Today dress is exhibited on transferable real and representational bodies: from model to mannequin to avatar. Dress in post-modernity represents a fragmented aesthetic extension of the self and body. Dress is also referred to as our ‘second skin’. We share an intense sensory relationship with dress, as the material interface between our interior and exterior worlds experienced through touch.

The original context for dress is on the living body, but when body and dress are separated and dress is re-constructed on a mimetic body, as in the exhibition, what happens to dress? Current curatorial debates centre on ‘enlivening’ dress. My research will look into these debates that envision the way dress might ‘embody’ liveliness in the exhibition space. When we enter a dress exhibition, we enter as a dressed body to view ‘other’ dressed bodies. How much of our own sense of being a living dressed body feeds into our ‘reading’ of the mimetic dressed body? What role does touch play?

In our daily lives we inhabit, consume and construct our identities around dress through touching the materiality of the object with our hands and our eyes. Yet, when we enter the exhibition space we enter a code of conduct: Do Not Touch. I will investigate whether dress can embody liveliness in the exhibition, by curating a series of experiments which will allow viewers to: touch dress (Haptic), experience a synthetic touch of dress (Haptics), use tacit knowledge to touch dress (Tacit Haptic) and equally to feel ‘touched’ by dress (Haptic aesthetics). A sensory ethnographic methodology will be applied to both the process and the evidence of these experiments supported by qualitative data in the form of interviews with curators and archival material from seminal dress exhibitions including: The Dictionary of Dress curated by Judith Clark (Blythe House, 2010).