Can fashion be a love language?
Or some personal and intellectual reflections about collaboration in fashion
Dear fashion thinkers,1
It’s been way too long since I last wrote. But, if you follow me on Instagram, you probably know that I spent the past few months in “beast mode” (as one of my best friends described it), trying to complete my Ph.D. dissertation. You may have also seen that I have successfully submitted a full draft and I’m preparing to defend—and become “Dr. Laura”—next month.
Finishing my Ph.D. is a huge milestone in my life, especially when considering that I’ve been working towards it for more than a decade, i.e. almost a third of my lifetime. Nearing the end has inevitably incited a bit of a crisis and, as you may have seen on Instagram as well, I’ve been thinking a lot about my future in academia—even though I haven’t come to any conclusions just yet.
The brighter side of nearing the completion of my Ph.D. is that I finally have some a lot of extra time and brainwidth to finally return to some of the projects that truly excite me. This newsletter being one of the most important.
And I have way too many things to share! After all, I launched this newsletter more than a year ago as “an effort to engage in critical conversations about fashion outside academia—and decentralize Fashion Studies in the process!” You might correctly suspect that the ideas I’ve been gathering for over a decade of researching and thinking about fashion are quite numerous.
But we’ll navigate through them slowly as I start sending this newsletter on a monthly basis again.
Today I want to return to one of my main “fashion lessons” from 2022: that fashion is a love language. Reflecting on such lessons before the end of the year, I wrote that:
Making—or knitting 🧶 in my case—clothes for the people you love is the best way of showing them how much you care. Especially if they’re far away, you can’t see them as much as you’d like to, and you miss them way too much!
Last year I knit clothes for my mother, my best friend’s son, and some other loved ones (including myself). Nothing made me as happy as wrapping the clothes and sending them with a little love letter. And, as I try to rush-finish a little something for another friend’s baby (born only a couple of days ago), I still believe that making clothes is a love language, at least on a personal level.
But is making clothes a love language at an industry level? Can we find signs of love—or some version of it—in the fashion system? And if so, can they serve any purpose in reframing such a troubled system?
Funnily, the last question seems the easiest to answer, though it might be because I can borrow ideas from one of my most admired mentors, Dr. Hazel Clark, rather than coming up with an answer myself. In a 2019 essay on Slow + Fashion, Dr. Clark argued that a slow approach to fashion is necessarily informed by “women’s wisdom” or feminine strategies and values “that pre-date and transcend capitalism, modernity and Eurocentricity, and which are not formed on the basis of patriarchy.”2 Such beliefs and methods include mindfulness, empathy, sensibility, compassion, and sharing. In other words, alternative dynamics for the fashion system, including “slow fashion,” can be shaped from the labors of care that women have been tasked with and embraced for centuries—if not millennia.
And it might hold true that love is just a step away from those labors of care.
So signs of love can exist at least in certain spaces of the fashion system and making clothes can be a love language communicated by a select few members of the industry. Such spaces and makers, however, might necessarily have to be the people who are doing things differently in tireless attempts to reframe a culture of endless consumerism and exploitation that has characterized western (capital-F) “Fashion” since at least the nineteenth century.
But I fear that these claims are just proof of my being blindfolded by my naïvely positivistic nature.
And yet I keep finding people who make it all feel realistic even if still desperately and romantically hopeful.
As I was debating internally about the possibilities of finding love in fashion, I received a call from Juanita García, founder of Colombian brand, Priah. I don’t think I ever got to write publicly about it, but last year I worked on a beautiful research project with Priah where we aimed to understand the core of Andean dress practices and translate them to the brand’s creative processes. While reflecting on the project, Juanita and I ended up talking about our many internal struggles as we aim to make sense of our contributions to fashion at the industry and academic levels.
I don’t think I saw this during our hour-long conversation, but I just realized that that project was filled with love from beginning to end. It was love what made Juanita move back to the town where she encountered the women who crochet the clothes she now sells through Priah. It was love what made me step away from researching French fashion and dive into a specialization on fashion in Abya Yala (more commonly known as Latin America). And it was love what brought us together to collaborate and bring two apparently disconnected elements of the fashion system—artisanal production and academia—to frame alternative fashion practices in Colombia that can certainly lead to significant changes to fashion around the world.
But what if we made collaboration the basis of the entire fashion system? What if we normalized thoroughly researching what we’re drawing inspiration from before actively creating? And what if, in doing so, we slowed down an industry that has been screaming for a new rhythm for decades?
I don’t know if I’m just delusional—or simply blinded by the hopeful personality I seem to share with Juanita—but I am convinced that if one brand can engage in this kind of slow, conscious research-creation process, others can, too. The question is whether or not they are willing to actively try.
And what excites me the most is that, although neither collaboration nor “serious” research-creation in fashion are unique to Abya Yala, with this “pilot project” we can offer the global fashion industry a fruitful example of how to do things differently—and better, if you ask me—from one of the corners that has been basically stripped out of the right to fashion for centuries.
But more on that next month.
One final note before signing off: The topic choice of today’s newsletter is not accidental, since I do realize that many people around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day today. Right now I can’t get into the details of how these holidays are capitalistic marketing traps to make us buy/spend more, but I simply can’t ignore this fact if we’re to really think about how to reframe the fashion system.
As always, thank you, thank you for reading, listening, sharing, and commenting.
Until a new issue of Thinking Through Latinx Fashion!
—L 🧚🏻♀️
The music in this newsletter’s voiceover is “Rebirth” by Ketsa, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Hazel Clark, “Slow + Fashion – Women’s Wisdom,” Fashion Practice 11, no. 3 (2019): 323.