Why Care?
My thoughts on buying, wearing and loving clothes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we value and care for our clothes. As knitters, or sewers, I think it’s easy to forget that the majority of people aren’t so connected to the time and attention taken to make an item of clothing, nor do they (for the most part) consider the people that are involved with the manufacture, nor where the fibres used to create the fabric come from – or even what those fibres might be. The process of shopping for clothes - especially online - is transactional, and often without thought. We talk about impulse buys or something for the weekend. Magazines and brands encourage us to purchase a new holiday wardrobe and show us how to maximise our shopping efforts on our precious time-poor lunch hour. Garments can be purchased for less than a cup of coffee with one click and our connection to them is just as disposable. We are consumers of clothing, not caretakers. As Alec Leach states in his book, ‘The World is on Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes’: “Clothes in the hype era aren’t products to own, they’re moments to broadcast, to share on Instagram for 24 hours. They’re here, then they’re not. More like memes than products.”
If you have taken the time to make something by hand, be it knitted or sewn, you have a different appreciation for it. We are more reluctant to let go of an old jumper long outgrown remembering the hours of concentration held in the stitches that make up its fabric, the inextricable connection between hand and garment. It somehow has worth beyond its basic practicality and as such we treat it differently; we’ll consider handing it down to a niece, adding it to a pile of repairs that we’ll get round to one day, or even repurposing or upcycling it. But we are inclined to forget that all garments are made by hand - even the mass-produced t-shirt sold for £2.50 in a supermarket.