Exploring the relationship between material and textile structure in creating changing textile expressions

This paper explores the relationship between potentially dynamic materials and textile structures for designing textiles with inherent changing qualities. Textiles are usually designed to retain their appearance for as long as possible. Yet all textiles wear out and change over time, both physically and aesthetically. This means the life spans of textile object and the material it is made from will not necessarily be equal. The dynamic changeable qualities in textiles could instead be enhanced by using the potentially dynamic, changing qualities inherent to materials and combining them with textile structures. Through contextualisation and design examples, this paper discusses the possibilities of embedding these qualities into textiles, and presents a series of woven and knitted designs that combine these materials into different textile structures. Two materials with differing dynamic qualities were chosen for the experiments. These are polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) yarn—a material that melts in water and uncoated copper wire—which creates a patina when it reacts with air. These materials are combined into woven and knitted structures and then exposed to two types of stimuli to explore how different stimuli affect the way in which the materials change: passive exposure to weather, and an active workshop with fashion design students. The results are initial explorations into the basic principles of combining potentially dynamic materials into textile structures to create textiles that take advantage of how different materials change over their life span, and how this might look. Through embedding different time spans into textiles instead of designing static expressions, the life span of materials and textile objects could be better matched, enabling the designer to tailor a more appropriate life span for textiles.