material inquiries
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 cost2. 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: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation
2. A new report launched this week by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, via Circular. For waste and Water Professionals, claims that
“every second, the equivalent of one truck of textiles is either landfilled or burned worldwide.”
PROCESS JOURNAL // january 2023
clothing culture
A common question by people, upon hearing that I work in fashion, is to ask my opinion of their outfit. Is this fashionable? While my responses changed with the years, I would find different ways of evading the question (years of experience did not make me comfortable imposing my personal taste on someone I just met). I found other aspects of the outfit to be more relevant. Who made it? Does the fabric feel good on your skin? Do you have good pockets? Does the colour bring you joy?
The more time I spent in the ‘fashion’ environment, the less it made sense to me. Drawn in to this world through my connection to creation and craft, the exclusivity and elitism that infused the industry never spoke to me. Fashion is often seen as 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.1Today’s reality is a heartbreaking absurdity. 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.
1. from the Introduction of Worn, A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser
PROCESS JOURNAL // february 2023
the power of stories
Through the stories we share weave our pattern of place into the world around us. These are the threads connecting us to our outer surroundings, as well as orienting our inner realms of understanding. Our learned reality is created through the stories we receive and repeat. Many stories are presented as inarguable truth, while many others are dismissed as myth or fable. Often, ‘modern’ stories carry more legitimacy within current society. Such a story is the story of progress. Within this narrative, our salvation will be found in the continuous speeding forward. The havoc that extractive capitalism is wreaking on the planet will be solved through further technological advancement and the increased encroachment into the earth’s natural systems is seen to be integral to our development as a species. But is it?
“The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World.”1
Our actions and relations are motivated by our worldview, and the understanding of our roles in society. We are brought up to view ourselves as seperate individuals, in competition with those around us. Yet, if we look to our natural surroundings, we see that all of existence depends on extensive collaboration. Our separation from one another and from nature is another story that is repeated in modern society. From a perspective of scarcity, we learn to see others as competitors rather than to understand that our future survival is mutually codependent.
Cultural work, the work of infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future, is the essential fuel of revolutionary fire.2
As Aurora Levins Morales writes in the book, Medicine Stories, “What we need is a collective practice in which investigating and shedding privilege is seen as reclaiming connection, mending relationships broken by the system, and is framed as gain, not loss. Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. Acknowledging our ancestors’ participation in the oppression of others (and this is ultimately true of everyone), and deciding to balance the accounts on their behalf and our own, leads to less shame and more integrity, less self-righteousness and more righteousness, more humility, compassion and a sense of proportion.2”
This book - as well as Aurora’s essays on Patreon - are filled with deeply insightful and thought provoking reflections and calls to action. Her work continues to be an important source of inspiration for this project, as well as the writings of Charles Eisenstein, who was quoted at the beginning of this entry. Both investigate and celebrate the power of story as a source for societal shift towards harmonious interrelation.
The need for stories that inspire connection and interdependence is irrefutable in times of increasing alienation and dissociation. These stories can become our north stars as we strive to orient ourselves in new - yet ancient - ways. Since our ancestors could communicate, stories were used to transfer knowledge and values from one generation to another. If we shift our attention away from the stories that the current system of domination is telling us, what will rise up in that space? Perhaps we will begin to realize that to be ‘disconnected’ has more to do with distance from what makes us human rather than being ‘unplugged’ from technology.
As we make meaning of the world around us, stories help us to trace our origins of being and illuminate our ways of becoming. Theirs is the potency to guide our attention and stir our emotion, bringing us together as a collective, driven by passion and a deep love for life.
_____________________________________________________
1. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
2. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals by Aurora Levins Morales
PROCESS JOURNAL // march 2023
fabric of life
san juan, guatemala
Woven into the threads that make up the garments we wear is a rich story. Typically, we do not have the privilege of knowing who made our clothing. But what if we did? What would they tell us, and how would our interaction with that piece impact their life?
The little town of San Juan la Laguna is nestled on the shores of Lake Atitlan in the heart of the Mayan region and present day Guatemala. A main pull to this part of the world was to experience firsthand the rich textile culture that is still vibrant today. Towns abound with brilliantly coloured, hand-woven fabrics, and many Guatemalan women still wear their traditional dress. San Juan, in particular, is filled with artisans and collectives. Also a common tourist destination, the streets are lined with signs inviting visitors inside for demonstrations on weaving and natural dyeing. One such studio I visited was Casa Flor Ixaco, where I had the pleasure of experiencing a presentation by Daphne, a local Mayan woman and a key member of the cooperative. Daphne walked us through the process of creation. They begin with locally and organically grown cotton - carefully cultivated over thousands of years and in four native colours - which is then harvested, carded, spun, and naturally dyed; using seeds, leaves, flowers, tree bark, and more and is then fixed to the fiber using ground bark from the banana tree. As Daphne demonstrated the dyeing process before us, it was astounding to see the brilliance of the hue, as well as its colour-fastness - achieved with so few and so organic of ingredients. The weaving process was also a wonder to witness, which is still all completed on the backstrap loom.
Daphne shared the story of the cooperatives founding, as well as the difficulties that the women and their communities have conquered and struggled with. Working in this cooperative has not only provided the women with a source of income from which they are able to nourish and support their families, it has also enabled them to continue creating in the traditional manor. By collectivizing their efforts, they are able to create more efficiently, for example by dyeing twice a year in large quantities, rather than repeating the same process multiple times in smaller batches. These women are doing the entire process by hand, and the fact that they are competing with multinational companies and highly mechanized factories makes such adjustments extremely vital. As Daphne was demonstrating the weaving process before us on the backstrap loom, a visitor from the group asked why they choose not to used mechanized looms, as these would be much faster. She responded simply,
“This is who we are. This is our culture.”
Preserving this tradition goes beyond the physical beauty and exquisite detail of the textiles. This process of creation carries stories and significance which are impossible to grasp or even to imagine. Women have been weaving in this way for hundreds of years, weaving their sorrow and their joy, their love and their heartbreak into pieces of clothing and blankets that have warmed friend and foe alike.
Whether woven by a woman like Daphne working within an empowered cooperative of women in Guatemala, or a young Bangladeshi girl working in a people-packed factory in the slums of a nearby city, each textile holds the imprints of those who brought it into existence. Here in the ‘developed’ world, where much of this process is obscured from our view, the clothes still carry these stories.
As holders and wearers of these pieces, we are in a special position to respect all that has gone into their creation and to continue their story forward. To honor those that have held the cloth before us and to preserve the materials that surround us, doing all in our power to lengthen their lifespan and conserve their value.
