Take care of your clothes and use them as long as you can. That’s concept designer and fashion communicator Hasmik Matevosyan’s green message. The line of reasoning in her project Clothes relationships is as follows. If we covet our clothes, they retain their quality for a longer period of time. And as we all know, the long-term use of clothes minimizes their environmental impact. What’s more, the space of time creates the opportunities for special relationships between clothes and their wearer. Again, the environment will benefit because a loving attitude towards our wardrobe is a clear counterbalance against the current trend in fast fashion and its concomitant throwawayism.
Clothes relationships calls for a mindswitch among consumers. Initiatives in sustainable fashion tend to focus on the production phase, even though environmental impacts of use and disposal are equally important. An ethically made, eco-friendly garment will not reduce our ecological footprint if it ends up on the landfill after a short period of use, will it? That’s why the Clothes relationships project aims to create an awareness of environmental issues at stake in the current global fashion industry as well as a full appreciation of our buys and wardrobe.
On her website Hasmik Matevosyan collects stories about people who foster a special relationship with their outfits. A street musician tells about his love of hats. A South African immigrant living in the Netherlands tells about the traditional scarf she has brought from her home country. And Hasmik herself writes about books that inspire her and shares advice about taking care of your clothes.
Addressing designers in particular, Matevosyan's website describes how consumers could become part of the fashion creation process. Online information about production and stores offering production on demand are central to this so-called relational design. In that way, designers can contribute to high quality relations between a garment and its wearer and hence indirectly reduce the environmental impacts of the fashion industry. But of course in the end, it’s up to us consumers to choose the greenest option.