The Intervened Wardrobe: Making Visible the Agency of Clothes

Abstract

The fashion industry is permeated by overconsumption. Mass production, low prices and speed of turnover of trends lead consumers to perceive clothes as disposable objects. The resulting throwaway culture adds to the already problematic environmental impact of the fashion industry. To shift this state of affairs, we propose wardrobe interventions, a method that uses experimental design practices to collect insights and promote more active engagements between wearers and worn by leveraging the notion of material agency. We describe two projects used to develop and verify the method, to demonstrate how foregrounding the agency of clothes can enhance values embedded in wearer-worn relationships, and potentially shift consumer actions.