From the Reform Dress to Resistance Textiles

cartographies of an implicated Design

Abstract

The present article emerges from my formative, teaching, and research trajectory, grounded in the understanding that Design happens when it does not separate itself from life. Drawing on the concept of a “refuge history,” recovered by Buckley from her reading of Brewer, I revisit experiences that have shaped my ways of researching and teaching — from the encounter with the Reform Dress to investigations into Latin American resistance textiles, passing through work on sustainability and real bodies in the Pérola Project and, more recently, the inquiry and practice of visible mending as both thought and method. This path reveals that knowing, in Design, is always an embodied, situated act, traversed by relationships. By embracing visible mending, care, and presence as ethical and methodological foundations, I propose a cartography that recognizes everyday life, minimal gestures, and collaborative practices as legitimate ways of producing knowledge. In this sense, Design appears less as a solution and more as a relation: a way of sustaining stories, bodies, and possible worlds.