Daniela Yakuel

My thesis, Dressed in Awareness: Embodied Encounters with Fashion through the Sensory Clothing Circle, is a practice-based inquiry into the ways mindful, embodied engagement with clothing can reorient our relationship to fashion. This project centers a methodology I created called the Sensory Clothing Circle—a participatory process that invites individuals to engage with their own garments through a process involving guided mindfulness, tactile exploration, movement, and reflection.

The circles offer a deliberate slowing down of the dressing process, inviting participants to feel rather than evaluate, to be with rather than consume. In my project, participants explored garments in unworn and worn states and in categories such as “sentimental,” “emotionally charged,” and “everyday” in an effort to surface affective and embodied layers of experience that often go unnoticed in conventional fashion discourse.

Rooted in affect theory, phenomenology, and somatic mindfulness, my research serves as a counterpoint to fast fashion’s logic of speed, disposability, and detachment. Participants reported renewed emotional clarity, deepened presence, and a transformed sense of intimacy with the garments they wore.

By foregrounding the lived, felt, and relational dimensions of dress practice, this work proposes that sustainability in fashion must consider not just systems and materials but also internal and embodied forms of reengagement. This work cultivates new and more sustainable forms of relating to clothing—ones rooted not in production and consumption but in presence. My project joins a growing call within fashion studies for more practice-based and action-oriented research methods—approaches that make space for sensory knowledge, lived experience, and collective inquiry.