Cultivating a Relational Fashion System for Prosperity: Embracing Decolonial Embodiment and More-than-Human Care Through the Practice of Deep-Wearing

Abstract

Wearers are locked in endless cycles of acquisition, disenchantment and disposal. Time spent with our garments is fleeting. We are encouraged to have clothes, to buy clothes, but not to care for them, to be in an embodied relationship with our clothes. We need to implement practices of care and relationality in more-than-human worlds or face ecological and societal collapse. Care is an intersectional relational practice that encompasses the entire spectrum of sustainability of our world-social, cultural, spiritual, and economic.^[1] In response to over a decade of ongoing research-through-design project engaging in a “conversation across worlds,” as articulated by de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) fostering dialogue and interaction between diverse epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural perspectives the authors enacted a short temporal deep-wearing project that centres decolonial body-garment relations. This paper contributes to defining the concept of prosperity fashion by cultivating alternative value systems and modes of exchange for holistic, metaphysical oneness with our clothing in our everyday lives. This aligns with a process of decoloniality, embracing diversity in ways of knowing and being, through mind-body-spirit that towards the aim of multispecies flourishing, goals that are far outside of the capitalist, growth-oriented lens. Drawing from Indigenous Knowledge; Chinese, Celtic and Māori; making visible and assigning value to what was erased by Modernism, the Cartesian divide and the colonial order. It applies Taoist theory and methodology that accepts that, everything, including ourselves^[3] and our clothing is energy.