on Clothing & Memory
“Our world is not one of boundless innovation, but rather one where nostalgia ties us firmly into place.”
on Clothing & Memory is an assemblage of images and excerpts from different publications and writers. I created this for Vestido, a fashion rental company based in Manila.
“I contain multitudes” is the phrase that sparked this assemblage; a piece of clothing holds the different lives and stories of its borrower.
I imagine the Dion Lee corset and the Gabbie Sarenas skirt witnessing a day in a life. I imagine them asking, what form will I be taking today?
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Our world is not one of boundless innovation, but rather one where nostalgia ties us firmly into place. — Postmodernism and Fashion by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, Vestoj
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[...] each article of clothing is imbued with personal history. — Translating Memory through Fashion, Kathryn Franklin
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‘Past things have futurity’ — Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
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Humans have a fundamental need to store memories, values and experiences in objects, perhaps to keep them safe from memory loss; proof that, yes, that really happened. — For the love of stuff, Lee Randall, Aeon Mag
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A simple grey cotton pair of un- derwear is laid strategically on top of an open collar dress, also grey, but with a small irregular dot print. Flat green shoes sit at the very edge of the photo. The cap- tion reads: “My friend and I refer to this as the ‘V dress’ or ‘V-neck dress’. I wore this on the night of the unplanned loss of my virginity. I kept my shoes on the whole time.” Meghan, Sydney, Australia — The Significant Outfit, Miranda July, Miyake Ishiuchi and, Sophie Calle, 2009
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Yet each item is heavily invested with personal history, loaded with the material memory of emotional experience and eternally significant to its particular owner. — The Significant Outfit, Miranda July, Miyake Ishiuchi and, Sophie Calle, 2009
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And through breathing life back into what would otherwise be fleeting ephemera, mere fragments, we somehow mourn times of yore yet celebrate our own history and the fact that we have lived. — Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, Vestoj
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What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? — What do clothes say? Shahidha Bari, Aeon Mag
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What is on one hand giving older pieces a new lease on life has also become a process of learning about the clothing. A garment expresses itself most clearly when it is experienced: from the qualities of a textile, the subtle details that register as you inspect its construction, and the tailoring and techniques that have been utilized to express the designer’s intended message. Sometimes we can only infer what it is that they wanted to say, but beautiful clothing is beautiful regardless. Sometimes that is enough. — Julio del Prado, Ersatz
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Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window. — Being in time, Paul Bloom, New Yorker
