We are never naked: insulation as a performing surface

In May 1987, an assorted group of thirty-three participants—including fashion and textile designers, academics, and practitioners—gathered to explore fashion and design practices as a function of time, through an intensive 12-day workshop held at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau. [...] On the one hand, the session questioned the qualities a designer ought to have so as to promote a progressive influence on contemporary dress, textile, and product design; on the other, it questioned the effect that each social and temporal context has on the design process itself. [...] Twenty-nine years later, on Saturday, January 30, 2016, nine delegates at Unfrozen—the first Swiss Design Network Winter Summit—took part in a workshop titled ‟We are Never Naked: Insulation as a Performing Surface,” which we organized with the goal of exploring surface interventions aimed at accommodating the body amid Brienz‘s wintry climatic conditions. Because the term insulation may refer to both an integrated or external surface of a building, as well as to additional layers of material surrounding the human skin, the workshop prompted a reflection on the interrelation between spatial, dress, and textile design. It dealt with surfaces that not only entail properties of envelopment, cladding, and ornamentation, but also comfort, regulation, and fit.