“How did you get a UTI?” my friend asks. I was too embarrassed to admit that it was because I didn’t change out of my bathing suit after going swimming…for two days. No human person bore witness to my unhygienic behaviour, but something else was present – my clothes. Clothes go where our bodies go. They know the scintillating secrets we dare not share. But clothes know more than that. They also know the secrets behind the sinister industrial manufacturing process.

The triumph of most successful fashion brands lies not with their garments but with their story. Fashion brands sell an identity, an idea, and a lifestyle. The intrinsic status of owning a designer label or capricious indulgence of updating our wardrobes every season has more cultural value than a human life. Also, the material garment, the item that you buy to wear, is fundamentally obsolete since we don’t care about its function, only about what it symbolises. The story of ‘The Brand’ is so powerful and pervasive that we are anaesthetised to the garment’s material properties – the fibres of its threads, the meticulously sewn on buttons.

What if we shifted our perspective and paid more attention to the material garment’s stories? The stories of the bodies and the labour that made its existence possible. Do you think it is as glamorous as ‘The Brand’ stories? I’m afraid not.

The manufacturing process is skilfully hidden from us by the entities that financially benefit from exploitative practices (The Brand). The living bodies or ecological bodies are disembodied because we don’t discuss them as bodies that deserve rights. We discuss these bodies as resources, functions and processes. It is easy to exploit them when we don’t consider these bodies our equals.

Garments have memories of how the cotton they were spun from wiped out an ecosystem. They recall the person stitching their seams together suffered appalling working conditions. How can we as consumers be sure that the essence of the low paid farmers, garment workers, clothing designers or logistics personnel’s labour – their blood, sweat and tears – is not woven into the garment? Negative whisps of imperceptible energy could be flippantly entering our lives as we race to procure the latest ‘It’ items.

If this is indeed true, continuous overconsumption will lead to continuous strife. That stress or anxiety you feel about what you look like? That could be the affect of the trauma from the exploited ecosystems and labourers.

Suppose my speculation on affect theory, agency and relationality hold true. In that case, our lives are impacted by the suffering of other bodies, even though we are not directly complicit in causing their pain. By perpetuating the system that creates their suffering, negativity permeates everywhere.

Maybe if we realised our clothes knew dark secrets, we would treat them more respectfully. Perhaps if we realised they had agency and affected our lives, we would shop more consciously and sustainably and pay more heed to the ecological and living bodies in the fashion system.

The rhyme below is a quirky supposition of what our clothes might experience and know as they make their way from the farms into our wardrobes. It was one of my first rhyming academic works and served as the foundation for this whole thesis. I didn’t list it first as I thought it would have a more significant impact after explaining the theoretical concepts.

The rhyme scheme is ABACDED, so every second stanza rhymes. This poem is very melodic. I like the tempo and have subsequently turned it into a crude song.