My interest in research was budding when I was an undergraduate when I conducted a project about “fashion therapy.” I surveyed a number of young women with a depression measure and correlated that with some appearance modifying behaviors. The idea that modifying your appearance could boost confidence and mood resonated with me as a clothing user, and unsurprisingly, the data supported this. I smile a little embarrassingly now at how logical this seems. As my interest in consumer behavior research grew over the next 20 years, I learned about the social and psychological roots of our dress habits and was especially interested in the phenomenon of using others’ perceptions and judgments (which can never truly be concretely known), to shape our appearance and our identity. Research scholars in this area have primarily investigated how we develop and change our identity by using an endless stream of fashion products from the marketplace. This area of research has provided a foundational understanding of human tendencies in regard to consumer behavior. As an aside, I learned that my preoccupation with my appearance, known as appearance investment, has been correlated with social anxiety.
Unfortunately, this area of fashion scholarship has perpetuated a tendency to view human beings as only consumers.
As if everything we do should have a bottom line that can be economized.
From a Buddhist perspective, developing a self or identity is a spiritual venture that does not require material things. Also, the idea that we could shape some independent and unchanging identity is considered a great source of human suffering because it is an attempt to control something that is naturally changing all the time. Our identity or self is
impermanent. To think of it otherwise is to indulge the ego: the idea of ourselves that we want others to perceive (which is typically something really good and potentially unrealistic). We do not call it “the ego” in fashion literature, but most spiritual communities would identify it that way. And, if we use possessions to shape our ego via social comparison and competition, we will perpetually need newer and more possessions. Worst yet, we can become so attached to and dependent upon a singular idea of ourselves that it becomes difficult to change even when we want or need to. Our selves are supposed to change… often…and in the service of our greatest potential. Therefore, I refer to the broad area of fashion consumer behavior research as a scholarship of the ego. The primary focus of this literature, indeed, has been to understand how the social-psychology of getting dressed defines us as humans who buy things. Even today, the focus of this scholarship surrounds how this social process can be exploited for the sake of the bottom line, even research about sustainable consumption. My interests can be distinguished from this body of work by attempting to understand how human beings, as spiritual selves, might navigate material contexts differently to achieve a more conscious way of being in a consumerist society.
Make no mistake, getting dressed is a social process, and there is nothing inherently bad about that. The problem presents in the tendency to participate in this process unconsciously. Not only does the clothing we wear as our second skin directly impact our comfort, confidence, and interactions with others, it is a material object that is produced by the world’s most vulnerable workers, and its over production is at the heart of our environmental crisis. It’s worth taking a look at how we use it.
MINDFUL CLOTHING CONSUMPTION WEBINAR
JOYFUL CLOSET CONSUMPTION CHALLENGE
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