resonance; sound arises not as expression but as event, as the material’s own utterance. Erika listens and transcribes this utterance into drawing, tracing the vibration through rhythm, direction, and form.

Then the process turns again — the drawn sound is feeded to an AI generative system, an algorithmic ear that reinterprets the visual into new sonic articulations. This third voice, neither human nor material, becomes a mirror that distorts and reveals — a machinic imagination translating the already translated.

Through this recursive choreography, Sonic Translations gestures toward an ecology of sensing — where the human, the material, and the algorithm co-compose in resonance. Meaning is never possessed but continually deferred, vibrating between bodies, gestures, and codes. The work asks: when sound travels through matter, through drawing, through the logic of the machine — what remains of the original impulse? Or does each translation become a new ontology, a new mode of listening?

Here, translation is not transmission but transformation — a practice of attunement to the intervals between senses, where sound becomes visible, and the visible begins to sound.

Can you listen to fashion?

Can you play fashion as music?

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theories, and methods that are based on visual language. This exposition revises fashion by approaching it from a different perspective – the sonic – in which sound is considered a potential source for a new theory and facilitator of the evolution of new methods rather than a negative aspect. Sound is thus presented as the main idea-generator and not as a secondary quality of designed objects. The research opens new avenues for design thinking with the ears rather than the eyes, exploring fashion from the perspective of listening rather than seeing, sounding rather than showing. It is a way of rethinking and redefining fashion, departing from the statement that dress is sound.

This exploration aims to explore the sonic agencies of costume design and the way they both inform and add a level of expression to the movement and choreography of a performance. The work is a collaboration between Vidmina Stasiulyte and Linnea Bågander who aim to intersect their expertise in a sonic and performative conversation with a dancer.