The Magic of Less
It's not just science telling us to live with less, it's artists too. Sharing some beautiful words from one on the power of our clothes.
There’s a girl I have had a crush on for the last few years. It might be because we are the same age, as are our kids - we certainly went to the same parties when we were younger. I’ve watched her career track alongside mine and in the last decade her beautiful, magical thinking has found enormous success. She started out as a set designer, and now builds stages for Beyoncé, U2 and Adele, but really she is more of an artist these days. Her name is Es Devlin, and fashion frequently calls on her to bring meaning, drama and beauty to their work. She creates large scale public pieces of “effectivist sculptures” as she calls them, immersive moments with Louis Vuitton, a show in the Moroccan desert with Saint Laurent, and most recently the Gucci Cosmos exhibition in London.
Climate is an important part of her work - she created a beautiful experience for Cartier last year on London’s South Bank where she recited all the species in the British Isles, alongside community choir performances. Es manages to love fashion and luxury, at the same time as highlighting the world we live in.
So I thought I would share with you some words she spoke last week in a podcast with Business of Fashion. They resonated deeply with me and I think they will with you because if you are on this journey of Rule of Five, you will know what it feels like to live with less - and how simulateneously that can also feel like living with more. Where your clothes and your personal effects start to take on a deeper, more valuable meaning. The host, BoF’s Imran Ahmed, asks her where fashion can go next in experiential design. Es starts to talk about poems she has come across that describe songs stitched into the seams of garments.
These go to show that the clothes you wear can carry can so much meaning, so much poetry.
I think this moment we are living in now in western cultural history is an aberration. Even as recently as 300 years ago people had probably five outfits at the max, you and I certainly wouldn’t have had so many, and each one would have had so much more meaning and value.
She praises Patagonia as a company that has built its community around mending (Patagonia promise each piece you buy from them is for life, encouraging you to mend it so it endures):
When you’ve finished with a garment you bring it in, where it will get recycled into the next batch of garments and you feel like you’re part of a story. So every single piece of material that goes into what you’re wearing on your body will go back into circulation and come back on somebody else’s body.
The stories and secrets our clothes can tell is the next frontier for fashion, Es reckons. And if like me you have been exploring second hand, and swapping your clothes with your friends, you will really feel this opening up. I like to think of Marilyn Monroe’s dress that she wore to sing Happy Birthday to JFK, that was worn again by Kim Kardashian to the 2022 Met Ball: imagine if that dress could tell us what happened on both those nights.
The act of putting on a second skin, having something close to your body that goes everywhere with you and is a co author of your day - the jacket you put on becomes the co author of the evening. That bag that experienced that meeting with me, or that encounter, or that kiss.
She urges us to treat our clothes as the protagonists and co-authors of our day to day lives.
The key to succeeding with Rule of Five, I am becoming convinced, is about building the value relationship we have with each of our garments. Treasuring them, nurturing them.
Es goes on to give advice to young fashion designers starting out to “use limitation and restriction as a resource”. She references a designer who stitched together a Dior dress and a Prada dress and praises the piece for "creating something new out of deadstock.”
We can decide that this is valuable; we can decide that this is beautiful. Beauty can be whatever we decide it is.
We have talked about the science behind our campaign (you can find the rundown from the climate group here), but I think this is rather beautiful as it talks about the art.
You can listen to the podcast here.
I write every week on fashion in my Substack It’s Not Sustainable. Last week I looked at the purpose, mission and values behind Veja, we have examined the climate impact of Phoebe Philo’s new brand and what happened when Asos crashed a climate summit.
I have written a great directory on mending and altering that will be published in the Sunday times this weekend - I’ll share it with this group next week.
I do hope you are all finding equal pleasure (not to mention extra cash in your pocket) as you learn to live with less. Please do let me know how you are getting on,
Tiff
this all sounds like poetry -- and so aligned with what we hope to achieve with objet.cc -- thanks for sharing Tiffanie