Caring for Fashion by Doing the Laundry

Wearing has long been the primary act of fashion, yet fashion consumers additionally engage in a complex, interactive relationship with garments when they are not worn. This paper explores the nuanced relationship between care and fashion consumption by examining the acts of care involved in doing the laundry. In identifying laundry as a series of seemingly small quasi-events that intertwine identity, social norms, and cultural consumption, caring for fashion can be reframed by abstracting typical laundry acts, such as progressing folding into a caring act of holding. Common consumption patterns and behaviours can be altered by disrupting standard laundry practices and engaging consumers in care activities based on joy, fulfilment, or even frustration. Examining how we consume fashion objects in our homes through the laundry basket can provide further insight into body-object relationships from the perspectives of care, maintenance, and dependence. This can thereby redefine expressions of bonding and our engagement with material culture by suggesting the consumption of acts as opposed to things as a means to care for fashion.