What is a relationship with clothes?

Clothing is an inextricable part of our lives. It’s a daily necessity akin to shelter and food. It’s both universal and individual. This makes clothing big and abstract, but it’s simultaneously practical and personal. We can get philosophical about clothing; it reflects so much about our societies and cultures. It’s imbued with value, utility, and norms. Its changes and transformations define decades. We can also get extremely specific about clothing. A sweater clashes with a coat because the colors and textures don’t harmonise. A specific sneaker defines a decade of fashion. A dress in a certain fabric and length is the perfect choice for a summer wedding. 

Whether you’re someone who waxes poetic about the history, beauty, and utility of clothing, or someone who feels that they could care less, you have a relationship with clothes. Put simply, a relationship with clothes is how clothes make you feel and how you feel about clothes. It affects why you choose the items you choose, whether they’re trendy or classic, brightly colored or neutral. Your relationship with clothes affects how quickly you cycle through garments or hang on to them, how many clothes you have, and what you wear every day when you get dressed.

Framing how we feel about clothes as a relationship is helpful because it invites the same questions we use to evaluate our interpersonal relationships, which require quality time, care, and respect. This might look like cleaning, mending, repairing, curating, and organising clothes. If we continue to draw parallels, we might call a relationship with clothes that inspires feelings of excitement, confidence, and expression healthy. An unhealthy relationship with clothes might entail feelings of shame, guilt, overwhelm, and insecurity. Your relationship with clothes might not fit neatly into one of these categories. In fact, you might feel a range of these emotions and more across the spectrum on one given day or a shopping trip. 

Your experiences with clothing and shopping inevitably inform your relationship with clothes. Your identity also informs it. This means everyone’s relationship with clothes is as unique as they are.  A relationship with clothes is also in flux, changing with life events and personal transformation. It can never be unmoving because we are not unmoving - who we are and what our lives demand of us change. Clothes are, of course, a form of personal expression; what we wear is an externalisation of our personality and ideas. But clothes also feed and affect our emotional well-being. We imbue them with memories and select them based on our moods or our values. It’s a relationship that is reciprocal. How we feel about ourselves reflects in our clothes and how we feel about our clothes reflects in ourselves.

A relationship with clothes is, ultimately, a relationship with yourself.