‘The last thing I would think about is how to dispose of it’: Fashion competence and the circularity of inactive wardrobe items

Amid the criticism of fast fashion brands regarding their valorising of a lifestyle that prioritises ‘newness’ over durability, blame is also apportioned to fashion consumers for their wasteful and irresponsible consumption. However, fashion consumers’ unremarkable ‘hoarding’ practices pose questions concerning the very notion of wastefulness and the moralised criticisms of them. The contradictory clothing disposal and hoarding practices call for an analytical shift in the study of fashion culture and sustainable consumption beyond the moment of acquisition. Drawing on Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar’s conceptualisation of ‘competence’, we coin the term and theorise various forms of fashion competence – as an evolving evaluative device – to explain why certain clothing items are considered unwearable by the owner, yet still remain unworn in the wardrobe. Such competence reflects the material culture of the wearer’s specific spatial and temporal setting: a mixture of normative expectations and personal resources that dictate whether and when an owned piece is valuable, useful, impaired, disposable, or reusable, thus moving objects across different moments of consumption. Distinct from a predominant focus on Western, straight and female consumers, our exemplary study of 21 Hong Kong gay male consumers’ ‘limbo’ wardrobe items challenges existing scholarships which crudely pathologise hoarding behaviours as obsessive human–object relationships, overemphasising individual autonomy in clothing choices, and also complements the Western-centric concept of a circular economy as a universalist organised system to minimise waste and the environmental impact of consumption across contexts. By uncovering and re-narrating the ‘inactive’ wardrobe stories, we look into other intertwined factors – technical, material, practical, cultural, social, symbolic, affective – that facilitate or hinder the revitalisation of inactive fashion items, and reveal the actual environmental challenges and opportunities through different stages of consumption.