German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a notion of the noumenon as a ‘positioned object’ that exists independently of human perception.

 

Kant argued that human comprehension is structured through ‘concepts of understanding’ that are found prior to experience in the mind, and which then links any external experience to internal attributes of the mind. He proposed, that whilst noumena ‘exists,’ it is also a condition that is essentially unknowable – an abstruse "thing-in-itself." 

 

Where, noumena is formulated in the mind, it becomes intrinsic to human creativity, and within any process and experience of imaginative conception.

 

Correspondingly, can we develop and promote fashion as a discipline increasingly formed in the mind, as an attitude that can produce expressions of ‘unknowable design,’ and leading to strange or different manifestations of ‘design phenomena’ as output, product, or space?

Simon Thorogood

Design thinker, fashion speculator, creative consultant and academic based in London.

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