Sensory Explorations: A Critical Multisensory Approach to Fashion Pedagogy

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.