(§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 gabardine 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’ 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.