Suffering in fashion: the links that expose issues for the future production of garments and their appropriation as fashionable items

Abstract

This article highlights how distress, pain, misery and ultimately suffering in the wearing and production of fashionable clothes are essential components for initiating change. Suffering in fashion could compare with the religious analogies of suffering, redemption and spiritual enrichment; suffering being a motivating factor for change so that the fashion production cycle can seasonally re-invigorate. Suffering in the ways clothes are worn is examined by investigating the design and manufacture of undergraduate fashion student's collections. This provides a visual analysis of fashion designers' responses to suffering and the changes it initiates in the skills of production and ultimately the wearing of fashion. Suffering through pain, anguish or distress is an extreme affliction. Pushing something to its limits of endurance, making it suffer, can undermine order, and to survive it is often reassembled in a new and challenging way. This concept is somewhat akin to Darwin's ideas about the evolution of the species through a process of random mutation and selective retention known as natural selection (Darwin, C. 1859. The Origin of the Species. London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.). His work coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ (Peel, J.D.Y., 1992. Herbert Spencer: the evolution of a sociologist. England: Gregg Revivals, p. 143), which introduced the idea that survival of a species is a struggle against climate and environmental change in nature. In fashion, suffering can be instrumental in enforcing the re-invigoration of the product when clothing styles are pushed to the limits of consumer endurance. The ‘fittest’ styles survive through their re-assemblance each season, sustaining the commercial cycle. In the struggle of clothes against clothes, some styles remain, due to their response to change, others are discarded.