Clothing as political agency & comforting inclusion
Clothing as Political Agency & Comforting Inclusion
Clothing the Self Interview with Rebecca Burgess
Interviewed by Dr. Alexandria Vasquez and Allie Nugent
Written by Lexi Fujii
Herderin is an auto-ethnographical research and design studio attempting to understand the social and emotional relationship people have to clothing; and if any, the relationship to identity that clothing facilitates and corresponds to. Through Herderin, Alexandria Vasquez, PhD, and her team is currently studying the emotional and somatic approaches to empathic clothing design. Herderin is branding this body of research: Clothing the Self. The following journal entry is from a Clothing the Self interview with Fibershed Executive Director and Founder, Rebecca Burgess.
Nestled in the hillsides of West Marin, the Fibershed Learning Center sits at the base of Black Mountain – a directional cornerstone for this area, guiding you west towards the ocean. The winding road leading up to the Learning Center takes you through disparate microclimates, from dense redwood forests cut through by salmon-spawning rivers, to steep grasslands dotted with dairy cows and looming oaks. We reach a bend with a driveway jutting right that comes up on us fast, turning onto a gravel road and immediately are confronted with a beautiful fenced-in garden, decades-old farmhouse and a three-story renovated barn. Stunning is an understatement. This scene is quintessential to West Marin agricultural history.
Today we are interviewing Rebecca Burgess, the Founder and Executive Director of Fibershed, a California-based nonprofit developing regional natural fiber and dye systems, rooted in soil health, localism, and relationships. Rebecca started Fibershed 12 odd years ago, not with the intention of creating an internationally-recognized organization, but simply to create a personal wardrobe from local natural materials grown and created by her own community. Through time, it has evolved into an international network of people who care about sustainable textiles, climate change, social justice, agriculture, and new economic models.
But we are here today, because at the end of the day, it is about how we clothe ourselves, how we interact with what we wear and what it represents. We are here to understand why someone, like Rebecca, chooses the items she wears and her relationship with these pieces, her choices, and herself.
We enter the main room of the Fibershed Learning Center, the original living room of the farmhouse. The walls are covered with beautiful imagery from the Northern California Fibershed, a huge live edge wood table sits low to the ground surrounded by sit cushions, and a six foot window lets light in with the perfect view of the natural dye garden out front. It is quiet, a little cold, and we seem to have arrived before Rebecca. We take a seat on the sit cushions, and five minutes later Rebecca comes through the front door to greet us. To many, she feels untouchable; this genius-type that has created a social movement invigorating communities all over the world to rebuild their regional textile systems. But here in this room, as we make introductions and she sits across from us, she feels soft, curious, engaged – incredibly present and humble. All preconceived notions of how this interview would go, slips away. As we admire the six-foot live edge wood table out loud, she admits in awe that her partner made it when they first were creating the Learning Center a few years back.
The first 45 minutes are filled with talks of politics, as a new administration has entered the White House and federal funding for climate resilience work has been frozen indefinitely, impacting nonprofits and farmers nationwide. As an organization focused on Climate Beneficial agriculture, the precarious and ambiguous situation is disconcerting to say the least. But after we get this out of our system, we settle into a rich conversation that is deeply personal. This research itself is deeply personal. Clothing is now designed for the masses, but every body and every being is different from one another, and thus has different relationships and expectations to a garment’s functionality and representation.
We begin by discussing Rebecca’s favorite garment. When asked this question she knows immediately what her answer is: a pair of black denim pants made by a designer in Oakland, California, just across the Bay. She has had them for years, and has spent countless meditative hours mending them in a number of places to keep them alive. She speaks to not only its perfect fit to her body shape but also to how flattering they feel and look on her, both an internal and external perspective, as others have told her the same. “I don’t have a traditional body [type]… I have always felt that this was something that made the fit of pants more challenging.” She also appreciates that they were made by a local designer; but ultimately these pants hold her body in the right way, which has allowed them to persist in her wardrobe, ranking them her favorite garment.
Rebecca wears her values – whether it’s the material (natural fibers and dyes), producer (local designer), or the visual queues to a long-lived and loved garment (visible and invisible mending). She wears her values because she truly cares about textiles that support healthy ecosystems and equitable production, but there is also another level: people often look towards what Rebecca is wearing because of her association to the sustainable clothing movement. “People are looking to see what I am wearing. I feel that,” Rebecca tells us.
Especially when her work takes her to California’s capital, Sacramento, and she is answering to a larger political role. “In Sacramento, I participate in meetings on subjects of land and climate change. I tend to wear green, yellow, and blue. These are colors I feel are represented in nature,” along with clothes that always tell a story of place and people. What she wears, represents the community of farmers, designers, artisans, manufacturers that she works directly with. Much of her wardrobe comes from the Fibershed initiative and is incredibly sentimental to Rebecca.
Through our research, we want to understand people’s wardrobe choices – how they decide to get dressed for the day, when they decide an item no longer belongs in their closet, and why they choose new items.
We learn that Rebecca’s closet is rather small, showcasing pieces from ethical brands using natural fibers. They’re pieces that prioritize fit and comfort. “Is it comfortable? Can it get me through the day? And then there’s novelty. If I am tired of wearing the same thing too much, I will want to change it.” When she retires an item, it either goes to the Fibershed Learning Center’s Swap Closet or she composts it. Rebecca never throws away a garment destined for the landfill, nor does she donate it, knowing the international secondhand market has created a waste colonial system that she does not want to take a part in.
With every piece that moves on from Rebecca’s closet, despite the relationship with each one, there's surprisingly little emotional attachment – just guilt and relief. “It is like a bad relationship. I feel the guilt that it didn’t work out, and also the relief that I made the decision.”
Getting dressed acts as a compass to Rebecca’s day. It does not take her much time to get ready, and her bathroom mirror, is only there to check in with herself to start the day, not to dictate her outfit. This period of getting dressed – between waking up and starting work with a steaming hot cup of black tea – is a transition signifier to herself of a day beginning. It’s a marker of roles and responsibility: being prepared for her day. Most days, Rebecca is meeting people over Zoom, so by all technical accounts she could stay in her pajamas, but the time it takes to get dressed is equally treasured as the pieces that she wears. It represents the value of time – something that can often feel so limited in our modern busy lives.
In the end, one point that we find most fascinating is how age has shifted what she wears and why. “As I have gotten older, I have noticed how I cover up more. It’s not because I do not want to hide my body, necessarily. It is because I have become aware of how ingrained society's habits are to judge character and worth based on the physical form.” Covering her body in natural fibers and not exposing her skin for those to witness is a form of resistance to Rebecca. These clothing choices allow her to communicate her values and principles, while participating actively in a form of resistance towards the economic realities of clothing manufacturing and climate change, but also the sexualization of the woman’s body. Clothing for her is an act of communication – of values and political alignments that circumscribe her body, moving the social and political to an embodied form.
In Rebecca’s case, we observe that the function of clothing is both social and emotional. The social being the political signifier and resistance to social structures and normalities; the emotional being that she seeks items that bring her comfort and tell a story of what she cares about – wearing her values.
We barely notice when three hours pass. The shadows of the room have shifted, our tea gone cold, but we are energized. This is the qualitative information we are seeking. Information that can only be gathered through in-depth interviews. The closeness that has formed throughout this time is palpable, and as we wrap up to go, our good-bye feels more like a, we-will-continue-this-conversation-again. This is just the beginning.