Marx´s Coat Workshop: Between Fashion, Design, Anthropology and Semiotics

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the workshop “The coat of Marx,” designed and coordinated
by Maira Gouveia. The workshop is an action inspired by the coat’s poetics overlays with its
users reported in Peter Stallybrass’s same title’s book (2012). As a methodology, the workshop
has a practical-reflective character. It proposes exercises that dialogue with the fields of semiotics
and anthropology, using questions and reflections from fashion theory and the field of
design to weave a critical-reflective reading on the possibilities of relationships to be built with
everyday objects. Throughout the investigation, it was possible to observe ways of occurring
dialogues between design, fashion, anthropology, and semiotics to rethink our look at material
culture. Moreover, the workshop proposes a more significant relationship with the artifacts
surrounding us, from Karen Barad’s agential realism to think in the workshop, the possibility of
understanding objects as social agents as co-creators of our ways of living.