Fashion Week 3: The Discomfort
Asking unsavory questions and searching for satisfying answers about how I dress
This is the third in a series on fashion and style. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
This week I took an old pair of boots to the shoe repair shop. They’re black leather, with a two-inch heel, super comfortable. They belonged to my grandmother, and when she died I liked the idea of inheriting shoes she’d danced in, or explored a city in, or felt powerful in. And I’ve worn them ragged, grooving and walking in them for so many hours (including the three hours of Renaissance) that the soles have started to peel back.
I found the nearest shoe repair, stopped by on Wednesday afternoon, and told the cobbler about my issue. He assessed the heels and told me he could re-glue them for $20. A little steep, I thought, as I flashed back to resoling shoes in the costume shop, but they’d also get cleaned and shined.
“I have this other pair,” I told the shopkeeper as I pulled out my beige espadrille sandals. I’ve been wearing this pair since I got them at age 14 or 15, from a Spanish shop. Made of cloth and glue, they are hardier than expected and have carried me through soggy Miami streets, arid desert, and everything in between. I love these shoes, I explained to the cobbler.
“You love them and yet you’ve destroyed them,” he replied.
I chuckled. “Yes, I’ve had them for over 10 years. I’m wondering if they can be resoled, or if I should just wear them until they’re done.”
Straightfaced, he said, “They’re done. You should’ve brought them in 8 years ago.”
As I sat in the Turkish coffee shop next door, I texted my friend about the exchange (followed by several crying face emoji). I’M SORRY SIR. I WAS 17, I added with a flourish.
My friend replied: It’s like doctors saying, “You’ve had this for how long? You should have come in a long time ago." How was I supposed to know that?
I found the interaction funny — it’s kind of refreshing when someone is East-Coast-gruff toward you in L.A. — but it also left me thinking. Had I actually destroyed these shoes I adored? I shouldn’t have worn them on rain-soaked streets, but it’s hard to avoid that in the tropics! Maybe I should’ve been more careful not to scratch the tip of those leather boots. What other pair of shoes am I unknowingly shuttling to an early grave?
I’ve historically considered myself a careful person, watchful of my beloved items and trying to keep them around for a long time. I’ve been known to wear a pair of pants for years, cutting them into shorts when I get tired of their length, patching up rips, creating rips and remaking them until they give out.
I’ll even wear fast fashion pieces for that long. There’s one dress from Zara, a boxy cotton tunic with a print of a floral bouquet on the front, that I’ve had for at least five years. The dress, which I wear as a top, is still in regular rotation. I get compliments on it every time I wear it. It might be the piece of clothing that feels most like me.
But the cobbler’s words kept ringing in my head: You love them and yet you’ve destroyed them.
I’m a big fan of cobblers and tailors, because they’re our allies in a move toward more sustainable fashion. Instead of throwing out a damaged pair of shoes or a dress that no longer fits, a savvy cobbler or tailor can make those items brand new again. Usable again. Often, they can make an item better than it was before and convince us to keep it in our closet.
And they force us to take ownership over our stuff. To see its value. They remind us that clothing can be personal again.
Never before has clothing been so cheap and so easily accessible. I can order a $10 dress to my doorstep in less time than it takes to wash a dress I already own. Nor has changing fashion converged with the meteoric rise of a new platform the way it has with TikTok.
Although my tween self uploading a new profile picture in a sequined pencil skirt would disagree, Facebook was never about style. Neither was Twitter. That started to change when Instagram came around, but fashion was still mostly the domain of magazines, bloggers, and celebrities. There was no influencer culture, and the platform wasn’t yet a monetization machine churning out ads after every non-sponsored post from a real human.
I remember a shift between late 2020 and early 2021. I had taken a break from Instagram and when I re-downloaded the app, it was completely different. Instead of the central feature being a button to upload a photo, it was a shopping bag. The ads were everywhere, creating an overstimulating and truly unpleasant user experience. Instagram was becoming a shopping app, replacing every bit of social interaction with features that make it easier to impulse-buy.
This was also when TikTok came on the scene. The early form of the app wasn’t transparently about buying stuff as much as it was about dancing and home-brewed comedy. But once millions of people downloaded and got addicted to the app, it gradually went the same direction as Instagram.
And it was a natural fit: TikTok is built on trends — its lifeblood is the use and re-use of visuals, audio, or editing styles until they reach virality or die. That DNA fundamentally changed the music industry. And it’s doing the same to fashion.
Almost anytime I've heard about a new trend in consumption over the past three years (what we wear, how we wear it, what we look like, etc.) it's come from TikTok. Every trend gets a name, neatly packaging something mostly unremarkable into a replicable aesthetic: clean girl, e-girl, soft girl, Y2K girl, Barbiecore, cottagecore, gorpcore, coastal grandmother style, and so on.
Even when someone is striving for originality in the way they dress or look, they’re quickly plugged back into the machine, their efforts categorized as a certain “-core” or “girl.” Or, if they do a particularly good job of branching out from an Internet-approved style, they might introduce a new viral trend, which then gets named, goes viral, and gets altered by others, renamed, and the cycle continues.
It’s this commercialization of personality that feeds the beast. The claw clip goes viral, online vendors rush to meet new demand, fashion retailers make their versions, and suddenly, everywhere you look hair is poking out from young women’s heads, fastened by a thing that became hot because a fresh-faced micro-influencer said so.
It's a major reversal of the old hierarchy, and evidenced by Vogue Business launching a paywalled TikTok Trend Tracker.
I don’t mean to say that trend-driven fashion is new. (We were wearing jeggings in 2010 because a magazine told us they were cool.) Nor do I mean to demonize new tools and platforms. I’m not a technophobe.
But it feels like our consumption, especially when it comes to fashion, keeps getting more reckless in large part because of social media. And the stakes in the world outside our smartphones keep getting higher.
I think of the climate impacts of this hyper-speed environment, where online stores are adding hundreds to thousands of new pieces to their websites each week. Many of these mega retailers are producing countless new plastics — acrylic, polyester, nylon and elastane — to keep up with demand for cheaply made, trendy clothing that will be out of style in a few months. The fashion industry is known to be a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
But I also think of the people harmed by such a fashion paradigm. The factory workers who suffer despicable conditions in order to make money. The people sewing on dozens of zippers and buttons, working so fast they don’t have time to trim stray threads on those garments. I imagine the back-breaking work of cutting, dyeing, rolling, shipping and delivering fabrics. All the way down the line, from the refinery producing crude oil for plastic-based fabrics, to an online retailer’s enormous warehouse, to the cramped break room at a big box store, people are being exploited at every turn. To what end?
All of the human toll gets erased when we disconnect clothing from the real world — when a skirt is just a cluster of pixels in the perpetual scroll of an app. This is why I stopped seeing fashion solely as a light-hearted “hobby” or “passion.”
In reading the work of Alicia Kennedy and others, I’ve started to think differently about fashion. There are so many parallels to the food system. We prioritize our experience of consumption above almost everything. We want to find food and clothing easily, for cheap, without thinking too much about it. Because in this country many of us are so accustomed to getting what we want, we rarely stop to ask how much we need. “We have a distribution problem, as well as an obsession with creating new things where the old could suffice,” Kennedy writes in her book, “No Meat Required.”
And who can blame us? It’s overwhelming to think about how our day-to-day actions drive unjust systems. Many argue that taking individual action on issues like climate change misplaces the blame and lets corporations off the hook. The average American, struggling under their own difficult working conditions and financial pressures, often can’t afford anything other than fast fashion and food. It can even come off as classist to insist that people interrogate their purchasing habits (a point Kennedy also makes about the way vegetarianism is dismissed as a practice of the elite and out-of-touch). But the powers that be, in food and in fashion, are also “banking on the continued disinterest of Americans” in the origins of what we consume, Kennedy writes.
We still live in the wealthiest nation in the world. If we don’t question toxic systems, who will?
On a practical level, not asking questions before we swipe a credit card leads to what we have now: a landscape with no in-between options for shoppers. Thinking hard about where I buy my clothes has made shopping considerably more difficult.
There are so few shops selling well-made, small-batch clothing at an affordable price. Local boutiques aren’t even immune to the fast fashion trap; they need trendy clothes that can be marked up to cover the overhead costs of a brick-and-mortar shop. Just because it’s hung on a felt-covered hanger doesn’t mean a garment was made ethically. And even second hand consignment and thrift stores are full of fast fashion rejects, especially in a place like Los Angeles: a six-week-old top from Urban Outfitters hangs under a pair of $15 boots someone ordered online for Halloween and never wore again. It’s been eye-opening.
And I think part of the problem is that many of us don't think that other, better systems could exist. We’re in so deep — ruled so authoritatively by these algorithms — that we can't fathom rearranging our lives for the sake of everyone's wellbeing. We can’t imagine purchasing fewer pieces of clothing, or reusing old garments, or spending more on higher quality goods that were responsibly sourced. Because we need to look cool the same way we need a dozen eggs for under $5.
I think of those black leather boots I got from my grandmother. If we stay on the track we’re on, not only will we keep harming our neighbors and our planet. We’ll also miss out on the opportunity to hand down pieces that carry the weight of the past and, like small time capsules, hold the stories of the people who wore them before. We’ll miss out on the singular experience of being insulted by a local cobbler.
Recommendations
The Internet is No Longer Fun, according to The New Yorker. A sticking point, about social media: “The barrier to entry is higher and the pressure to conform stronger. It’s no surprise, in this environment, that fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers.” And that’s on top of apps becoming a place to exercise avarice.
In a weird episode of synchronicity, Maybe Baby’s Haley Nahman wrote about “coming back around” to getting dressed after avoiding the topic for years. But her mindset is different now. Nahman used to work at Man Repeller, which you all know was very important to me in my formative fashion years.
“Your Sweaters Are Garbage,” by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic, about the state of modern knitwear.
The Secret to a Long Life. When I saw this RadioLab episode in my feed, I thought it might be an extension of the annoying conversation du jour about cryogenic preservation and “blue zones” of centenarians (I don’t understand the obsession with living to be 100 years old). But instead, it was a charming and surprisingly moving piece about a young reporter’s efforts to make a week of her life feel longer and more memorable.
Eating: A bit of homemade fig jam, which used up the last of some tiger figs. I used this recipe, and ate it with slices of manchego. Delightful.
Have a great week,
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta. You can share your thoughts by hitting ‘reply’ to the email or commenting in the Substack app. You can also find old posts in the rummaging archive.
Have you listened to AHP’s new culture study podcast on clothing?