Fashion Designer and Associate Professor, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University
Multicultural Expressions: Identities, Aesthetics, and Knowledge in Practice
This paper explores how multicultural influences shape creative identity, hands-on knowledge, and aesthetic expression within today’s design and art practices. Focusing on wearable forms as spaces where cultures meet and mix, the discussion draws on interdisciplinary methods that combine fashion design, material traditions, digital media, and performance to show how creative work can both protect and transform cultural memory.
By looking at making as a way of asking questions and exploring ideas, the paper highlights how clothing can act as a tool for storytelling and personal or cultural understanding. Special attention is given to how blended cultural references appear throughout the design process, allowing artists and designers to reflect on themes of identity, heritage, and belonging. The paper argues that these creative approaches challenge dominant ideas of beauty and design by making space for diversity, migration stories, and intercultural exchange.
In doing so, this research contributes to larger conversations around inclusive design, cultural knowledge, and representation. It presents creative practice as a powerful space where tradition and innovation come together—opening new paths for thinking, making, and imagining more inclusive futures.
Galina Mihaleva, Galina Mihaleva, Ph.D. is an artist, and fashion and wearable technology designer. She is the founder of Future Fashion LOOM.01. Mihaleva’s artistic practice and academic research deals primarily with the dialogue between body and dress, driven by the idea of having both a physical and a psychological relationship with a garment as responsive clothing: Wearable technology as the body second skin; Wearable technology in performance art; Sustainability and new materials for better future. Her research on the development of smart clothing and textiles is therefore multi-disciplinary and collaborative, integrating technology, media art, textile design, live performance, humanities including historians and linguists, Material science, and Bio-design Prior to joining ASU, Mihaleva thought at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore at the School of Art, Design, and media. Her artistic work has been exhibited in leading international venues, galleries, and museums across Asia, United States, Europe, Africa, Central, and South America. More than sixty solo or group exhibitions and showcases at Art, Science Museum, National Museum and the MAD Museum in Singapore, Nelson Museum in New Zealand, Textile Museum in Belgium, OCCCA, USA. Her wearable technology and fashion collections were showcased in Cannes, at the Cannes film festival red carpet, Tiffany’s Paris fashion week, at the International Music Award, New York, at the World of Wearable Art: WOW in New Zealand, Smart Textile Salon in Morocco in Russia for Podium, at Piel Moda in Ecuador, Colombia at ISEA, in Japan at the ISWC and at the Beyond festival in Germany. Her work has been shown also in India, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Egypt, Argentina, Turkey, Poland, and Bulgaria. Mihaleva was nominated for the best design award at Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. She received the Rumi award in San Francisco and first place at the Tiffany’s Paris Fashion week in 2016 for her innovative collection. Beyond the in-depth analysis of cultural values, she combines traditional techniques and methods, while developing and using innovative materials and new technologies, closely involved in sustainability to create positive economic, environmental, and societal impact.
