Clothing Culture
Clothing is a basic need, yet our 'style’ and way of relating to it is informed by our interests, occupations and the mundane functionality of what we do for work. 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.
... 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)
The majority of clothing today is mass-produced, purchased, worn and discarded - all in record time It then traverses the globe again as ‘second-hand’ often ending up on the shores of a country in the Global South - sometimes even the same country whose natural resources and labor force were plundered to construct the pieces in the first place. This destructive cycle is well-documented in Dead White Man’s Clothing, a multimedia project that explores the effect of second-hand trade in Accra, Ghana.
Alejandro teaching Alina to weave. Oaxaca, Mexico. 2024
With the loss of craft, culture is weakened. As values pushed aside by economic interests, the context of clothing loses its importance and the conditions of its creation are obscured. Once clothing is discarded, it is quickly whisked from view - yet there is no such place as ‘away’.
Almost every piece of clothing has been constructed by human hands out of resources taken from the earth we stand on. Through our interaction with these pieces, we choose our way of relating 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.