(I read "Worn Worlds" yesterday and I accidentally wrote this really long thing -- I thought it would be a paragraph long and I could add it quietly to my zine-corpus. It's not a finished piece of writing. I plan on going back and adding more, reworking it over time. I posted it yesterday and then deleted it because it's not "done," but Spencer put up something on Materialism so I thought I should repost.)
Thinking about "Worn Worlds"
I have a half closet, one suitcase, and a few plastic zippered bags full of clothes I have made. Much of this clothing was made in collaboration with my best friend. In general, we would do research, sketching, and designing together. Through draping, pattern making, cutting, and assembling, often swapping tasks and handing over pieces that eluded us in some way, eventually each garment would come to have its owner. This happened at the end of each summer -- the end of each "collection" -- and negotiations were never really necessary. It was always understood who had the soul of a garment, who loved it most, regardless of who did what part of the process of creating it.
A few years passed after the clothes designing days of my youth and I heard from my friend that he had started giving away some of the clothes. I was horrified. In my head, I was asking, "Are you crazy?!" These things were always so precious to us that we never even considered giving them to our friends who wore them (as some of the most amazing, spirited, hardworking unpaid models ever). He had also started to give away some of his shoes (between the two of us we'd probably accumulated forty or more pairs for shoots and shows) and he described it as "freeing."
A few months before she died, someone I admired dearly offered me her entire collection of Time Life photography books. I accepted and took as many as I thought I could bring back to New York. Reading "Worn Worlds" has me thinking about these two sets of things now: those dark grey metallic-seeming Time Life books and all of those clothes that I made. These days, being "materialistic" is construed as being overly focused on the possession of objects, but all the while "attention to material is precisely what is absent." Because we don't place enough value in what we own, because we don't read enough into objects, those physical things become interchangeable, replaceable, lose their value.
While it's cool to own a set of books from the wild days of analog photography, their preciousness resides in the fact that I (not posthumously) inherited them. They take up a little square of space on my bookcase and they have value in the world because they are a reminder of someone I loved. As for the clothes, what will I do with my clothes? Even through washing, or preferably dry cleaning, I think there is some memory (both meanings) that will last. There's some memory of my hands, some memory of the slight way I stretched fabric to ease in a sleeve. There is also the history of the people who wore these clothes, if briefly then certainly boldly, and literally fleshed them out. They were the ones who made the garments real, slightly wrinkled and make-up stained but actualized nonetheless.