Everything that my garments have experienced I have also

My clothes are alive, feeling, growing: they’re just like me. I started this project by investigating my relationship with my garments and realizing that they are more than just something that I cover myself with — old and new memories flow around every one of them. Everything I've been through my clothes have also. And I wonder, how have they experienced it so far? Our relationship then must be very important.

‘Everything that my garments have experienced I have also’ is a series of photographs of my garments that are intertwined to letters that I wrote to them, using an empathic approach to care for them and reflect on my own behavior towards fast fashion consumption.

This project is very personal to me and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It started from something professor Julia Valle mentioned in one of our initial lectures: “Your clothes are alive, everything is fluid and flexible”. From this point I started questioning myself, okay clothes are alive but what does that mean? Nowadays garments are becoming more alive with biomaterials or “smart” textiles, so garments being alive is not something impossible. (Photo 1)

With this project analog photography seemed as the perfect medium to explore my relationship with my garments, as I usually shoot portraits of my friends I thought why not do the same to my living garments.

The process was very intuitive for me, not how I’m used to work. I tried to plan things out but It just didn’t work out, I just grabbed my garments and went to places that are meaningful to me or places where I would like to make new memories with some of the unworn clothes, hoping that my clothes would also feel what I feel. (Photo 2)

I learned so much about my behavior during this project, I’m changing and trying to value and appreciate my garments, they still have such a long life to go and I cannot throw them away just because they stopped being fashionable. My wardrobe changes a bit with the seasons of course, so some garments are left in storage while others come to life— I’m still making new memories with all my clothes and that really excites me.