(§1) “Introduction”: First excerpt from Empires Over Skin (2025)
The mounds of clothing that adorn my floor and the foot of my bed sometimes grow too large, and suddenly I am sinking into the matted mess of fabrics. On days like these I can’t help but feel that clothing, not just my clothing, but the very idea of clothing, is swallowing me up. Clothing is this immensity looming over me, yet somehow a microscopic itch in my brain, prodding me and twisting itself into knots–an irritation I accept for the temporary bliss of scratching it.
On one hand, clothing is everything romantic and beautiful in life, the poetic spirit of the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, the romanticism of selecting outfits for purely aesthetic goals, embodying ineffable things, feelings I know could never be articulated in clumsy language. For us reserved people, it’s often the only way to communicate ourselves to strangers. On the other hand, clothing is the primary site of my self-exploitation, the heart of my anxiety and neuroses; the arena where I compress my existence into a commodity, into an indistinguishable good ready for purchase.
As I look down at my outfit today, I can't help but feel there would be something more–something profound–to my day if I had worn something special, something more real. And yet, regardless of how spectacular I feel, I always see nothing but a series of products on my body, their prices, their dwindling use-values. I see the costs not just to myself, but to the people who pay its true price, the cost of cheap manufacturing and reckless waste. My garments are laden with memory, not just mine but those of the hands which pulled them through sewing machines, across factory floors, and into trucks and boats. I wonder, are my clothes nothing more than things? Are they part of my body and its experiences, or simply an imposition upon it from the outside world?
Despite these feelings–which often leave me sick at the sight of my wardrobe–I am quite attached to these things I wear. Like most, I fill each piece with my own history, thoughts, comforts, and identity. From head to toe I feel something about every item I own, even if I am not always conscious of it. I could spend hours talking about each of these things I’m wearing, sprawling thoughts and feelings I rarely vocalize.
Take the pair of canvas platform boots I'm wearing–Revolt HI TX by Palladium, a French footwear company. They are some of my favorites, though I find their large platform soles have a tendency to wobble and I’ve tweaked my ankle a few times because of it. The hollow construction of the sole worries me, because I know it will eventually split for someone who drags their feet like I do. When I truly reflect on it, I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this chunk of rubber. Above those I am wearing a pair of gabardine1 pants by Issey Miyake which I purchased secondhand years ago.
They’re among my most treasured possessions, so even though the pockets are falling to pieces, I repair them with fabric glues, spare cloth, and hand stitches, though these slipshod repairs never hold up for long. In fact, over the past week I abandoned two pockets since I haven’t had the time to repair them. A colleague watched me absent-mindedly put my phone into the wrong pocket, where it dropped through the busted pocket bag, into my pant leg, and onto the floor. Above those I’m wearing an oversized bootleg Sonic Youth t-shirt with a white print of their 1990 album Goo, the origins of which I cannot recollect. Its neckline, collar width, boxy fit, and top-to-bottom length I can recall immediately, however, because they’re all a bit… off. There are few outfits which I can wear without the shirt fitting strangely.
All of the garments are black–a color from which I rarely deviate–and fit oversized and loose, minus the socks. The outfit, like any, was chosen for a variety of banal factors this morning: the weather, my feelings about my body, the look I wanted, which clothes were clean, and the level of decorum required at work. My wardrobe extends from a life-long battle of similar factors, picking colors, shapes, and materials I find comfortable and ‘fashionable’ and balancing them with social and personal obligations. Without intending to construct it, and without any strong intention to maintain it, I always have a wardrobe that more or less works while still drifting with wider trends, slowly replacing skinny pants with wide ones as they pass out of style.
These factors, and my outfit, are totally unremarkable. They probably echo your own approach to dressing. Yet this unremarkableness is fundamentally important to what fashion truly is, what it represents and its powers. We have to remind ourselves of the quotidian world of clothing, to be attentive where previously we ignored. Clothing straddles art and utility, history and culture, morality and expression. It is so fundamental to life as we understand it as to be ubiquitous and yet somehow silent, not because clothes are literally passive, but because we have made them so through culture. Interest in clothing is often defined as ‘womanly,’ ‘queer,’ or ‘childish’2 in order to erode its significance, and to make groups that care about it insignificant by association. As awareness for ‘background’ people–women, queers, children–is borne out of struggle, so too is it a struggle to bring clothing to the foreground. The secrets of clothing have to be extracted with immense energy because they are deeply set into the background of life, and so they must be made into characters with their own voice to be heard.
If we take the simple t-shirt I am wearing today, for example, there are aspects of its construction and design which could fill books worth of commentary, though I would have never noticed until I bothered to look.
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If we flip the t-shirt inside out, across the back of the neck and to the end of each shoulder, right where the arm panels are sewn into the shirt's body, there is a reinforcing fabric piece called the ‘neck tape.’3 It gives t-shirts a small degree of shape and structure, but more importantly it reinforces the place where the weight of the garment is supported. This tape is generally made of ‘self-fabric,’ from the same fabric as the main garment pieces. This raises the question of why self-fabric is used instead of another material, something with more stretch, strength, or weight? It's not as if this detail is visible from the outside, anyways.
Most likely, it's because using self-fabric lowers the price of the garment, requiring only a single fabric with a use for leftover bits after the main body panels are cut out.4 In some cases it reflects an aesthetic decision where designers wanted a product with an unbroken appearance. Sometimes neck tape is made with different fabric, reflecting alternative underlying aesthetic, economic, or functional design choices. The neck tape is–and this is banal to emphasize–a conscious design choice made by designers. It is a thing decided upon before the garment even starts construction. In exploring the neck tape as a thing, it becomes clear that the neck tape is also an idea, a conscious feature, and so we can take our questioning further. Consider: why does neck tape exist at all?
Though t-shirts have become ubiquitous, they originated from undergarments meant to absorb sweat underneath ‘real clothes.’5 In comparison, a ‘formal’ collared shirt (approximating ‘outerwear’ before t-shirts) has its entire neckline structured to maintain the upright shape of its collar. All of its seams are reinforced, and because of this, formal shirts do not need neck tape. From this difference we glean that the t-shirt and its neck tape, comparatively, are a minimum viable product—the bare minimum required of a garment to survive being draped on a human body. Its design reflects its lineage from disposable utilitarian garments, and the neck tape reveals itself as a decision of necessity. Consideration of the neck tape as an idea unfolds the concept further, into a discussion of the wider cultural context, of why such a necessity emerged and morphed into something new.
We can ask what these design choices say about the society that made those choices. Neck tape is only necessary if there is a need for simple, disposable undergarments to avoid soiling expensive or difficult-to-wash outer clothes. It is a design choice borne out of external pressure. We can glean insights into how they were expected to present themselves, their access to laundry, and their economic and material means. Why bother wearing clothes so delicate and cumbersome that one needs an additional layer to absorb sweat, and why hide sweat at all? In the absence of a functional need for undergarments, neck tape only exists if one wants to wear undergarments as outer clothes, which reflects how that society thinks about self-presentation and its access to textile goods. The shift undergarments took, from a need into a want, further reveals how a society has changed. Consider how undergarments as outerwear may reflect changing views on modesty, or on the importance placed on ‘dressing up.’
Here our discussion of neck tape could open to hundreds of directions, threads that may never cease expanding as we pull on them, endlessly unraveling. While more can be said of neck tape, let us go broader. The most inconspicuous aspects of fashion, which appear like small saplings on the forest floor, have roots extending far and deep, joining into the larger forest of society itself, a deeply interwoven rhizome beneath our feet. The wants and needs, pushing and pulling; the material and immaterial aspects of human society, those innumerable complexities of life, all inform and are informed by fashion. Clothing’s unique role in society presents an opportunity to investigate social shifts up to and through the internet epoch, from the feminist dress reformers of the mid-19th century to nebulous hyper-fast fashion like Shein. It is frequently said that there are ever-growing alternative fashion subcultures and fashion media in our contemporary moment. It's clear that fashion is ballooning in scale and doubling in speed, but the causes of this are not an intangible mystery, its roots can be traced to a wider social context, they can be followed through the history of fashion, and by extension, the history of society.
We use clothing to connect society to our personal experience. We wear items reflecting ethnic or religious relations, to embody our morals and affiliations, and even things which are explicitly contemporaneously constructed (e.g. uniforms, Wear it Pink Day, etc.). The relationship between our lived experience and our systems of social organization operates in a deep and vulnerable way through clothing, which hugs and extends our bodies. Cultural turnover in our society is hitting new speeds, and the physical relationship we have with clothing gives us a personal way of attaching to and experiencing that speed.
Historically simple concepts like ‘work clothes’ take on new dimensions, as adages like ‘dress for the job you want, not the job you have’ now explode in complexity in the digital fashion era. Our ‘jobs’ absorb ourselves, our presentation, and our achievements in a manicured social media world. The boundaries of work have expanded into our private lives as we enter an era of gig labor, of always maintaining a resume and a LinkedIn profile, of always being reminded by social media to hone new skills, to career-build. As such, workwear no longer means conforming to a dress code or uniform, but presenting oneself, making the right impressions, honing a professional image. People now work more jobs and change companies faster than ever, and so an always-at-work contractor mindset emerges within fashion. Work clothes are becoming simultaneously more casual and more put-together in the collision of always-on work culture and work-from-home gigs. Similarly, casual athletic leisure wear (athleisure) is being pushed away from the appearance of leisure and taking on corporate aesthetics, becoming a signifier for someone who is always working on themselves, always grinding. Kim Kardashian, perhaps athleisure’s biggest popularizer, said “Get your fucking ass up and work” just months before releasing ads for her own athleisure line, sitting in a white-collar office in front of her computer in head-to-toe athleisure. Athleisure is business, and our business is leisure.
Online fashion influencers insist that clothing doesn’t just represent large social groups like gender, race, class, or profession, but instead represents finer-detailed statements on the intersection of lifestyle, interests, health, attitude, and worldview through collective archetypes (e.g. fashion lifestyles like clean girl). The way we dress reflects our individual worldview and the media we consume, the romantic archetypes we wish to project (e.g. softbois, studs), and the roles we wish to play. Whether one dresses in the latest or the oldest possible clothing reflects a position on over-consumption or conspicuous consumption, meaning we can express our view on clothing as a concept through clothing itself. As our world gains complexity, so too does our dress, and our relationship to it.
In our world, clothing is an unresolved paradox, a basic need that is somehow also a frivolous ‘want.’ The primary effort of this book is to show how contemporary fashion emerged from its lineage as a functional and historical ‘need,’ to explore how a need can become a want, and what significance this distinction has. Clothing history, however, is not the ultimate conceptual goal we seek.
Books on fashion are often filled with definitive answers to the problems of fashion, asserting that we simply need to consume less, consume better, dress better, dress more modestly, or wear nothing at all–American nudist Maurice Parmelee once wrote with great gravitas that wearing clothing was “grievous to [...] mankind.” These books provide salves to our clothing anxiety, to move us from the unsettling edge of the unknown, where things are undefined and uncertain. They attempt to rip fashion out of its complicated tangle and give it a final form and place. This is a book about the answers people seek in fashion and the hidden forces that construct those answers. This book doesn’t seek to make fashion inert and give it a cure, but to enliven it, to show all its complexities and show it as a thread in the weave of life. The point is not just to study fashion’s history and conditions as they are, but to understand the society of which fashion is part. Fashion is our window in, but the goal is to see the whole building.
Footnotes
1 Gabardine is a wool fabric invented by Thomas Burberry to be breathable and water-proof by utilizing a very tight weave to allow for water vapor, but not droplets, to pass through. It was designed as an alternative to the rubberized wool that predated it, which was much heavier and impermeable to water vapor, making wearers incredibly sweaty.
2 Georg Simmel relates fashion to behavioral imitation in his foundational fashion studies text. He characterizes fashion as indicative of a lower state of social development, both childlike and primitive. Though fashion is used for both imitation and differentiation, like other social formations, it is clear that his view of imitation is low. “The tendency towards imitation characterizes a stage of development in which the desire for expedient personal activity is present, but from which the capacity for possessing the individual acquirements is absent. It is interesting to note the exactness with which children insist upon the repetition of facts, how they constantly clamor for a repetition of the same games and pastimes, how they will object to the slightest variation in the telling of a story they have heard twenty times. [...] We therefore see that there is good reason why externals—clothing, social conduct, amusements—constitute the specific field of fashion, for here no dependence is placed on really vital motives of human action. It is the field which we can most easily relinquish to the bent towards imitation.” (Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, 1957, pp. 541–558.)
3 The ‘neck tape’ is a specific iteration of the general category of ‘bias tape’ or ‘bias binding,’ where strips of bias-cut fabrics are used to improve the strength of a seam or to finish a raw edge.
4 Contemporary Western clothing is made from multiple panels of fabric sewn together. These panels are cut from rectangular sheets of textile in a pattern created by the garment’s designer. This panel-based method of clothing construction is called CMT (Cut, Make, Trim) and is the primary current mode of clothing production. Certain items of clothing, typically draped garments like togas, hijabs, or scarves, are made of only a single panel of fabric.
5 Wells, Troth. T-Shirt. New Internationalist, 2007.
Empires Over Skin (2025) is available from our webstore