When Emotion Touches the Body, It Becomes a Manifesto

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On the re-embodiment of emotion through the body, fabric, and movement

When we look at a garment, we often notice its form first: its color, fabric, cut, and the way it sits on the body. Yet clothing carries a far more complex meaning than its visible form suggests. It is a moving surface positioned between the body and the world; one that can hold memory, identity, desire, the need for protection, belonging, and rebellion all at once.

For me, a garment has never been merely an object that covers the body. It is a space in which something experienced internally can find a body again in the external world. At times, it becomes the volume of an unspoken sentence; at others, a shell developed for protection, or the visible form of a part of ourselves that has long been suppressed.

For this reason, I have been pursuing the following question in my work for a long time:

What happens when an emotion becomes a line, the line becomes fabric, and the fabric becomes a moving body?

I do not see this process simply as applying an illustration to a garment. Printing an image onto a textile surface is not the same as re-embodying the emotional state carried by that image. My interest begins precisely at this distinction.

When the faces, colors, and movements of the women I draw are transferred onto clothing, they do not merely acquire a new surface. The emotion stands up again. It walks, folds, expands, contracts, and continuously changes in relation to the body and the surrounding space. In other words, the emotional state recorded in the drawing becomes a living event once more.

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Dressing: The silent agreement between the body and the world

Fashion is often treated as superficial, temporary, and driven by consumption. However, understanding clothing only as a consumer object produced by the fashion industry means overlooking its profound relationship with the body and identity.

Sociologist Joanne Entwistle approaches dressing not as a decorative layer added to the body, but as an “embodied practice.” According to her, the dressed body exists at the intersection of personal experience and social order. The way we dress does not arise solely from individual choice; it is constantly negotiated through the codes a society creates around the body, gender, class, age, acceptability, and the right to visibility.

This perspective is deeply valuable in relation to my work. The body is never an empty surface, and clothing is never a neutral covering. When a woman gets dressed, she is not simply deciding how she wishes to look. She is also making conscious or unconscious decisions about how much space she may occupy, how visible she may become, how protected she wishes to feel, and how approachable or inaccessible she may appear.

An enlarged shoulder may not merely be a formal design choice; it can become the visual equivalent of gaining power. A broad volume surrounding the body may express a need for protection. Layers that open as the body moves may represent an emotion that has been held inside for too long. Transparency may evoke vulnerability, while a rigid architectural structure may express the need to establish boundaries.

Clothing, then, resembles a silent agreement between the body and the outside world.

Sometimes it says, “I am here.”Sometimes, “Do not come closer.”Sometimes, “See me.”And sometimes, “You will not see me in the way you expect to.”

Clothing does not only represent us; it also affects us

The question of what clothing communicates to others has long been discussed. Yet there is another, perhaps more compelling question:

Can what we wear also change the relationship we have with ourselves?

In their 2012 study, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky introduced the concept of “enclothed cognition.” The term suggested that not only the physical experience of wearing a garment, but also the symbolic meaning attributed to it, could influence psychological processes.

It is important to note that some of the original experimental findings were not reproduced in later direct replication attempts. Therefore, we cannot establish a simplistic scientific rule such as, “If you wear this garment, you will definitely feel that way.” Researchers later discussed the limitations of the theory and the failure to reproduce some of the initial results.

Still, the conceptual space opened by this debate remains significant: our physical contact with clothing and the meanings we attach to it are not entirely separate.

We all experience this in everyday life in one form or another. In some garments, we feel more visible; in others, safer. Some make us feel vulnerable, while others bring us closer to ourselves. This is not merely about what we see in the mirror. It is also about the fabric touching the skin, its weight, the way it expands or restricts our movement, and how it allows us to carry our bodies.

In this sense, clothing is not a passive shell. It is a partner that affects posture, walking, rhythm, and even the amount of space the body occupies.

This is exactly the relationship I seek in the garments I design or visualize. I do not want emotion merely to be represented on the surface of the garment. I want it to become part of the garment’s structure.

Anger is not only the color red; it may become a sharpened shoulder, an expanding volume, or a line that extends beyond the body.

Anxiety is not merely a complicated surface pattern; it may transform into entangled layers that constantly change direction.

Vulnerability is not limited to transparent or delicate fabrics; it may be constructed as a fragile area protected within a rigid structure.

And hope, for me, does not always have to be expressed through bright and cheerful colors. Sometimes it is a form that can still move, remain open, and continue transforming.

The female body: From an observed surface to an embodied subject

Women’s relationship with clothing cannot be understood through aesthetic preferences alone. Throughout history, the female body has remained at the center of social interventions concerning what it should wear, how much it should reveal, how it should move, and how much space it is allowed to occupy.

Clothing has functioned both as an instrument of these rules and as a means of resisting them. Dressing has been a way of conforming, protecting oneself, and belonging to a class or group, but it has also served as a means of disrupting social expectations and reconstructing identity. Fashion studies have repeatedly emphasized that clothing is deeply connected to identity, society, and politics, and that the dressed body can operate like a text that carries meaning.

The women I draw do not represent a single state of womanhood. I am not interested in reproducing the image of a woman who is always powerful, complete, and self-assured. That image can easily become yet another performance imposed upon women: the obligation to remain strong, to heal constantly, to keep producing, and to emerge from every collapse more successful than before.

The experience of womanhood, however, is far more contradictory.

A woman may be brave and afraid at the same time, angry and compassionate, eager to be seen while simultaneously needing to disappear. She may feel confident one day and fragmented the next. She may establish boundaries in one part of her life while continuing to place herself second in another.

The faces in my work inhabit these contradictions.

This is also how my series Faces of the Months emerged. I drew one face for each month as a way of recording the emotions each month left in me and the shifting emotional states of women. I did not think of these faces as fixed portraits. I saw them instead as visual records of conversations, decisions, tensions, and transformations that accumulated internally throughout the month.

The August work, “It Keeps Hitting the Shore Inside Me Like Waves,” is part of this approach.

The wave here is not a romantic metaphor associated only with the sea. It refers to unspoken conversations, postponed decisions, anger that repeatedly withdraws, and the burdens carried under the phrase “I can manage.”

Some emotions do not disappear. They simply change form.

Sometimes they return as fatigue, sometimes as physical tension, and sometimes as a decision that can no longer be ignored. The face of August is the face of this repetition: rising, receding, yet never vanishing.

From drawing to garment: Not reproducing an image, but giving it a body

When transforming this illustration into clothing, my aim was not to extract its colors and create an aesthetically pleasing dress. Such an approach would reduce the drawing to a decorative pattern.

I wanted to preserve the internal structure of the illustration.

The woman’s face, the hair moving like waves, the green organic fields, the black contour lines, and the red and yellow accents were not merely visual elements. Each formed part of the emotional architecture of the drawing.

For this reason, it is important to me that the illustration remains clearly recognizable in the garment. Yet I do not want it to appear as a flat print. I want it to be reconstructed through volume, the movement of fabric, and the movement of the body.

There is no one-way transfer between drawing and garment. The illustration transforms the garment, while the garment also changes the meaning of the illustration.

The wave on paper is static. The wave in fabric opens and closes as the body walks; it falls behind, moves forward, and changes direction. The face in the drawing looks at the viewer; once it becomes clothing, it moves through space and is perceived from different angles. The emotion recorded on a two-dimensional surface enters time.

I call this the re-embodiment of emotion.

This is not simply an aesthetic contribution to the category of wearable art. It is an investigation into the relationship between image, body, and emotional state.

Here, the garment is not a display case for a completed emotion. It is the place where emotion continues to transform.

Why does memory cling to fabric?

The relationship between clothing and memory is another important part of this process. Some garments transport us back to a specific moment not only when we see them, but also when we touch them, smell them, or feel their fabric against the skin.

Because clothing comes into direct contact with the body, it can carry memory differently from other objects. It preserves something of the body’s shape, movement, scent, and lived experience. Garments may therefore become material carriers of personal identity, relationships, and memory. Studies on clothing and memory suggest that the memories evoked by garments are shaped by the wearer’s sense of self and by their relationships with others.

A garment may carry the presence of someone who is no longer in our lives. It may remind us of a former version of ourselves. It may even reveal who we were trying to become during the period in which we wore it.

In my work, this memory does not arise from the past of an existing garment, but from the transformation of an emotion into clothing. In other words, rather than carrying a memory that has already been lived, the garment creates a space in which an emotion can be re-experienced through the body.

This is why the garments I create are not costumes.

A costume is often placed onto a body from the outside in order to represent a character. The clothing I seek, however, is built from the inside outward. First, there is an emotion. Then come its line, color, weight, and volume. The form of the garment follows afterward.

The starting point is not fashion. It is lived experience.

What role does artificial intelligence play here?

My use of artificial intelligence during the visualization stage does not mean that the illustration or the creative decisions belong to AI.

At the beginning, there is an original drawing, a conceptual framework, a color language, and an idea of the body that belong to me. Artificial intelligence becomes a visualization tool through which I can experiment with how the world I have drawn might appear through fabric, volume, runway, light, and movement.

What matters to me is not what technology can produce on its own, but how an artist’s original world can be expanded through technology.

It is relatively easy for AI to generate an aesthetically pleasing garment. The difficult part is knowing why that garment exists.

Why this color?

Why this volume?

Why is the female figure positioned in this specific part of the garment?

Why does the fabric wrap around the body in one place and extend beyond it in another?

The answers to these questions are not contained solely in a prompt. They are found in the artist’s previous body of work, personal memory, conceptual continuity, and way of seeing the world.

Technology can generate an image. Yet the artist’s intention still determines what that image continues, what experience it emerges from, and why it needs to exist.

Can an emotional state become wearable?

Perhaps the central question of these works is this:

Can an emotional state truly be worn?

Of course, it is impossible to translate an emotion completely into fabric. Emotions are not fixed, measurable objects with the same meaning for everyone. But it is possible to give an emotion form, color, weight, and movement.

Instead of explaining an emotion, we can create a bodily encounter with it.

When a viewer looks at a garment, they will not experience exactly what I experienced. Nor should they. The power of art does not lie in exact transmission. The viewer approaches the form through their own memory, body, and lived experience.

My wave may become their anger, grief, decision, or desire to begin again.

For this reason, these works are not merely the externalization of a personal diary. They are an attempt to create a shared space where the personal can come into contact with the experiences of others.

In a world where women live profoundly different lives yet often carry similar pressures, silences, and obligations to keep rebuilding themselves, it is not accidental that one face may resonate with another woman.

Solidarity does not always mean having lived the same experience. Sometimes it means recognizing something in another person’s experience and being able to say:

“I know another version of this feeling.”

Conclusion: Emotion finding a new body

I do not see clothing as an end point, but as a transitional space.

Emotion becomes line.Line becomes fabric.Fabric becomes body.Body becomes movement.Movement becomes emotion again in the viewer.

In this cycle, no stage reproduces the previous one exactly. With every transformation, meaning shifts, expands, and becomes something else.

This is why a garment is never just a garment.

It is the relationship between a body and the social world. It is a material trace of the past, a form of protection, a demand for visibility, and sometimes a silent act of resistance.

In my work, it is also the second life of an emotional state.

The woman who begins in the drawing acquires another body through clothing. Yet she does not lose her emotion. On the contrary, she reconstructs it as she walks, folds, and moves through fabric.

Perhaps this is the real point:

Some emotions do not want to be explained.They look for a new body in which they can move.

References

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed Cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918–925.

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2019). Reflections on Enclothed Cognition: Commentary on Burns et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83.

Burns, D. M., et al. (2019). A preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Entwistle, J. (2000). Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice. Fashion Theory, 4(3), 323–347.

Mackin Roberts, E. (2024). Embodied Wearing: Clothing for Artemis in Ancient Greek Ritual. Material Religion.

Twigg, J. (2013). Dress, Dementia and the Embodiment of Identity. Dementia.

Clothing, Identity, and Communication. In A Philosopher Looks at Clothes. Cambridge University Press, 2025.