Towards a Design Space for Storytelling on the Fashion Technology Runway

Abstract

Fashion is driven by a narrative, i.e. a story or idea that the designer wants to convey to the audience. Fashion-tech now adds another dimension to this narrative through dynamically changing aspects of the garments. Many factors of presentation in a runway show affect how fashion-tech garments communicate a story to the audience. In this pictorial, we review a set of twenty-eight storytelling fashion-tech garments. We identify, catalogue, and categorize the factors designers used to convey stories to the audience from the runway. The design space consists of three levels: (1) the artifact-level, (2) the viewer-level, and (3) the context-level. The design space addresses how designers show their story through fashion-tech garments and how audience members see and know those messages. Our work contributes a list of considerations that fashion-tech designers must address early in their design process to effectively convey their story during a runway show presentation.