Stop Ghosting Your Closet: Fashion’s Attachment Problem
by Cheryl Lam
In a society defined by rapid change, garments often become obsolete not because they are worn out, but because they are no longer perceived as “new.” This psychological obsolescence, driven by fast fashion and social pressures, makes it increasingly difficult to form lasting connections with what we wear. Items designed to last only a few wears before falling apart or going out of style contribute to cycles of overconsumption and environmental harm.
Fast fashion – an industrialised, trend-driven approach to clothing production – has completely changed how we shop for clothes. It has also brought about serious consequences for people and the environment. The early 2000s saw the rise of this phenomenon, characterised by speed, mass production and low cost; according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, clothing utilisation (how often garments are worn before disposal) declined by almost 40% during this time. To keep consumers buying, brands externalized environmental and labour costs while accelerating production at unprecedented scales, leading to wastefulness, overproduction and exploitation of cheap labour. As material consumption increased, people found themselves with less time for what truly matters: relationships, community and rest. How did we come to trade long-term well-being for continuous consumption?
Sustainability Crisis
In this growth-logic industry, sustainability is often treated as a marketing tool rather than a guiding principle. It becomes a superficial label used to justify waste, overproduction and burnout – both environmental and emotional. Factories and warehouses overflow with unsold materials, while the pressure to produce more, faster and cheaper devalues both creativity and labour. What began as a movement grounded in ecological responsibility and ethical production has become so diluted that it risks losing its meaning altogether.
Too often, “sustainability” becomes a buzzword that conceals deeper systemic issues. This disillusionment raises a question: What if sustainability were rooted not in efficiency, but in care, slowness and attachment, valuing the relationships between people, garments and the memories they carry? Reframing fast fashion through intentionality, material honesty and emotional engagement may offer new possibilities for sustainable design practices grounded in these enduring values.
Relational Sustainability
Jonathan Chapman describes waste as “a symptom of expired empathy” (Chapman 2015:61). When there is no meaningful connection between consumer and product, cyclical patterns of desire and disposal emerge. Chapman’s concept of emotional durability – the ability of an object to remain meaningful over time – offers an alternative to disposability. Rather than focusing on a physical lifespan alone, it asks us to consider memory, attachment and significance as part of durability.
While environmental metrics remain crucial, Kate Fletcher (Fletcher 2010) and Lynda Grose (Fletcher & Grose 2012) extend this thinking through slow fashion and design activism, emphasising stewardship, time and intimacy in human-clothing relationships. Together, these perspectives challenge a system built on constant newness and disposability. Alternative forms of engagement with clothing – memory work, repair, co-creation, sensory reflection and lived attachment – can cultivate relational sustainability: an ethic of care and connection that intertwines material culture, emotion and everyday practice.
A Turning Point
But attachment to clothing is not only psychological – it is also deeply emotional, sensory and relational. In what ways do garments carry emotional durability across time, loss and wear, embodying memory, care and heritage? How might sensory connections be formed through touch, ritual and remembering become quiet acts of resistance within a culture of disposability?
Lived Experience
By repositioning sustainability around relationships between people, objects and time, clothing can be understood as something lived with rather than simply consumed. Material culture theory frames clothing as an archive of lived experience: a material record of the lives it has touched (Miller & Woodward 2008). Revisiting garments through journaling, photographing, collecting memories or simply handling them over time can reveal the emotional and sensory lives embedded within them.
If emotional durability depends on attachment, then perhaps sustainability begins not with buying differently, but with practices that encourage attention, learning how to look differently at garments we already own. It also asks us to slow down enough to notice what our clothing already holds, through repairing, remembering, photographing, exchanging stories, wearing garments repeatedly or remaking old clothing collaboratively. These slower acts challenge the logic of disposability by allowing garments to gather meaning rather than simply accumulate consumption. Clothes often outlast the moments they were made for, carrying traces of relationships, grief, celebration, labour and care long after trends disappear.
In fast fashion culture, traces of wear are often framed as failure: garments lose significance as they age, fade or show traces of use. Yet these marks – worn seams, fading fabric, stains and signs of repeated wear – become more than imperfections; they act as traces of intimacy, movement and lived experiences. In a culture that equates newness with value, such traces resist disposability by reminding us that meaning often deepens through use rather than despite it. Garments, in this sense, become intimate archives – material witness to everyday life. A leather jacket softened through years of wear, denim marked by movement and labour or a sweater inherited from someone no longer present each reveal how garments accumulate traces of lived experience long after their practical function ends.
Ethics of Care
If clothing can hold memory and emotional significance in this way, then design itself may need to shift from producing garments for rapid consumption toward creating conditions for attachment, participation and mindfulness – principles of relationship. bell hooks described love as an active ethic grounded in care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge (hooks 2001: 94). Applied to fashion, this ethic invites us to reconsider clothing not as disposable commodities, but as companions shaped through ongoing acts of use, repair, memory and care.
Conclusion
These threads of emotional durability, material memory and ethics of care reveal how sustainability might be understood not through the preservation of resources alone, but through preservation of meaning. We must consider not only how garments are made, but how they are lived with, remembered and cherished over time. Rather than attempting to “solve” fast fashion through efficiency, this perspective asks: what if we designed for relationships rather than trends?
By prioritising emotional richness, adaptability, memory and care, clothing becomes not disposable commodity, but the residue of a life well lived. When someone is gone, what changes fundamentally – and what is left behind? Often, clothing becomes one of the few material forms through which presence, memory and intimacy continue to endure. Emotional durability is therefore not only a design strategy, but a way of reimagining sustainability through continuity, attachment and care – learning how to remain in relationship longer with garments, materials, memories and one another.
Bibliography
Chapman, Jonathan (2015). Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy, 2nd Edition. Routledge.
“Fashion and the circular economy - deep dive” of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/fashion-and-the-circular-economy-deep-dive#:~:text=The%20current%20system%20for%20producing,of%20in%20under%20a%20year
Fletcher, Kate: “Slow Fashion: An Invitation for Systems Change”, in: Fashion Practice (2010), Volume 2, Issue 2, pp. 259-266. https://doi.org/10.2752/175693810x12774625387594
Fletcher, Kate and Grose, Lynda (2012): Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change. Laurence King Publishing Ltd.
hooks, bell (2001): All About Love. HarperCollins.
Miller, Daniel and Woodward, Sophie: “Manifesto for a study in denim”, in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008), pp. 335-351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0964-0282.2007.00024.x
BIO:
Cheryl Lam received a Bachelor of Science degree in Textiles and Apparel Design from the University of Texas at Austin in the U.S. and is a recent graduate of Akademie Mode & Design in Berlin, having completed her Master of Arts in Sustainability in Fashion and Creative Industries. With experience across Austin and Los Angeles, her work includes custom apparel design, bridal gowns, ready-to-wear women’s clothing, styling, and floral design. Her future research interests explore intentional design cultures that value continuity, connection, and meaning, with a particular focus on how slow culture, fashion, creativity, and psychology can intersect to shape contemporary creative practice.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cherylpaulettelam
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