Emotionally Durable Fashion: Practices and Factors of Valuable Use
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2022-08-15
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en
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Abstract
The larger discourse on sustainability and fashion is often criticised for its eco-modernist and techno-centric approach, only addressing environmental issues in production and manufacturing while not addressing the underlying capitalist logic in which fashion is operating. This thesis argues that in order for sustainability to be a credible concept for change more attention needs to be paid to fundamentally addressing and re- thinking the social and cultural dynamics and our relationship to fashion. The themes of durability, emotional value, and the dimension of use, combined in the concept of emotional durability, are identified as key themes to highlight the lived experience of fashion and the affective relationship between fashion users and objects. Fashion here is understood as an embodied material practice and process of materialisation. Through ethnographic wardrobe studies qualitative empirical data was gathered on how women, aged between 18-35, experience and engage with fashion and how inter- connections between different use practices and factors affect the emotional durability of fashion objects.
The results show that all garments in women’s wardrobes hold emotional value in various manifestations. The dimension of use is often conflated with the practice of wearing. However, use of fashion is in fact an assemblage of multiple use practices, namely, wearing and remembering as main practices and altering, repairing, and keeping as enabling practices. Wearing is most relevant in relation to mundane everyday fashion objects and subtle expressions of emotions while remembering is related to special and highly significant expressions of emotion such as memories of loved people and experiences materialised in garments. Emotional durability then is the result of a unique combination of the practice of wearing and remembering.
As such, this thesis highlights fashion as an intimate social activity and provides new contextual data on the emotional value and durability of fashion which, hopefully, helps to enable the creation of alternative fashion systems.
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