The quiet resistance of the fashion toile as artefact - an unfinished, ungendered approach to fashion image making
Marshall, Michelle (2026) The quiet resistance of the fashion toile as artefact - an unfinished, ungendered approach to fashion image making. In: 2026 International Conference on Clothing and Textiles (ICCT), 22-23 May 2026, Seoul, South Korea. (Unpublished)
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While the global fashion industry is fixated on perfection (Reffstrup and Roberts-Islam, 2024), the fashion toile offers quiet resistance. These raw, discarded prototypes, denuded of colour or retail intent, exist outside the commodity loop. Drawing on The Draft Archive, an ongoing practice-based research project and forthcoming publication, this paper argues that fashion studio castoff toiles can be repositioned as vessels for new aesthetic, ethical and curatorial inquiry.
Grounded in phenomenology, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of dressed embodiment, the paper frames the toile as a form that privileges bodily experience over visual legibility. Discarded and fragmented toiles are collected from design studios and reconfigured around the body in improvised, unresolved structures. Informed by object-based approaches to dress analysis (Mida and Kim, 2015), this practice-based methodology privileges somatic experience, material experimentation and iterative reconfiguration over predetermined outcomes.
Through recomposition, orientations shift and relationships between elements remain in flux, inviting the wearer to reshape, reassign and reimagine garments beyond fixed typologies and gender codes. The research proposes a circular framework for studio surplus that values imperfection, temporality and process, reimagining designer castoffs as culturally and aesthetically valuable. Read through a Foucauldian lens, the toile becomes a site where fashion’s disciplinary mechanisms fail to fully take hold, opening new sartorial vocabularies and possibilities for rethinking how fashion and the body are visually embodied and presented.
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