<sup>Liliana Sanguino is Associate Professor at Parsons and Donna Karan Co-Director of the MFA in Fashion Design and Society. Born in Colombia, her work spans fashion education, curation, and decolonial practice. She is a PhD candidate at Glasgow School of Art, focusing on Indigenous collaborations and socially engaged design.

A full PDF version of this visual essay is available here.</sup>

“Drawing can only take you so far, he believes. ‘You really need to start making, draping, trying it on the body, letting it walk around, doing something physical,’ he says.
 ‘Even if you don’t want to be a maker, it’s important to understand how things are made. If you don’t know how a waistband is constructed, how can you have ideas about a waistband? How can you change it? It’s that Picasso idea: you have to know how it’s done to destroy it, to make something new.’”
       -Craig Green, Financial Times, April 10th, 2024

My name is Liliana Sanguino. I was born in Cali, Colombia, where I studied for a BA in Architecture in Bogota and Dublin before settling in London to study Fashion at LCF and Central Saint Martins. I began to work as an academic in 2008, leaving my final UK post as course Leader for the MFA and MA Menswear, University of Westminster, to join Parsons in January 2023 as Associate Professor in Fashion Design and Social Justice and Donna Karan Co-Director MFA Fashion Design and Society.

The most exciting proposition in leaving architecture for fashion was the ability to work in scale, 1:1. To prove my ideas, to prototype to scale, then repeat, in different materials for different results. My teaching and learning practice aims for students to make connections between what they do and do not know. I have come to recognize that much of the unknown relates to understanding fashion as more than just a visual discipline.

Over several intakes, I have identified recurrent gaps in students’ knowledge surrounding this area, including negligible fabric research, limited understanding of how fabrics behave on the body, inability to anticipate the weight of completed garments, bewilderment at approaching 3D work, and a lack of garment knowledge and construction skills.

That we are experiencing fashion today as predominantly 2D makes for an obvious reason behind the discrepancy. Pre-pandemic, the percentage of information received via screens, telephones, devices, from the internet, social media, etc. was already staggering. More worrying is that these images are mostly limited to front views of garments. On highly respected platforms, such as Vogue Runway, there is no explanation of a garment as an object, existing in 360 degrees.

^{Images courtesy of the author.}

“And I found that of all the senses the eye was the most superficial, the ear the most haughty, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and inconstant, touch the most profound and philosophical.”
                               -Diderot, ‘Letter on the Blind,’ 1749

Learn Through Touching

In terms of wearing fashion, when people choose to dress in clothes, it is to look and feel good. The most successful designers are knowledgeable and sensitive to these elements when creating a desirable product. Aesthetic discussion runs deep within fashion, often without acknowledging that the vocabulary it relies on is largely derived via the human sense of touch.  This knowledge, which occurs through contact with a garment or material, includes the development of an exquisite glossary to define the phenomenon.

Despite the many different and differing interpretations of what is meant by “fashion,” it remains a universal truth that humans dress—and this is both a functional and aesthetic act.  In this sense, fashion describes a particular way of dressing.

Lauwaert defines clothes as a structure around a person, suggesting the body is required to define fashion, that there is no fashion without a subject, that fashion occurs as the clothing forms a layer over the subject’s skin. [1] Fashion is the only design discipline which covers the body. Fashion and skin, the largest of our organs by surface area, make contact and touch is the primary sense at play.

It follows then, that fashion students must be fluent in the experience, the language, of touch to develop into successful designers.

Describing garments as soft or silky relies on us having experienced this sensation before—knowledge that can only be gained through touch and which only occurs when a person comes into contact with the garment and the material, as either designer or wearer.

Through touching we learn about fashion, about manipulation. Using our hands to feel and experiment is the way to discover something new.

Touch is the first sense prior to the differentiation into other sensory modalities and works as a model of perception in general. Touch provides knowledge of temperature, weight, size, shape, and density. Touch is a modality resulting from the combined information of innumerable receptors and nerve endings concerned with pressure, temperature, pain, and movement. Touch is also a sense of communication that is receptive and expressive and can communicate a sense of closeness by bridging the gap between distant objects and people.

It could be argued that vision precedes touch; people see something, they suspect what it might be, but touch is required to confirm these predictions. The flip side of this is holding something without seeing it. Touch allows for the gathering of much information, while seeing confirms this to fact. 

Navigating this relationship, between touching and seeing, is an area where students frequently encounter problems. In my experience, there is too much concentration on how work might be photographed or seen and too little understanding of garments or accessories as real objects. Similarly, within a field of research, I see far too often a collection of images without critical thinking, no understanding or explanation. I bring garments to class to engage touch and develop 3D awareness, or alternatively describe what’s been seen to take students beyond the surface. Frequently the vision they have worked toward is not substantiated, owing to limited experience or lack of knowledge gained through Touch. Touch is intimate, seeing is surface, and when sight is communicating in 2D images, the reality is frequently too far away.

Ashley Montagu, in his book The Human Significance of the Skin, highlights the importance of touch in human development from birth, and before. [2] Touch is the first sense to develop in the human embryo. He goes on to suggest that for a child the primary sense is touch, ahead of audio and visuals, with this order reversing as we develop, as visual most often becomes the priority. Is it possible that, despite our learning so much through touch early in life, this process is finite, that our learning this way simply stops?

Through deeper research, I realized that this gap in knowledge stems from a longstanding preference for sight in Western culture, deeply rooted in historical and philosophical traditions. This preference, often termed ocularcentrism, has led to the privileging of visual perception over other senses, particularly touch. This bias can be traced back to Aristotle, who, in his hierarchy of the senses, ranked sight as the highest and touch as the lowest. This historical bias influences the perception of touch, leading to its undervaluation and neglect.

Material Donation Center

Since arriving at Parsons in 2023 I have been developing a Materials Donation Room, as a student resource. Any donation we receive is available to all programs and levels across the School of Fashion. I initially recognized the financial benefits for the students and the positive environmental side effects of preventing dead stock going to waste. The idea is simple, coordinating company donations delivered to the School and organizing these for students to take away and design, opening the room at set times, with students accessing what is on offer.  This ranges from swatches, small pieces, to rolls of fabric, buttons, some toiles, to accessories and previous student’s leftover materials.

Priority access was decided in the cases of more specialized materials, e.g., leather was first reserved for final year product students.

As donations began increasing, I encouraged students to take more, to experiment more, to help create space—if nothing else, oftentimes it was difficult to organize the stock, and so the room frequently lacked any order beyond latest to oldest donations, with communication among students being crucial to attracting those in need. There was a great benefit to this “lack of organization,” the students had to investigate, dig deep even, and decide what worked for them, more touching, more knowledge. It was an interesting activity and students made their own decisions with no guidance, no middle person, and the benefit to their work was evident.