A garment under investigation
The Garment That Knows Too Much treats a denim garment as a research object: a temporary arrangement of fibre, chemistry, labour, care, data and decisions. Four NewTexEco projects expose different knowledge layers. TOS13 provides the physical-digital fieldlab in which materials, machines, people and infrastructures meet. M-DPP investigates persistent material identity and verification. Care & Repair studies the practices that extend life in use. Digital Product Passports for Circular Denim connects production, use and end-of-life information across the denim value chain. Together they ask what a garment must know—and what people must know about it—for circularity to become actionable.
Data as design material
Physical tags, textile fragments and digital layers make visible what is stored in a label, encoded in the material, written into repair traces or lost between producer, wearer, sorter and recycler. The Digital Product Passport is approached not as an administrative endpoint but as design material: information must guide care, maintenance, repair, resale, sorting and recycling. The garment becomes an observatory for testing how data acquires meaning through material encounters and situated decisions.
Knowledge stays with matter
By compressing a complex textile ecosystem into one readable object, the installation reveals dependencies between material science, digital infrastructure, care practices and fieldlab experimentation. Its proposition is precise: a garment should not become waste because its knowledge has been separated from its material body.
