Every Wardrobe Its Malfunction
We all know what cargo pants look like, but here’s a picture of some of them anyway.
I would love to start this piece off with a catchy little memoir bit, but any possibility for it is so embarrassing I cannot bear to commit it to text, so let’s deal momentarily in generalities: you are out and about, doing something or another – work, socializing, collecting essential goods before scurrying back to your den, whatever – when you experience what has come to be known as a “wardrobe malfunction.” Some part of your clothing slips or splits or is spilt upon, or worse, you realize that you’ve just been walking around like that for far longer than you’d like to be. (For me, “longer than [I’d] like it to be” is any amount of time at all, but your mileage may vary.)
Or maybe you’ve been made to wear something that is diametrically opposed to your image of yourself: the garment or garments in question contravene your gender, or your aesthetic sensibilities, or your physical comfort in some way. But you have no choice; you have to wear them or suffer grievous social or economic consequences. (I wear cargo pants and a high-vis shirt for work, and have for years now, and do I seem like a cargo pants guy to you?)
Sucks, right? It sucks. And while these two types of experience are different – one the product of physics’ harshest laws, the other of equally-unforgiving socio-economic pressures – they both elicit humiliation caused by a disjunction of presentation and experience. I’ve talked a little about presentation, in the sense of developing a personal style, but today I’m thinking less about what one might individually do with respect to presentation, and more about broader systems and material culture. Specifically, what does the construction of our clothing tell us about our culture’s attitude to human dignity, and what can we do with that?
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I went thrifting a couple times recently. Both times were with friends – once because a friend needed to upgrade his wardrobe to accommodate a career change, and the second time because I needed to do something similar.
A stereotypical thrift store; photo pulled from this ten-year-old guide to thrifting, which is really showing its age.
But thrifting, as many a vintage reseller and cultural critic will tell you, ain’t what it used to be. The shoes all sucked, and trying to find a halfway decent button-up shirt that wasn’t permanent press or largely synthetic was needlessly difficult. And, at least in shopping for myself, I have it pretty easy: I am the same size as sick husbands and teenaged boys, so there’s usually plenty of stuff in my size and designed for my build. (Husbands, after all, recover, and teenaged boys grow up.) Which is sort of a roundabout way of acknowledging that I am playing the game of not being embarrassed by your clothes on easy mode – but I do want to acknowledge that before I go on.
That said, these recent thrifting expeditions point to some of what I want to talk about here. It’s a truism bordering on an offensive cliché to note that we wrap up a lot of our assumptions of a person’s worth and value in how they dress – but when the options for how one can dress are increasingly viewed as valueless themselves, how can anyone present themself as a person with value and dignity?
Let me unpack that a little bit. Dignity comes from the Latin word dignus, meaning “appropriate, worthy, or deserving” – and “dignity” typically encompasses those same concepts. By contrast, we use the word “undignified” to comment on someone’s comportment, rather than their being, and “undignified” behavior can often extend to “inappropriate” dress – itself characterized using words that suggest the clothing (and, by extension, its wearer) is unworthy in some way. We could get into some of those cruel and deliciously sibilant terms (sluttish, slovenly, substandard, seedy, sleazy, and so on) but we’d be getting into the weeds more than I’m quite ready for. It suffices to say that dignity and worth are both tied up in presentation and dress. Okay.
“Options for… dress… viewed as valueless”: how much should a tee-shirt cost? This is a bit of a loaded question, as the answer varies wildly depending on how much the respondent knows about clothing manufacturing and labor conditions in the fashion industry. Relatedly, how long does it take to make a tee-shirt? What if you have to make the fabric, too? Also loaded questions, but I’m sure we can all see where I’m going with this.
I’ve lately become pretty convinced that we don’t even know how to think about the worth of clothing. It’s no exaggeration to say that, on a certain level, every garment is “handmade”: if it counts as “handmade” when I purchase the fabric and construct a garment out of it myself, it’s absurd to say that a garment is less “handmade” because it was constructed in a sweatshop in LA or overseas. Just because you don’t know the hands doesn’t mean their labor should be as utterly devalued as it is – and yet.
A contemporary industrial overlock machine, though this image doesn’t include the table it would usually be mounted on, because this baby can sew through so much stuff.
While the last truly game-changing technological advancement in garment manufacturing arrived in the late nineteenth century in the form of the overlock machine, the same cannot be said of what we make the fabric out of. While the first semi-synthetic fibers were invented towards the end of the nineteenth century in the cellulose-derived precursors to rayon, the twentieth century saw a proliferation of true synthetics, beginning with nylon in 1935, courtesy of our beloved nemesis, DuPont, followed by polyester, acrylic, and a variety of other spun plastics. These textiles were developed for a reason: many are stronger than natural fibers, and the fact that they do not biodegrade is, for certain applications, a point in their favor. (Also I just learned that, in the case of rayon-precursors, there was a silkworm catastrophe in France, which motivated the search for alternatives and I think that’s kind of cool.) Besides that, as a general principle, they’re far cheaper, in a blunt, arithmetic sense, to manufacture than natural fibers.
The problem with these fibers arises in their actual use in clothing. While industries of various kinds are the most significant sources of microplastics (and, frankly, macroplastics, or whatever you want to call actual chunks of plastic trash), clothing, and specifically fast fashion clothing, is nonetheless a major source. This is both because fast-fashion companies manufacture many thousands more units of an item than they can possibly sell – or, more properly, order more units, which are then manufactured in conditions that are, at best, questionable, and at worst exactly what you’d expect – and then discard them, and because, while synthetic fibers themselves may not biodegrade, garments nonetheless wear out. Because they are manufactured as quickly as possible, the garments in question are not constructed to last, and the materials they’re constructed from are often difficult to repair when they do tear. Besides that, synthetic blends – which are very common as staple garments, like tee-shirts and jeans – often wear out in unsightly ways, pilling and staining and growing stiff with sweat that never quite comes out.
So the labor that constructs the garment is devalued, and the material the garment is made from is durable as a material but quickly ruined as a garment: both the labor and the garment are disposable. (And we haven’t even touched on the conditions under which textiles are made and manufactured.) Is this what we’re using to project our identities? Is this the measure we want to use to assign worth to others?
Apparently, yeah.
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I don’t know, man, here’s the illustration Wikipedia has on the page for Wardrobe Malfunction.
“Wardrobe malfunction” made a dramatic entrance into English idiom after the disastrous appearance of a simulated sexual touch turned into a real disrobing on live television, subjecting the United States of the Bush II years to a nipple, which obviously would never stand; the expression was used in Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s apology for the event. Once again, there’s a great deal to unpack in all that, but let’s let it lie. After all, “wardrobe malfunction” is such a bland and polite term for something so many of us have experienced, in one way or another.
The events of the half-time show at Superbowl XXXVIII notwithstanding: we are offered a devalued commodity, that once occupied a tremendous place in human working life, and told that it had better look nice, or else. From the casual cruelty of People of Wal-Mart (link goes to Wikipedia and is provided for the happy few still unfamiliar) to the fantasy of rag-clad urchins somehow positioned to, or indeed, interested in, accepting the unloved cast-offs of SheIn hauls and Forever XXI sale racks, we use clothing as a proxy for a person’s dignity, an outward symbol of one’s well-being.
As discussed elsewhere, this can be gamed – but only to a point. In manufacturing all this stuff, all these textile goods, huge swathes of people are denied even the option to dress as they please: “plus size” fashion is notoriously… not great; accessible clothing is often prohibitively expensive; children and elderly people are often subject to whatever is easiest to dress them in. As mentioned above, I am distinctly privileged with respect to my clothing needs, but I’m not insensitive to the cruel reality of the situation; Cameron has also made some notes on his experience with this, which is very different from mine.
So some are set up to experience “wardrobe malfunctions” of various kinds, but none are spared the complicity of clothing that is a natural disaster. My work shirt feels like a plastic grocery bag; it was only as an adult that I was self-aware enough to realize that I felt better when I wore natural fibers next to my skin, and the sweaty, staticky crackle of the polyester wallpaper-print frocks of my youth still makes my skin crawl. And as mentioned, I’m on easy mode here.
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Once again, we are given trash, and told not to let it embarrass us, and if we’re very lucky, we’ll get to leverage that trash to project a little of our deal before we have to talk to people about.
Any solution to the problems laid out here that I could offer would be grotesquely individualistic, but I gotta end this thing somehow; as a general aside, I’ll note that Clotheshorse Podcast has been doing some excellent work in these areas. Shop carefully, I guess? Get stuff that’s worth the repairs and learn to mend them if you can? Keep an eye on the labor conditions in clothing manufacturing, and push for inclusive sizing and environmentally-responsible textile manufacturing practices?
I don’t know, man: brands won’t save us, and we can’t craft-circle our way to dignity and sartorial self-expression for everyone-everyone. (Which is not to say you can’t craft-circle your way to sartorial self-expression for you, if you’re so inclined, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about here.) But we can at least be aware of how we’re using what may be beyond someone’s control to judge them and, you know, not do that.
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