Symbiosis: Regrounding interactive fashion design with posthumanist thinking

Abstract

The advancement of technology is profoundly reshaping human living environments, work modes, cognitive patterns, and even identity constructs. The boundaries between human and non-human, machine and organism, virtual and physical, are increasingly blurred and interwoven. As a philosophical and social theory, posthumanism reveals that technology has evolved beyond a passive tool to become an active, agentic co-participant. This paper adopts a posthumanist perspective to explore how technology can achieve deep integration with human subjectivity within a framework of symbiosis, tracing the evolution of interactive fashion from linear control to bidirectional adaptation and, ultimately, to collaborative co-agency. Building on this, the study proposes five core mechanisms of symbiotic interactive fashion design: distributed agency, collective sensing and intelligence, decentralised adaptive decision-making, proactive and emergent interactions, and eco-ethical design orientation. Together, these mechanisms aim to construct a more intelligent, decentralized, and sustainable strategic framework for interactive fashion, offering methodological and ethical guidance for future fashion practices.