Vänskä, Intimacy – Embodied knowledge, creative work and digitalization in contemporary Finnish fashion

A garment is not just a garment: it is a link between the self, our peers and our surrounding world, specific to a time and a place. Intimacy is a book about contemporary Finnish fashion and international fashion studies. It considers the intimate relationship between the body and fashion from diverse perspectives: fashion as a tool for identity expression, the significance of the fashion designer’s own bodily experiences in their work, and the contribution to fashion of wearable technology, which generates data on the wearer’s bodily functions. This book is also about how fashion is always a product of its surrounding society and culture. Like our society, fashion is becoming mediatized, digitized and datafied, and the impact of social media is evident not only in fashion publicity but also in our use of fashion. In the new millennium, clothes can now be virtual. At the same time, our understanding of the wearers of fashion is shifting, as young designers challenge the strict body norms and the whiteness of the fashion world. Intimacy presents the processes involved in Finnish fashion designers’ creative work, linking them to topical fashion studies discourse.