In\asense¶
what is the concept¶
In\asense is an exploratory project that aims to expand the sensory boundaries of fashion by creating interactive garments that engage not only sight and touch—the dominant senses in fashion—but also sound, smell, and potentially even taste. The project imagines clothing as more than just fabric on the body. Here, garments become immersive vessels, capable of evoking memory, emotion, and multisensory connection.
At its core, the project translates heightened sensory experiences into wearable forms. Through the use of a personalized methodology, an anonymous participant shared two vivid life experiences, each evaluated through a 5-senses graph inspired by Jinsop Lee’s TED Talk, “Design for All 5 Senses.”
This tool allowed the participant to self-reflect on which senses were most stimulated during those moments, providing a data-driven yet emotionally rich starting point for the designs.
(left to right) Jinsop Lee's The 5 Senses Graph / Adapted graph and questionnaire example by me
Two complete looks were developed based on these experiences, each made up of multiple garments and accessories that collaboratively express the sensory essence of the event.
These designs are not just aesthetic objects—they are experiential. The goal is for wearers and observers alike to engage with the garments through layers of visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory cues. By embedding sound-responsive technology, scent-infused materials, and experimental textures, the garments invite introspection and provoke shared emotional responses.
material catalog
Beyond the physical outcomes, In\asense includes the creation of a Material Catalog, which documents the development and recipes behind each experimental textile used. This catalog emphasizes sustainable, bio-based, and hand-crafted approaches that merge traditional techniques with technology.
short fashion film
The project is further extended into a short fashion film, created in collaboration with Dissecadu (film), Unpsii & José João Lopes (sound) and Inês Furtezinhos (performer), which explores the garments in motion within a surrealist narrative, offering an emotionally charged visual and auditory immersion into the core ideas behind each look.
Finally, a key part of the concept is interactivity. The garments are not finished once worn—they are meant to be felt, tested, and experienced by others. A final participatory event invites viewers to respond to the pieces using the same 5-senses graph, encouraging feedback and a collective understanding of how we all experience the world through our senses—differently, but also together.
why (context)¶
The foundation of In\asense emerged from a personal turning point during the Fabricademy program, when the sensory overload of relocating to a new country and adapting to unfamiliar cultures pushed me into a space of deep reflection. Surrounded by constant stimulation, I became acutely aware of how profoundly our senses shape the way we interpret the world.
This project was born from that awareness—how a smell can transport us back in time, how a texture can make us shiver, how a sound can stir unspoken feelings. I became increasingly fascinated by the interplay between sensory memory and emotional perception, and how fashion—despite being a multisensory experience by nature—is often reduced to sight and touch.
I began asking questions: How do we perceive the world through our senses, and how can clothing reflect that perception? Can garments become emotional artifacts, not only expressing identity but also translating invisible sensations into something tangible?
Fashion has long served as a canvas for self-expression, identity, and cultural narrative. But it also has the potential to be empathetic—a bridge between personal memory and collective understanding. By rethinking how garments interact with the human body and with others in proximity, we can create new forms of emotional intimacy and dialogue.
At the same time, this project advocates for new material practices that embrace sustainability and biomaterial innovation. Exploring sound-reactive textiles, scented bioplastics, and bio-cultivated materials is not only an aesthetic choice, but also a response to an industry that urgently needs to evolve. In doing so, In\asense reimagines both the future of fashion and its present-day responsibilities—creative, emotional, and ecological.
inspiration¶
References and useful links:
Multi-sensory installation by Studio Swine for COS, 2017
The blossoms were designed to float down and burst on contact, releasing a custom scent of bergamot, jasmine, cedar, and oak moss, enhancing the sensory experience.
The sensory aspect is especially evident in how these mist-filled orbs interacted with the environment. The audience was encouraged to engage with the installation by wearing special gloves that allowed them to hold the blossoms, preventing them from popping immediately.
The installation not only appealed to sight (through the visual spectacle of the tree and its blossoms) but also to touch, smell, and even the ephemeral feeling of the mist.
Tangible Textural Interface (TTI) by Eunhee Jo at Show RCA 2012
By interacting with the soft, concave control panel, users can adjust the music's volume, skip tracks, or modify the equalizer settings through tactile gestures.
The fabric surface dynamically changes in response to these controls and pulses to the rhythm of the music, providing an immersive experience that blends touch and sound.
(flexible surfaces that can physically respond to user input).
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres, 1991
It consists of a pile of individually wrapped candies, often arranged in a corner or spread out on the floor. The pile is meant to symbolize the weight and loss of his partner, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. The pile of candy represents Ross’s body, and the work is both a tribute to him and a metaphor for his physical presence.
The pile of candy, which viewers are invited to take from, gradually diminishes as people interact with it.
Smell Chess, Liquids by Takako Saito, 1960
Olfactory art created as part of the Fluxus art movement in the 1960s. This work reimagines the traditional chess experience by replacing the visual and tactile identification of chess pieces with olfactory cues. Each chess piece is represented by identical glass vials, differentiated only by their unique scents.
Saito’s Smell Chess was part of a series of experimental chess sets that redefined the game by engaging other senses, such as hearing (Sound Chess) and taste (Liquor Chess).
Sopro exhibition by Ernesto Neto at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2019
One of the main pieces in the Sopro exhibition was a large, translucent tunnel made of stretched fabric, which visitors were invited to walk through. This piece played with the senses, particularly balance, proprioception, and spatial awareness. As viewers moved through the tunnel, the fabric responded to their movements, swaying and shifting as they walked, creating a fluid, almost dreamlike atmosphere.
The exhibition included installations infused with scents from organic materials like turmeric, clove, and other aromatic spices, creating an immersive and multisensory environment.
These smells are carefully chosen to provoke memory, reflection, and a sense of community within the exhibition space.
Your blind passenger by Olafur Eliasson, 2010
Immersive experience designed to challenge our reliance on sight and awaken other senses.
The work consists of a 45-meter-long tunnel filled with dense fog, reducing visibility to just 1.5 meters. This controlled environment creates a sense of partial blindness, compelling participants to navigate using their other senses such as touch, hearing, and spatial awareness.
The Weather Project, by Olafur Eliasson, 2003
Eliasson created a giant sun-like orb inside the museum, accompanied by mist and light effects that altered the space's mood.
Visitors were immersed in a sensory environment that played with their visual perception, touch (with the mist), and the overall atmosphere created by the light and space.
In preparation for the exhibition, Eliasson devised a questionnaire for the employees at Tate Modern that included questions such as: “Has a weather phenomenon ever changed the course of your life dramatically?” “Do you think tolerance to other individuals is proportional to the weather?” “To what extent are you aware of the weather outside your workplace?”
REMINIscent by Pallavi Padukone.
Reinterpreting the fragrance industry, Reminiscent is an experimental sensorial collection that uses natural ways to integrate and infuse scents into handmade textiles through weaving, embroidery, and fragrant embellishments.
The sense of smell is a powerful catalyst to trigger memories and feelings of calm and comfort. Reminiscent explores the concept of scents for wellness and how fragrances can be expressed visually through color, patterns, and textures. It is a system of using textiles as aromatherapy to condense time and distance and create an immersive experience to reconnect with nature, nostalgia, home, and identity.
- Jasmine I - 52" x 34" - Embroidery (Silk, jasmine-scented cotton dyed with beetroot, indigo, and turmeric).
- Rose - Handwoven (Pre-dyed handspun recycled sari silk and rose scented wax beads dyed with beetroot, hibiscus, chili and cutch)
- Jasmine II - 41” x 44” (Un dyed silk organza, jasmine buds/ Accessible pockets to replace buds).
Herbal Kneipp Textiles by Alexandra Stück, on Dutch Design Week 2014.
Inspired by the alternative therapies developed by 19th century German monk Sebastian Kneipp, Stück worked with five scents that are claimed to have certain health benefits: germanium and valerian root to provide comfort and strength after psychological trauma, lemon balm to balance the cardiac cycle, peppermint to promote concentration and focus, pine for blood pressure and rosemary to restore libido and sexual function.
"The scent molecules reach your olfactory organ and create a certain instruction in the brain, like, decrease stress, increase concentration, lower blood pressure, balance the cardiac cycle, depending on each plant and its remedies," Stück told Dezeen.
Taking the essential oils from each plant, she developed a liquid "scent dye" that can be hand-washed into natural linen and fixed for up to six months by ironing the fabric.
"The textiles are organic linens so they're not coated or chemically processed. I rubbed them to make them shiny and have a nice finish, but I didn't use any chemicals, so they still have the ability to open up in warm water – something linen does naturally. Both the scents and the fabric originate from plants so they work together."
BreaZea room divider created from scented bioplastic by Design studios Crafting Plastics and Office MMK.
"We were wondering, together with the German architect Moritz Maria Karl of Office MMK, how to bring a new identity to bioplastics, since normally you perceive these materials through their visuality and structure, not through their smell."
The bioplastic used for BreaZea is made from cornstarch and sugar and when it's heated up, it has a "starchy, sweet, baking-bread like smell" which the studio says is unique for starch and sugar-based biopolymer blends.
To create the scented room divider, the studio is experimenting with both oil-based and water-based scents, which are added either to the bioplastic material itself before it it is 3D-printed or to the finished product.
"We're 3D-printing it and putting the scent onto the finished material, while another option is to encapsulate scents into the material," Kubušová said.
Real-Time Soundscapes Using Soft Interfaces for Dung Dkar Cloak project.
Interactive installation combining digital jacquard weaving, sound synthesis, fractal geometry, and algorithmic thinking to unfold matter into the visual and sonic domain. Designed by EJTECH, Judit Eszter Kárpáti, and Esteban de la Torre, the hybrid augmented textiles provide a multi-sensory experience as haptic interactions when the jacquard woven fractal patterns are sonified in real-time via soundscapes.
The two jacquard woven fractal interfaces contain visual cues where interaction areas are embedded, seamlessly woven into the textile. Touch sensitive soft interfaces discern between touch and no touch to trigger sounds, but Dung Dkar Cloaks also sense the amount of touch, allowing for expressive gestures of interaction with the soft musical interface. The depth of the gestures controls the amount within signalflow – a system that allows for high control resolution of parameters (ie. filter cutoff).
ideation¶
The ideation process for the project was built on a hybrid methodology that merges emotional narrative, scientific evaluation, and sensory translation. Using the 5-senses graph as a foundation, the anonymous participant provided two life experiences that were especially rich in sensory content. A questionnaire accompanied the graph, encouraging introspection and emotional articulation—pushing the data beyond numbers into the terrain of metaphor, feeling, and memory.
From this input, I established a working system of six interconnected layers:
- Context (where/when the experience happened)
- Dominant Senses (which were most activated)
- Adjectives (how it was described)
- Feelings (emotional response)
- Textures/Forms (physical and environmental elements)
- Environment (natural or constructed surroundings)
Each layer served as a design filter, helping me move from abstract experience to tangible material choices, silhouettes, and interactive mechanisms. I focused on two specific experiences that highlighted sound and smell, as these senses are rarely explored in fashion but deeply potent in shaping memory and emotion.
During E-Textiles week, I was introduced to conductive yarns, soft circuits, and textile sound interfaces—something totally new to me. I was fascinated by how softness could produce sound, how weaving or knitting could become interactive, and how garments could literally respond to the body and environment through invisible networks. It felt like a subtle rebellion against the usual visual dominance in fashion.
The first experience, “Submerged in a River at Paredes de Coura Festival,” was the turning point for my exploration of sound. This wasn’t a typical dip in cold water—it was described as “crystal spikes piercing the skin,” a painful, almost electric sensation. The muffled, disorienting festival sounds underwater—mixed with the biting cold—created a surreal moment of both suffering and clarity. That complexity really stayed with me: “It hurts, but it also makes you feel alive.” I tried to honor that contradiction in the look by combining soft bamboo jersey with crystalline textures, isolating silhouettes, and a 3D-printed structure. A stretch sensor modulates sound based on movement—inviting the wearer to re-experience the memory’s soundscape through motion.
Scent, on the other hand, emerged through experimentation during the BioChromes and BioFabricating weeks. While some materials had… let’s say, challenging smells (kombucha and fish skins!), they made me think about scent as something powerful and intimate. I began to wonder: how could we embed memory into smell?
The second experience, “Riding a Motorcycle in Faial,” is all about freedom and contrast. The participant recalled the rush of fresh air, the scent of sea fennel and rosemary, the volcanic textures of the landscape—all vivid, joyful things. But there was also a bittersweet undertone: the knowledge that such moments are fleeting, and that most of life takes place in constructed urban systems that disconnect us from these sensations. That contrast became a driving force in the second look. I worked with dried herbs, bioplastics, reeds, waster materials and volcanic-inspired textures to translate that euphoria. Scent is released in layers as you move closer to the piece—almost like being lured into a memory.
Together, these experiences challenged me to see garments not as passive objects, but as emotional and sensory vessels—interfaces that hold the power to trigger memory, spark empathy, and invite connection.
sketches¶
