On The Soul Of Clothes

The modern mindset is killing our ability to truly love our clothes.

Yohji Yamamoto once said:  

I stopped in my tracks the moment I came across the quote in ‘Yamamoto & Yohji’ (2014) a few months ago. It felt timely. I had been reading W. David Marx’s ‘Status and Culture’ (2022), and there is a paragraph in the book that briefly discusses modernism in art and design. Ornamentation had long been a status symbol for the elites. Modernists believed that banishing ornamentation from design would prevent people from using these new objects as status symbols, and in that sense we’d live in a new world that was more equal. The opposite happened when ornamentation had been stripped away: anti-ornamentation, or modernism, became elitist – a status symbol in its own right. Modernism had evolved as a revolt against bourgeois values and aesthetics, but it ended up holding up the very values it had sought to extinguish. 

In the context of fashion, ‘modern’ often refers to a controlled style that’s relevant and keeps up with the times. The meaning of ‘modern’ is ‘new’; relating to the present time as opposed to the past. In this sense modernity is always temporal. W. David Marx writes that “abandonment is […] as important as adoption in fashion cycles” – you can’t have new unless something that was once new, becomes old. You can’t deconstruct something if it hasn’t been constructed first, and in order to embrace modernity, you must break up with tradition. I can’t even begin to imagine what ‘modern’ would be if time was not at the heart of it, because all tradition is rooted in time: in repetition over years, decades or centuries, through rites and carefully shaped and slightly ever-changing practices. 

I believe (like many others) that the quality that has made fashion designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Alexander McQueen so exceptional is that they trained as traditional garment makers. They’ve known pattern making and garment construction like the back of their hand, and always allowed fabrics to speak to them. They’ve borrowed heavily from the past in their designs, almost toying with the idea that fashion should be about the now. I’ve been wondering for a while why I’m so drawn to their work and to them as people, and I think I finally have an answer: they are rebellious romantics at heart, just like I am. Their clothes celebrate a sense of spirituality, quiet evolution and fragility that modernity has little place for.  

I recently read a fantastic interview in System Magazine with fashion critics Angelo Flaccavento and Alexander Fury. They discussed, among other things, the lack of dressmaking and the effect of 2D imagery in the fashion design process. Very few designers draw by hand or even drape fabric anymore, and AutoCAD is used instead. Flaccavento and Fury discussed how at some point in the last ten years or so clothes began to look like they were designed with an Instagram image in mind. Clothes began to seem flat and frontal. Flaccavento said: “For some designers these days the dress has to be frozen in a perfect picture, as if they cannot bear to acknowledge that everything crumbles, everything decays.” There’s beauty in that process that many designers seem to be fighting against. “[If] things fall apart, they are no less appealing. The dynamic that governs these things is deeply human; it’s the fear of death or imperfection”, Flaccavento argues. 

Richard Leppert (2004) has argued that modernity is marked by an obsession with ‘evidence’, visual culture, and personal visibility. There’s something about all of those things that abandons what all humans long for: meaning over evidence, feeling over visual culture, and belonging over personal visibility. I wonder if we wear our clothes with that same sense of picture-readiness and fear of imperfection that Flaccavento talks about. That’s how a lot of current clothes are made, and that’s also the basis of how we buy clothes online these days. The experience of buying and wearing clothes can feel weirdly shallow because a large proportion of clothes is just that – shallow. There’s no tradition or craftsmanship to lean on, no tactility when we make a purchase, only an attempt to tempt us with a bunch of images and to have us buy more (always more) after what we receive in the mail doesn’t feel quite right. The way we rationalize or justify our shopping habits, harbor visual culture, and obsess over our personal visibility is preventing us from developing emotional affection for our clothes.

There’s a disconnect between us and the two-dimensionally created and marketed clothes that we buy and wear: why else would we keep purging our closets and filling them up again, season after season. We might think that it’s out of want to be one with the Zeitgeist, because “[to] forgo trends is to be out of touch with culture itself, to become basic” (Alec Leach, 2021). I think it’s a question of deeper dissatisfaction. As much as we think that we love fashion and clothes, that love is tacked on and fleeting, and we don’t forge meaningful, lasting attachment to our clothes. Our clothes become, in the words of Jonathan Chapman (2005), “… symptomatic of a failed user/object relationship, where insufficient empathy led to a perfunctory dumping of one by the other.”

I have always had a thing for anthropomorphism. I’ve never really been able to shake that childlike sentiment that inanimate objects have feelings: I feel bad for a chipped teacup that doesn’t get drunk from anymore, or a cat toy that’s lying on the floor, face down (it can’t see anything). I notice more and more how rare it is to find current clothes that bring out the animist in me. More often than not, I feel nothing. (Rachel’s review of COS this week describes the emptiness of fast fashion clothes exquisitely.) In my work I come across clothes that feel alive. Sometimes they’re just exceptionally made clothes that have a certain something that you can’t quite put your finger on, and other times you can tell that the clothes have truly lived – not just that they’re old and they’ve been worn a lot, but they’ve been worn with such dedication and purpose that the clothes seem to have developed a character, a history, a soul of their own. These types of clothes have two things in common: obvious human design, and very often they look like nothing in photographs, or even on the hanger.

One recent example is a Vuokko cotton shirt dress from the 1970s. It looks god-awful in photographs:

Its narrow, horizontal black and brown stripes seem humble due to their subtlety, but the volume of the stiff cotton makes the form stand out just slightly. The snap buttons in the front hint at workwear with their practicality, but there’s still elegance in the garment, thanks to the wide inverted pleats at the chest. Its former owner used it as a work uniform at the art museum she worked for. The dress is intact but very worn and stained in places, but it has a ton of charm and personality. You can’t see it or rationalize it, but you can feel it. The dress seems like a living, breathing thing, even though I know, rationally speaking, that it’s just an object. But like I wrote earlier, I am a romantic. I cherish that dress, and many others like it: clothes that speak and listen, clothes that have a history, clothes that bear the weight of a lived life, clothes with a soul.