fashion is also what separates or unites our bodies with the environment: what we put on decides how permeable or sealed off from the world we choose to be.
the stories i tell myself about fashion are what make me love it, and communication is essential to changemaking in fashion for exactly this reason: the industry is a product of the stories we carry with us, told and re-told until they become infrastructure. its sacrifice zones, and how its waste systems and geography have been built, were initiated through systematic narratives too, decisions about whose materials, whose labour, and whose land count as expendable [2].
if narrative built these systems, narrative can also be used to question and rebuild them.
barthes had already shown how central words are to fashion — not just what a garment is, but how it’s described, is what gives it meaning [1]. this is where my interest in changemaking actually begins: not with the object, but with the story wrapped around it.
this is what i love doing: rethinking fashion’s systems through story. it’s as playful as imagining what my neighbourhood would look like if we all wore our neighbours on our jeans, and as grounded as working with planetary minded brands like iris van herpen,who use fashion to propose entirely different relationships between the body and the material world.
[1] barthes, r. (1967) the fashion system. paris: éditions du seuil.
[2] niessen, s. (2020) ‘fashion, its sacrifice zone, and sustainability’, fashion theory, 24(6), pp. 859–877.