material inquiries
The studies and stories that led to the founding of this project. Understanding relationships to one another through the lens of material culture.
PROCESS JOURNAL // January 2023
relationality
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.(1)”
Many writings use cloth, fiber, thread - or other related terminology - to descibe relationality in various aspects of social life. The invention of clothing was a shaping moment in our evolution and since then has woven its way into our cultural identities and social structures. Clothing is a means of communication and a form of connection. It dictates how we see ourselves and how we wish to be seen by others. Our way of dress helps distinguish us and signal our values to those around. It also allows is to recognize similarities and shared interests and can provide an idea of a strangers story - all through materials, colours, shapes and details.
The culture of clothing is incredibly intricate and deeply complex. However, it is also destructive. It has been seen to promote classism and encourage materialism. On our current era’s stage of mass consumption, the production and consumption of clothing has taken a leading role. The rapid turnover and cheap price tags of ‘fast fashion’ have created an insatiable demand for newness and change, without paying a fraction of the real cost(2). Quantity has replaced quality and to have has become more important than to be.
In this great acceleration, the stories behind what we wear have fallen to the back. What do our garments say about us and how can we dress in harmony with a collective vision of healing for the world? Material culture can be a powerful force to reenvision a world dictated by financial interests and billboards of photoshopped models, into into a world of authentic care and connection.
1. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail:
2. According to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, via Circular -
“every second, the equivalent of one truck of textiles is either landfilled or burned worldwide.”
PROCESS JOURNAL // January 2023
clothing culture
The more time I have spent working with clothing, the less sense the world of fashion has made to me.
I was drawn to this practice through my connection to creation and craft, and quickly felt very at odds with the exclusivity and elitism that is common in the industry. Fashion is often a space where people are either ‘in’ or ‘out’, but what does that even mean? And who decides?
The greatest takeaway that I have gathered after working in the industry is that ‘fashion’ in that sense doesn’t exist. There is no objective way to guage whether someone is in or out, because these landmarkers are subjective. Each of us develops our individual taste, informed by our interests and our occupations and the mundane functionality of what we have to do that day. For someone working with the land, clothes follow a different code than someone working at a desk, yet both are equally valuable and signficant forms of expression. Whether we choose an outfit based on function or fashion, (nearly) all of us are choosing what we put on our body, on a daily basis. Whatever our relation to it is, clothing is our first layer of home. It is our warmth and our comfort and our way of communicating something about ourselves to the outside world.
Clothing is culture, and less than fifty years ago, most of it was created locally, by hand.
... a type of small-scale textile manufacturing thrived among every group of agriculturalists across the world. In our present world... the system of production responsible for making all these clothes has everywhere become more extrac-tive, centralized, and concentrated among a few megacorporations... And what had once been the world ’s most common and widely distributed popular art—making textiles—has almost disappeared from the hands of the artisan. In the preindustrial period, anthropologists estimate, humans devoted at least as many labor hours to making cloth as they devoted to producing food. It is almost impossible to overstate how enormous was the change in the daily rhythm when textile work disappeared from everyday life and moved into the factory.1
Today’s reality is a different story. The majority of clothing is mass-produced in slave-like conditions before being shipped across the world and consumed, worn and discarded - in record time. It is then reshipped around the world again as ‘second-hand’ where it piles up on the shores of a country (typically in the Global South) - sometimes even the same country whose natural recources and labor force were plundered to construct the pieces in the first place. This devastating cycle is well-documented in Dead White Man’s Clothing, a multimedia project that explores the affect of second-hand trade in Accra, Ghana.
With the loss of craft, culture is weakened. As values are increasingly dicatated by economic interests, the context of clothing is losing its importance and the conditions of its creation have been obscured. Most of garment production happens behind closed doors, thousands of miles away. Once clothing is discarded, it is whisked from view nearly just as quickly. But there is no such thing as away, and something - or someone - being out of sight does not make it lose affect.
Each article of clothing in our closet has been constructed by human hands out of resources taken from the earth we stand on. Through our interaction with these pieces, we choose to be in a certain relation to our human family and to the world. Just as the food movement has brought increased awareness to the importance of what we put in our body, the material movement is here to show that what we put on our body has just as critical of an effect.
