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The physical relationship with textiles
At the beginning of the year, in her OP-ed, Li Edelkoort pointed at the commodification of the fashion industry and it having become primarily about speed and volume, stating that the oversaturation of products and overproduction has “devalued the significance of fashion and textiles”. The renowned fashion oracle anticipates a future where stricter laws are in place and a generation not as easily persuaded by the extravagance the industry has to offer. “People will scale down as ownership is no longer considered cool”. These are opportunistic claims being aware that consumption yet continue increasing and dubious companies such as Shein manage to pass Zara and H&M within a timeframe that may as well seem like overnight. It is an industry that has sacrificed creativity for quantity predominantly concerned with the brief highs of drops and collabs and were things become abrupt TikTok sensations before being forgotten just as quickly.
We all know that a radical transition is imperative. The challenging part is knowing where to start and who to hold accountable. It is as warranted to blame consumers as it is to blame companies or politicians. Consumers are attuned to a culture that celebrates newness and aesthetic progress and companies are fighting to survive in a system that demands growth. We can also observe, as Edelkoort did, how fashion education has largely contributed to a diminished regard for textiles and their origin by shutting down textile design departments, ignoring fabric knowledge while advancing practices such as virtual sketching at the expense of pattern making and draping. I’d argue that this is nothing necessarily surprising, and that it is a natural consequence of a fashion system that has for long valued imagery over materiality; fashion is sold on billboards and through Instagram feeds, not in ateliers. As technological progress has accelerated, we have increasingly lost touch with the tangibility of textiles and their origin and since digital communication has become the default mode of understanding the world, we primarily use our eyes to “know fashion”.
Li proposes a radical overhaul, embodied by a new educational model centered around textiles and their origin in both history and nature, where students start on the crop fields – the literal source of fashion - and sequentially move through the steps involved in fabric making. Such an approach primarily insists on an awareness of life and an understanding of what a textile is on the essential level: how it’s made, how to manipulate it, and its value both culturally and practically.
It comes down to an awareness of and respect for the intricate craft of textile and garment making, which starts on the crop fields and moves through a variety of different hands each with unique skill sets that should be honored rather than go unrecognized, as is normal practice today. Production, the craft process, is invisible to the public today and consumers are utterly detached from the work that goes into the garment. Many efforts have been made to improve transparency and many sustainability-oriented brands work hard to feed the consumer as much information as possible, be it through Instagram, product information pages, or care-tags. The problem with such form of communication is that it is exclusively verbal. They are strictly performance and quantity based; they are there to satisfy new laws and make us feel a bit less guilty about our purchases, but they do little in providing consumers with deeper emotional needs or fostering longevity between object and user.
Object-user relationships are complicated and has attracted researchers in their effort to find out why we keep certain things, including garments. Chapman (2005) argued that “by cultivating an emotional and experiential connection between person and object, we can disrupt our dependency on consumption for new goods”. He pointed, for example, at the development of “character” and patina on surfaces of objects as being in important aspect for emotionally durable design. Moreover, an object that requires “skill to interact with” fosters the sentimental bond between it and the user. Design activist Alistair Fuad-Luke (2010) pointed at incorporating a “sensorial variety” in activities in which the object is involved, which mirrors Chapman’s idea of considering the “deeper sensorial dimensions of the object”. Textiles are multisensorial. They communicate and can therefore be experienced through not only sight, but also smell, sound, and touch. When clothes are seen, people feel the unconscious desire to touch them. You look at a textile, but your body feels the texture. This phenomenon is called a “visceral bodily response”, and it hints at our innate desire to involve all our senses when engaging with the world around us.
Leslay Millar explored the relationship between touching, making, and knowing as well as the hierarchy of communication that prioritizes the verbal and the visual. She argues that making involves a body of knowledge formed by intuitive decisions using our haptic senses, quoting a Japanese textile artist, Yuka Kawai, who describes her process as such: “In weaving the cloth I do not so much form the shape according to my will but rather I value the shape which arises from the weaving, from my hands. I believe in the tacit knowledge of our hands.” Millar argues that, as a society, “we have less tactile knowledge than ever before, and we are no longer used to learning material awareness through the touch of the hand”. Renowned anthropologist Daniel Miller similarly observed how children today are inculcated exclusively through verbal-based teaching, whereas before, they were immersed in a material culture that fostered touch.
In our culture, the sense of sight and hearing have been ranked highest in terms of intellect, philosophical contemplation, and abstraction. These senses are followed by smell, taste, and touch in this order. Hazel Clark argued that slower, more sustainable, fashion necessitates a relationship with clothes that involves all senses: “What is emerging here is the potential of ‘slow products’ to inculcate a ‘new beauty’ in fashion, based not purely on the visual, but also including sensorial aspects that acknowledge the existence of the many abstract and emotional factors that underpin what people wear”. The use of the totality of available senses yields a “sense of proximity” which contrast the “sense of distance” clearly becoming more ubiquitous today. The exclusive focus on the visual, one could argue, is exactly what makes our collective ignorance of dubious activities and the resulting overproduction and consumption possible; it enables companies to use language as a means to artificially manipulate the value of products and smokescreen the real repercussions of business activities. Proximity and the activation of all our senses shifts the focus from perceiving the garment as a vessel for signifiers to a personal, tangible, object with its own unique history and many possible futures.
Textiles tell stories that mere verbal descriptions cannot recount. We have become accustomed to understanding textile products in terms of metrics: textile compositions in verbal form, amount of water saved, and price-value propositions, increasing its value as a commodity, but not as an object of use; it veils the tangible dimensions of textiles. There is an undeniable cultural reverence towards quantity in terms of information and product volume, which has been at the expense for quality of garments and, more importantly, our lives with them. The notion that we have “lost touch” with our environment is not an overstatement and continues to ring truer as years pass by and digital devices become increasingly cunning in pulling us out of reality. Ceppi (2006) coined the term “sustainable sensoriality” which entails understanding an object in terms of how it is made, from raw material to end product, rather than as an object of pure consumption. A sustainable approach, she argues, necessitates a shift of focus towards “the knowing of the object” through significant experiences.
There is a call to turn against our digital instincts and re-ground us into the tangibility of our immediate surroundings. We need to change our relationship with clothes and textiles. We need to be able to observe and understand their material origin in our ecosystem. We need to use clothes rather than merely consuming them, and engage with them for long, indefinite, periods. It starts with a radical change in how we perceive garments, from mere commodities carrying time-dependent signifiers to objects that involved work by real people, carrying emotional depth. Commodities are easy to replace or discard, sentimental objects are not. A bond between garment and user requires a depth of knowledge that stretches beyond verbal descriptors.
Seemingly mundane acts of washing and mending are not only ways to acquire deeper insights into the objects and find new appreciation for them, but they are ways to ground ourselves into the present moment. Fashion primarily engages with the past while keeping its eyes fixed on possible futures. It averts presence and disavows patience. To truly engage with your garments over longer periods of time is subtle but profound act of rebellion against a system doing anything to veil reality while progressively chiseling away what is left of our attention spans.