I don't give a shit about fashion.

Give me stories.

Far and away, my favorite thing about working in fashion is hearing stories from older people about significant garments from their family or childhood.

Last night, just before closing up the store, my coworker called me up front from my desk to meet our last customer of the day who bought a beautiful coat we have this season. (I love it when she does this-- we just gush over the woman, and we're all buzzed in a glow of apparel delight.)

This was an older Italian woman, a long-time customer. She came into the store, zeroed in on this coat my colleague had just brought out to the floor that day, and bought it with no deliberation or hesitation. We were both in awe of her decisiveness.

She told us a storycito (to borrow a phrasing from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes) about being a young girl in Italy in the 1960s, and going with her family to visit an aunt in the city. It was the first time she had ever gone to a department store. She tried on a linen summer suit, asked her mom if they could buy it, and she walked out of the store in it. The woman knows what she likes, and always has, it seems.

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To me, this is not a story about conspicuous consumption, or vanity, or some other puritanical, misogynistic epithet that people think counts as critique when it comes to fashion (cue Andre Leon Talley's imperious glare).

This is a story about this woman's personality and identity, a story about her memories of her family, about development and urbanization in Italy and how it paralleled with her own coming of age as a teenager.

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I've been really struggling this year with -- how shall I say this -- giving a shit about fashion, or marketing, or product design, or consumer products, which is the nexus that appears to be my career lately.

Certainly, I'm wary of the vagaries of the economy, having been out of work for most of 2018, and still recovering financially and emotionally. I'm also weary of the bread-and-circuses of fashion and product design in general, with Instagram and Youtube having turned every teenager into a faux-connoisseur with a bullhorn to their context-less opinions. There's the rolling frontier of the fast manufacturing juggernaut, as brands seek the next up-and-coming populace to exploit for the least cost. And then there's the looming climate apocalypse, fueled in no small part by the turn to polyester, acrylic, and other highly-processed, petroleum-based fibers. All of which has created unprecedented churn which sends shipping containers full of "dead white men's clothes" back to those same developing economies....

How can we go about business as usual when this economy is not going to persist in a climate that cannot support life as we know it? How can I give a shit about paying my student loans and striving for professional accomplishment, when the local economy of my state has some of the widest wealth and health disparities in this country, when our cities are being gentrified from beneath the feet of Black and brown families who have built them up?

I can't take it. This is not something I want to participate in.

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I spent a lot of time this summer at my parents' semi-rural acre, helping my dad with yard work, clearing out some invasive vines, foraging the wild blackberries and an errant grapevine that keeps popping up on the back slope. I've been reading a lot about homesteading and permaculture, and I tried my hand at food preservation for the first time, canning some local peaches and making a tiny batch of what I would call wild grape ketchup...

In my own apartment, I've been tending my houseplants and annoying my partner with inconvenient waste reduction schemes. (He'll thank me during the apocalypse.)

I fantasize about stewarding a piece of land, growing my own food, feeding chickens, and having nothing at all to do with the consumer economy...

And five days a week, I still drive an hour each way -- by myself, in a car -- to sell polyester clothes to people who don't "need" them.

I don't give a shit about small, local, vertically-integrated, closed-loop fashion. I don't care about developing new technology to recycle or upcycle extant garments. I don't want to read another article about the next sanctified organic, handmade brand sending girls to school and lifting women out of poverty.

How can I care? It's all going to carbon-hell in an Ikea handbasket.

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I'm finally getting around to reading Surviving the Future, a condensation of David Fleming's work, Lean Logic (my copy was gifted to those of us who attended the localization conference put on by BALE in Vermont in 2017).

As edited by Shaun Chamberlin, Fleming critiques the typical conservationist framing of needs vs. wants in Chapter 7: "consumption in response to our needs is justifiable and sustainable, but consumption in response to our wants is not." Needs = good, wants = bad. Further, non-material wants = okay (singing, hiking, painting); material wants = bad.

(Pausing to breathe deeply here, because as the descendant of New English and Scots-Irish Protestants, the generational trauma of guilt, repression, and deprivation around personal expression and desire is a bit triggering...)

In an industrial, consumption-based market, according to Fleming, producers create the wants along with the goods to satisfy them, while marketers manipulate that desire and place consumers on a wheel of ever-increasing desire. (Hello, I'm in marketing, here is your wheel.)

Yet in the post-peak-oil world, as in pre-market societies, Fleming points out, material goods will have meaning beyond their practical function. In long-gone local communities, "agricultural implements, household goods and weapons, along with houses, churches, fields and wells, were decorated, blessed and given names." As a tool of communication, goods outlined social relationships: status, loyalties, obligations, belonging.

Food has lost its implicit role in reciprocal giving and household interaction (see: the foodie movement, which emerged after Fleming's writing). Sport has been reduced to winning (and its ROI of sponsorship), no longer having much to do with ceremony and play.

In the cash economy, fashion is homogenous and anonymous because currency has replaced the social symbolism of belonging and courtesy inherent in local dress: "it does not matter who you are, so long as your money is good."

While there is certainly good in flattening the signifiers of wealth and exploitation inherent in much of historical clothing, much more is lost when local tailors and others involved in local textile production are displaced by t-shirts and sweatpants literally dumped in the market (not to mention the plastic microfilaments aggregating in the world's oceans from our oil-based fabrics).

The expression of identity and personality, including family or geographic background, are beautiful, valuable cultural products that we lose when all fashion is mass and fast.

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Is this enough to make me care again?

My work on Manuma was predicated on this idea of cultural specificity, attempting to frame traditional skills and materials within modern lifestyles. My Poesia Graminia project was an exploration of local weeds and local waste as a source of material production and decoration.

Are these ideas worth elaborating, as skills and frameworks of thinking that will make life worth living under the probably-arduous constraints of the energy draw-down?

Will we want or need to forge social bonds through the stories of our garments, our hairstyles, the way we decorate our homes?

My own possessions are full of significance to me, to the consternation of my partner who treats everything in our house like his tools at work which are durable, replaceable (on the company's dime), and power-washable. Precious to me are the potato peeler from my mom, the wool blanket my dad bought for me, the hat made by my grandma, my childhood coin bank, the chair made by my great-great-uncle...

I think this points to what draws me in to retail, and blurs the boundaries for me around the arts, craft, design, our constructed environments-- I always want to hear the stories of people's connection to the material things they select and display in their own lives. They are the physical context of the intangible memories and qualities of our personalities and experiences.

And because the stories are inherent in the objects, we cannot deprive ourselves of one and expect to keep the other. We've tried to have objects without meaning, and in the postwar industrial orgy, that has lead us straight to climactic ruin. Without our material possessions, our memories and stories will fade within a couple of generations at most.

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So that's a shred of something for me to hold onto - at least, to quell my ancestral and ecological guilt over participating in this soul-and-planet-killing economic system.

I suspect the coming climate catastrophe will force my choices on this.

For now, I'll hold out for good stories until I pay off my student loans at age 85 and can finally buy the isolated, self-sufficient permaculture farm of my dreams.

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I'm a Parsons-trained fashion designer, with a background in anthropology and human rights. I also read every book on historical dress in my local public library a dozen times before age 18. I occasionally blog about sustainable lifestyle and design at ManumaStyle.com. My hobbies include collecting other people's trash and talking to my houseplants. This article also appears on Medium.