THE RITUAL OF DRESS: Why Sustainable Fashion Starts With the Self. Our Talk at SF Climate Week, Hosted by Rivian

THE RITUAL OF DRESS

Why Sustainable Fashion Starts With the Self

FULL TALK TRANSCRIPTION for SF CLIMATE WEEK & RETHINK THE RUNWAY

HOSTED BY RIVIAN

 

Close your eyes. Return to this morning. Getting dressed. Just notice what was present in that moment.

 

Every morning, you make a decision.

After you've checked your phone. Before or after you've had coffee. For some of you, before you've audibly said a word to another human being — you stand in front of a closet, or a pile of clothes on a chair, and you decide who you're going to be today.

We call it getting dressed.

But I want to suggest it's something much older  and much more loaded  than that.

It's a ritual.

Not in the casual sense. I mean ritual in the sociological sense:  a set of repeated practices that produce meaning. That draws a line between the ordinary and the significant. Between who I was yesterday and who I'm presenting today.

Victor Turner, the anthropologist who spent his life studying rites of passage, would call this a liminal moment. A threshold. A space of becoming.

The question I want to sit with for the next twenty minutes is: becoming what? And for whom?

Because I think the answer to that question is at the root of everything we're getting wrong about sustainable fashion.

The fashion industry runs on desire. And desire, at its most basic level, is the feeling that something is missing.

Sociologists of modernity have noted that one of the defining features of contemporary life is that identity is no longer given to us. It used to be. Your community, your religion, your family's trade — these things told you who you were. You didn't have to figure it out.

Late modernity dismantled that. Identity became what sociologists call a reflexive project — something you have to construct, maintain, and revise continuously. Something you are always working on.

That sounds liberating. And it is, sometimes.

But this freedom has a shadow. When nothing is fixed, everything is anxious. When identity is always up for revision, there is always the possibility that you've gotten it wrong.

And markets are extraordinarily good at finding anxiety and handing it a solution.

Scholars of consumer culture have argued that postmodern consumption collapses the boundary between who you are and what you have. The self becomes a display. The body becomes a window. And what you put in that window signals everything — your taste, your values, your tribe, your aspirations.

What we have, then, is a perfect storm.

A self that feels incomplete. A culture that tells you completion is purchasable. And an industry - our industry - that is extraordinarily efficient at producing new forms of that purchase, as fast as possible, at the lowest possible cost.

That is not an accident. That is the logic of a system.

And it means that when we talk about sustainable fashion, we are not talking about a supply chain problem.

We are talking about an identity problem.

I want to introduce a concept from our own research. We call it sartorial labor.

Sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, introduced the concept of emotional labor — the managed, effortful work of producing an appropriate emotional display for others. Flight attendants who smile through turbulence. Customer service workers who stay calm through hostility. The labor is real. It's just invisible. It’s here even tonight with the workers and organizers at this event.

I argue that we do something parallel every morning in front of that closet. We perform sartorial labor — the managed, effortful work of constructing an appropriate identity display through dress. (add personal anecdote?)

This is work. It takes time, money, attention, and a kind of constant social reading: What will this room expect of me? What does this occasion demand? What will I be judged on today?

And like emotional labor, sartorial labor is not evenly distributed. Women carry more of it. People of color carry more of it. People whose bodies don't conform to the industry's default template carry more of it. The higher the stakes of being misread,  the heavier the labor.

Now here's what I think is underappreciated in our sustainability conversations: fast fashion doesn't just create environmental damage.

It generates sartorial labor demand.

Every new micro-trend — every quiet luxury, every coastal grandmother, every mob wife aesthetic — adds a new vocabulary to the identity display system. And if your sense of self is already fragile, already externally dependent, already built on the next thing you buy — that vocabulary feels urgent. It feels like a requirement.

Brands are not selling clothes.

They are selling provisional answers to the question of who you are.

And those answers have a very short shelf life. By design.

(Alix Vasquez of Herderin, Rebecca Burgess of Fibershed, Julia Marsh of Sway, and Mira Musask of ReThink The Runway)

Today, ask someone in one sentence: what did you almost wear today but didn't?

 

I want to be real with you: this is the part of the conversation where even the sustainable fashion folks may feel less comfortable with. Because what I am talking about requires a different relationship to clothing altogether.

Bourdieu gave us the concept of habitus — the idea that the body carries history. That our dispositions, our tastes, our instincts aren't just ideas we hold in our heads. They're inscribed in how we move, how we carry ourselves, what feels right and what feels wrong in our skin.

The body holds what the industry never thinks to measure.

What I've been working toward — in my research and in my own design practice — is a framework I call restorative clothing (Alix is wearing Herderin). Garments that don't demand identity performance. That don't arrive with an implicit requirement to become something. That instead support the body in its actual, present experience.

This is not minimalism as an aesthetic. It's something more fundamental. It's the difference between clothing that asks something of you — and clothing that gives something to you.

Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty would put it this way: the body is not an instrument of social display. It is the primary site of being-in-the-world. Somatic grounding is a return to that register. Before the algorithm. Before the trend report.

Some makers are already working in this space — quietly, without making it the marketing hook. The giveaway is often in how the things are made: natural fibers, natural dyes, slow processes, small runs. A customer who knows who made their garment, and how, and from what — has a different relationship to that object. It's not a prosthetic for a missing self.

It's a relationship with material culture.

That shift — from clothing as identity signaling to clothing as somatic shelter — is, I believe, the deep architecture of what sustainable fashion actually has to become.

(Allen Litton of Bodies As Clothing asks a question from the audience)

 

I want to come back to where we started. The morning ritual.

Right now, for many of us, that ritual is running on a logic of lack. I don't have the right thing. I am not the right version of myself. Let me fix that.

And every time we answer that ritual with a purchase, we reinforce the loop. We tell ourselves — and brands tell their customers — that the self is something you build from the outside in.

Sustainability — real sustainability — requires us to interrupt that loop. Not with a better fiber, not with a more ethical supply chain, though those matter enormously. But with a different story about what clothing is for.

The most radical thing we could do as an industry is help people develop what I call sartorial self-knowledge — an awareness of what they're actually doing when they get dressed. What need they're meeting. What anxiety they're soothing. What story they're trying to tell, and whether that story is theirs.

That is consciousness work. It belongs in how we design. In how we talk to our customers. In how we build our brands.

Because we cannot build a restorative material culture without first building people who feel restored without it.

 

Thank you to Rethink The Runway for having us!