Fashion as Memory Archive

A personal project on curating the past through dress.

When my Grandma passed away, one of the first things my Mum said we needed to do was go through her wardrobe to deem which items were ‘worth keeping’.

As she emptied old handbags and sorted her possessions into a ‘keep’ and ‘throw out’ pile, it struck me that we were in the process of itemising my Grandma through her dress. We were, in a sense, curating her memory through her clothing. Objectively, I could understand why much of what she had worn was no longer valuable; a plain, inexpensive t-shirt with no discernible features didn’t seem as ‘precious’ as a suede jacket, or a piece of jewellery that glistened when you turned it over in your hands.

However, I realised just how much of my Grandma’s clothing I wore and loved. None of these items, which I cherished so deeply, were of much ‘worth’. Rather, the clothes she had handed me down, and that I wore with the most enthusiasm and love, were visibly deteriorated; missing buttons, tattered sleeves, irremovable stains.

Why is this?

Through this project, I have been re-evaluating my, and my peers’ connection to our clothing. In doing so, I have considered some key questions:

When does an item cease to be of cultural worth, and how does its value decrease over time?

Might there be something to be ‘treasured’ in clothes that have lost their material value but retained emotional worth by connecting the wearer with a person or a moment from the past?

Might using ‘memory’ and ‘emotion’ as a metric for clothing’s value radically change the way we wear and consume dress?

I’m not the only person to have thought about our visual and material records of the past, through clothing or otherwise.

Specifically, Wilson explores the theme of fashion and memory through the lens of fashion photography, which she describes as ‘rather different from some other kinds of photography, since it essentially makes images of [the] eternal present’.

On photography, German philosopher, Walter Benjamin declared,

In Cheryl Clark and Hazel Buckley’s article, ‘Conceptualising Fashion in Everyday Lives’, the two scholars are in dialogue with Wilson’s argument that fashion is often ‘a perpetual pursuit of the new’. They recognise that ‘a predominant interest [within fashion studies] remains in the fashion “syntaxes” of the young, the novelty of the “look,” and the currency of the latest style — whether recycled, second-hand, revivalist, or new’.

They assert that ‘everyday life registers the process of modernisation as an incessant accumulation of debris: Modernity produces obsolescence as part of its continual demand for the new (the latest version becomes last year’s model with increasing frequency)’, and that fashion only came to be associated with modernity as supply chains quickened and production technologies advanced in the late 1970s.

By recognising fashion’s ‘fascination with a zealous commitment to [its] spectacular — although frequently transitory — qualities’, we, perhaps, overlook clothing’s ability to foster emotional connectedness with our past. By considering the clothing we own through the lens of our own personal histories, memories, and kinships we might restructure this basic tenet of the industry, and foster a more conscious relationship with fashion.

In ‘Worn Clothes and Textiles as Archives of Memory’, by Carole Hunt, the focus is not on visual depictions of fashion, but on the very materiality and wearability of clothing. In this way, unlike Wilson, Hunt relocates the act of evoking memory through clothing from an act of looking or seeing, to an act of wearing and touching. Hunt posits that there is a distinction between ‘collective’ and ‘private memory’; the idea that memory, evoked through clothing, is both a social phenomenon, as well as a deeply individualistic experience.

At the very least, the visual documentation of fashion goes some way in making what is transient, eternal. Whilst this project is concerned with the materiality of ‘memorable’, used, and worn clothing — and how specifically it displays and collects these signs of wear — it will also heavily feature visual records of clothing from the past as a further medium for connecting us to what we have ‘worn in’, and ‘worn out’ through time.

The majority of the images for this project are original or otherwise credited. A portion were selected from hundreds of physical family photographs, from the 1920s to the 1990s. Through these visual records, I will explore continuity with the past through dress, how contemporary brands tap into nostalgia, and physical ‘signs of wear’.

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