What Not to Wear: Exploring Taboos in Clothing Through Speculative Design

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Traditional clothing is commonly worn in India and are visual markers of caste, religion, region, political affiliation, and gender. While family, friends, and communities implicitly monitor what is worn, it causes tensions between personal choices of self-expression and social expectations of conformity. This paper describes a speculative design project that explores clothing taboos and possible futures in private, public, and regional/national contexts. We describe a participatory workshop conducted to facilitate reflection about the clothing choices people make today, and to re-imagine the purpose of clothing in the future. The result was the design of a dystopian speculative world called Oneness exhibited in a series of photographs depicting provocative transformations in private, public, and regional/national life. The exhibition became a catalyst for deeper reflections and insights and we suggest speculative techniques could be used more often to create supportive spaces for discussions around culturally sensitive and taboo topics.