Fashion Beyond Sight : Perceptions of fashion and dress by visually impaired women in Finland

Abstract: Understanding fashion and dress is frequently dictated by the sense of sight and the social fact of visibility. This thesis aims to explore the phenomenon of non-visual fashion and dress with a particular focus on visually impaired people and their bodies as a site of knowledge production. While previous studies of the relationship between body and dress have examined how the sighted body is fashioned, the present small-scale and socio-sensorial study attempts to fathom how fashion and dress become perceivable in haptic, audial, and olfactory terms. This thesis engages thoughtfully with the visually impaired and their feelings related to the present-day field of fashion and dress, building on a Bourdieusan framework of habitus and embodiment applied to fashion studies. Employing qualitative interviews conducted among visually impaired women in Finland, this thesis gives voice to the people meagrely represented in the literature on fashion and dress. Furthermore, while acknowledging the empirically grounded non-visual dimension, this thesis adheres to previous contributions of revaluing the plurality of epistemologies and discourses vis-à-vis fashion, dress, and the body.