The increasing inclusion of digital technology in fashion-design practices challenges the established material ontologies that are the result of fashion’s physical-based history. Materiality in the digital does not inherently come into existence with pre-set properties, behaviours, and expressions. How it appears, behaves, and responds is programmable, which fundamentally questions the causal material thinking commonly found in fashion design. It also introduces a dimension of openness and ambiguity as regards the role, purpose, and interactions of materiality that fashion design as a discipline needs to embrace if it wants to create meaningful content using, and for use in, digital environments.

The research programme that the research presented in this thesis followed involved the formulation of an alternative material ontology in digital fashion design; this was based on practice-based experimental activities, which were informed by agential-realism theory. The ontological approach formulated in the programme shifts the focus away from designing objects and towards designing resolutions (here understood as enacted states of how the body, fabric, and space unfold and become intelligible) of material components within phenomena in fashion design. Phenomena are understood as the basic ontological units, in which the body, fabric, and space exist as entangled components. Rather than designing for the human body, using fabrics, and within three-dimensional spaces, the research programme proposes designing resolutions wherein the roles, purposes, and functions of the body, fabric, and space are expressed based on their material performances and enacted using digital technology. Engaging with digital technology that way changes its purpose, from a tool to be used to being part of the designed phenomenon.

Notions, methods, and tools developed within the research programme shift the focus away from making concrete physical products to be worn on the body within socially constructed spaces, and towards the design of resolutions within material phenomena in which the body, fabric, and space equally constitute the design experience through their performative intra-actions. Phenomena-based fashion here does not rely on causal structures of wearing; instead, it more intimately and immediately involves people in the sense of ‘being’ and ‘being part of’, via performative boundaries of digitally enacted material interventions. In this sense, the research programme not only formulates methods for alternative design practices in fashion with digital technology, but also outlines an alternative material ontology that suggests different ways of experiencing, engaging with, communicating, and ‘being part of’ fashion on a material level.