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Unravelling neurodivergent sensory experiences with clothing

tobiasson on 17. November 2023

Author: Maureen Selina Laverty, PhD Candidate, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.

Aim

Wardrobe studies have formed an integral part of my PhD research entitled Sensory Nourishment. I collaborate with people who are neurodivergent: people on the autism spectrum, people with ADHD, people who experience the sensations in our environments at amplified, and often unbearable levels. This can have a profound impact on their well-being, disabling their interactions with the world around them. As a fashion designer I am concerned with the sensory inputs from our closest environment, our clothing. My objective with the wardrobe studies has been to identify neurodivergent individuals’ clothing triggers and glimmers.

Background

One participant described her body as “being too porous so too many of the wrong sensations get through. This leads to sensory overwhelm which is exhausting to process and very distressing for my body” (Anna, 36). The author Katherine May, who herself is on the autism spectrum, writes about sensations “that scream so loud that you want to retreat”. And how she “inhabit(s) a body that simply stops responding when it reaches its point of overwhelm.” (May, 2018) On the flipside, another informant explained that “with heightened sensitivities, the reward is high. When the sensory input is right, it is wonderful!” (Eva, 55).

Context

My adoption of a wardrobe methodology was inspired by an encounter I had with Herman, an autistic teenage boy. When visiting his home, I laid out the early prototypes for a knitted textile I was developing. He screwed up his face and pushed them away. He left the room. Sometime later Herman returned with his mother’s cashmere sweater. His eyes lit up as he pressed it against his cheek. He placed the sweater in my hands and said, “I want it to feel like this”. I visited Herman several times and we developed a very fluid dialogue through tangible objects that he would collect for me to feel. This encounter completely shifted my way of working as a designer. Rather than projecting my solutions onto a user, I saw the importance of being guided by their lived experiences and learning through the objects they surround themselves with in order to live well.

Wardrobe study in a home Photographer: Anders Myklebust

Recruitment

Over the last two years I have interviewed a further 70 neurodivergent informants. For some it is simply a quick chat. For others it has been a series of intensive meetings spanning a couple of years; our collaborative dialogue and articulation of sensory experiences sharpening with each rendezvous. The informants range from non-verbal children to active teenagers, to young professionals, to a factory worker and a diplomat in their 60s. They are all in mainstream education or full-time employment. The wardrobes I examine are situated mainly in Northern Europe: physically, culturally, and climatically.

Adaptation of methodology

I use the term wardrobe both literally and metaphorically (Klepp & Bjerck, 2014). My intention was to visit each participant’s physical wardrobe in their home. For most participants that has been the case. However, for some it felt too intimate. So, they packed up the contents of their wardrobes into shopping bags and brought them to nearby cafes. For a few, the loud background sounds of a cafe were too overwhelming, so they let me rummage through their drawers in the privacy of their work offices. I embraced every opportunity for a wardrobe study, even unpacking the contents of someone’s suitcase at a conference. Covid-19 restrictions meant that sometimes there was a computer screen partitioning me from the wardrobe. The adaptability of the wardrobe methodology was key, in particular with participants who are non-verbal or have communication challenges. The red thread through each adaptation was a sensory ethnographic approach that was “not so much to study other people’s sensory values and behaviours, but to collaborate with them to explore and identify these.” (Pink, 2009)

Stories from meetings with wardrobes

Stine, 26, Researcher
Study Location: Community project & her home

Stine anticipated some knee and hip flexing as we shovelled the ground so some stretch in the trousers was essential. She also anticipated that the ground might be abrasive. Toughness was therefore an equally important characteristic to ease of movement. She had settled on a pair of jeans with a little elastic content. However, she now regretted that decision as the hardware from the waistband was digging into her abdomen as she loaded stones from the ground into a wheelbarrow. Her trousers restricted this bending action by tightening the fabric across her obliques. This particular sensation is a daily obstacle for Stine. It can become so overwhelming that she cannot concentrate on anything else. Over several meet-ups, in Stine’s home, we refined the description of this sensation as akin to that of a stranger slowly sliding their hand around your waist. The sensation approaches from behind. You can’t quite process it until it’s too late. Physically you feel restricted. Emotionally you feel violated. Socially you don’t want to cause a scene.

Left: Stine climbing trees in her jeans
Right: Laila choreographing with her snowsuit
Photographer: Anders Myklebust

Laila, 4, Barnehagebarn (Kindergarten-kid)
Study Location: Her parent’s apartment

As Laila’s mother led me inside, Laila started to scream and cry. She lay down on the floor, clinging on with determination. Growing tired, Laila wandered off. Her mother nudged my gaze towards the porch. Laila pulled the snowsuit up over her legs and let it rest at her waist. She put her right arm inside a padded sleeve, and then her left. She shrugged it up over her shoulders. Ever so slowly and with great attention she pulled up the zipper with her tiny hands. She then pulled the hood over her head and sighed. As she blocked out the room the crying stopped, the incessant movement subsided, the screaming ceased. Then Laila reversed these actions. The snowsuit was around her ankles once again. She repeated the dressing actions. Then the undressing. Again, again and again.

Tom, 38, Innovation Manager
Study Location: Many cafés

Given the snowstorm outside, it was quite peculiar to be greeted by a bottle of sunscreen placed in the middle of our table. Tom explained that he thought it would be helpful to begin with an abstract of sorts, an executive summary of his sensory dislikes. These were embodied in the bottle of sunscreen: perfumed smell, coldness, slimy texture, someone else must touch you to put it on your back. From under the table, Tom pulled out his comfort shirt from a shopping bag. He let me take it home so I could live with it. Its synthetic fibres and overlocked seams contradicted every other participant’s preference so far. The others exclusively wore natural fibres, covered up thick seams and cut out every label.

Some weeks later, Tom and I met so I could return the shirt. He had kept notes on a new tweed blazer he had bought. Standing in front of the mirror in the store, he had concluded that it fitted his body perfectly. Across the back there was an ease of movement, and the cut was flattering. It projected the confidence of the character he wanted to inhabit at Monday’s presentation. However, on Monday morning, the blazer inhabited him. Tom is very animated with his arms as he presents. The blazer was catching on the top of his inner arm. A catching that restricted him physically and distracted him mentally. This catching made a sound. The longer he wore the jacket the smell of the fabric became more potent. “I couldn’t find a way to decode the experience, it was eating me up, it was almost animalistic, like an animal on my back with the sound and the smell and the restriction to my arms.”

Tom’s sunscreen and comfort shirt Photographer: Anders Myklebust

Examples of insights

Cheap construction, as a result of fast fashion, is one of the main culprits for sensory overwhelm: synthetic fibres, roughly overlocked seams, careless labelling, restrictive cuts.
Natural fibres are overwhelmingly preferred because of tactility, smell, sound, and thermal regulation. However, tactile perception, preferences and vernacular vary between participants. For some cashmere is a “soft” fabric. For others cashmere has small hairy fibres that cling to the skin. Such participants describe a smooth shirting cotton as “soft”.
Dominant fashion design practices are traditionally visual and static in their conception of clothing (Skjold, 2018). The wardrobe studies allowed me to see clothing as an act of dressing, a practice of wearing, a series of dynamic actions. This has shifted the moving body to the forefront of my design process.
The potential for movement facilitates a physical freedom that is inextricably linked to emotional freedom: freedom of choice, freedom from judgement, freedom to move through the day free from distractions and restrictions.
Comfort is more than simply soft materials or a lack of constraint. It is being able to comfort yourself at times of great discomfort. It is being comfortable with how you are socially presented: “the embedded meanings so implied, can be a source of ease and calm – or its reverse.” (Twigg, 2010)
Clothing has the potential to activate pleasant sensory stimulation that overrides or dampens problematic sensory inputs from other sources.

Outcomes

The analysis of these wardrobe studies will be published in my PhD monograph (anticipated in 2024). A second component to my PhD is the translation of this analysis into my design practice. Currently I am working with three participants to create a garment each by designing out the depleting sensory inputs and indulging the sensations that nourish. The anticipated result is a series of iterative prototypes whose contribution is less about the final product and more about a way of working. Ethnography is no longer confined to defining design needs. I am now integrating applied ethnography within my design process.

The project has also received innovation funding from NTNU Discovery with the ambition of embedding the wardrobe study insights within the fashion industry by advising companies on more considered approaches to how we craft sensory experiences in terms of design, manufacturing, and shopping.

References

Klepp, I.G. and Bjerck, M. (2014) A Methodological Approach to the Materiality of Clothing: Wardrobe Studies. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17(4), pp. 373-386.

May, K. (2018) The Electricity of Every Living Thing. London: Trapeze.

Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. 1st edn. London: SAGE Publications Inc.

Skjold, E. (2018) Making sense of dress: On sensory perspectives of wardrobe research. Artifact: Journal of Design Practice, 5(1), pp. 4.1-4.15.

Twigg, J. (2010) Clothing and dementia: A neglected dimension? Journal of Aging Studies, 24(4), pp. 223-230.

Wardrobe Clearance: A Post-Mortem Methodology

tobiasson on 17. November 2023

Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture, University of Brighton, UK

In 2019, I shadowed an English house clearance company who clear unwanted goods from homes to observe what happens to clothes at the end of a life, to understand commercial decisions about clothes’ value, and to follow garments’ afterlives. The company followed has a business model typical of the sector. Across a week, clothes are moved out of wardrobes, into the secondhand market, where they move through declining scales of value until they are given away for free. At the end of the process, unwanted garments are incinerated. This practice offers a microcosm of textile turnover; following each stage sheds light on how cultural and financial value is constructed, and how waste is classified and produced.

Bonmarché, dressing gowns 2019. Photo: Annebella Pollen

Methodology

The study followed a single company on a single job relating to a single person (a recently deceased widowed woman in her eighties). Using a social biography method – considering commodities as persons with social and cultural lives (Kopytoff 1986) – I followed the contents of this woman’s wardrobe, as her garments moved through sequential stages. To interpret the clothes and the process, I utilised a material culture methodology that foregrounds the things with which the social and cultural world is populated and with which it communicates. Objects’ movements, meanings and status shifts are shaped by their materiality; what they are made of and how they are made, by whom, matters.

I considered ‘the wardrobe’ not only as an assemblage of clothing but as a container of meaning and as a mobile site through which clothing flows. Gregson and Beale (2004) demonstrate the utility of social biographical approaches in garments’ existences and afterlives when they reflect on the mobilities of accumulation and divestment. “Clothes circulate”, they argue. “They have lives with their initial possessors and lives which may exceed them.” Woodward (2007) argues that worn clothing not only narrates the lives of its wearers in its use and disposal but, by extension, that individual garments can be read as material archives or indexes; together they form a body of biographical material.

The dressing gown, 2019. Photo: Annebella Pollen

The study was underpinned by empirical observation of disposal and dispersal at three key points—the cleared house, the waste processing site, and the reselling location — and by interviews with those who make choices about what to keep and what to trade, as well as with those who buy it and sell it on. All involved – wearers, sellers, users and destroyers – were anonymised.

Findings

The clothes were mostly daily wear designed for comfort, bought new from middle-market British high street locations, particularly Bonmarché. I researched Bonmarché business practices, particularly its connection to the Rana Plaza garment factory that collapsed to devastating effect in 2013 in Bangladesh, killing 1,134 people and injuring 2,500 more. I thus traced garments from their production site – wherever labour is cheapest – to their life in a British woman’s wardrobe, then back into the secondhand market, where they may be bought and used locally, or be picked up by low-paid migrant workers who ship garments back to the Global South.

The central garment case study was a stained polyester dressing gown. This was among the intimate wardrobe items selected by house clearers for waste processing; it did not even enter the secondhand circuit. As the clearer told me, it is more work to pack and unload such material, only to reload and dump it at the end of the market, than to dump in advance. I consequently examined garments whose meanings cannot be revalued in secondhand cultures of vintage shopping, typically bedwear, underwear and clothes associated with illness and death. I also scrutinised the dressing gown’s material, as a plastic polymer fibre garment whose deterioration is not marked by the wasted aesthetic effects of denim or leather, and which is not associated with garment recycling’s fashionable and pleasurable performances. As Stanes and Gibson (2017) observe, of artificial fibres in the recycling economy, “polyester’s materiality—its very plasticity— unleashes an unsettling set of contradictory relations” in its Western users and re-users, including discomfort, disgust, sweatiness and neglect. As such, polyester garments have become the overlooked stuff of fashion waste.

Implications

My study contributes new perspectives on the little-researched house clearance industry. While part of a wider secondhand practices that have been thoroughly documented, house clearances are particular. They can be unregulated operators at the bottom end of the secondhand chain, intersecting the antiques trade, refuse disposal and the death industry. Their operations may be opaque, but they are often the first brokers of goods as they move from first-hand usage to second-hand repurposing or disposal. The decisions clearers make about the value of clothing have fundamental effects on its later direction and meaning. The study also scrutinised garments that are not usually examined. Stained polyester bedwear is not a treasured item with vintage value; it lacks romantic patina. I argue, however, that is important to examine what is culturally unwanted. Together, my microcosmic study pays attention to bigger processes that are overlooked, whether for discretion, trade secrecy, or to hide the unpalatable truths of the global inequalities that sit beneath first world fashion pleasures.

The waste disposal site, 2019. Photo: Annebella Pollen

The research was firstly shared at a 2019 Design History Society conference panel dedicated to understanding fashion practices beyond mainstream systems of financial value. It was adapted for the 2021 conference and 2022 JOMEC journal special issue on Secondhand Cultures in Unsettled Times. It has been used to provide wider context for the artistic practices of Lloyd Corporation, an artist duo who examine the cultural movement of goods outside the mainstream. This has taken the form of a talk accompanying a 2022 exhibition at Centre for Contemporary Art, Brighton, and a commissioned catalogue essay, ‘The Social Life of Unwanted Clothes’, for the exhibition’s reiteration at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery, London (‘Today’s Gift is Tomorrow’s Commodity. Yesterday’s Commodity is Tomorrow’s Found Art Object. Today’s Art Object is Tomorrow’s Junk. And Yesterday’s Junk is Tomorrow’s Heirloom’). Finally, it formed a contribution to the 2022-23 workshops, ‘Overcoming Secondhand Challenges’, organised at University of Cardiff, which brought together academics and secondhand stakeholders to consider ways to reduce waste, strengthen systems of repair, and build community in the sector.

References

Gregson, N. and Beale, V. 2004. Wardrobe matter: The sorting, displacement and circulation of women’s clothing. Geoforum 35, pp. 689–700.

Kopytoff, I. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In Appadurai, A. ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64-92.

Pollen, A. 2022. Emptying the wardrobe, clearing the house: A microcosmic view into the creation and destruction of clothing value. JOMEC: Journal of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies 27, pp. 34-54

Stanes, E. and Gibson, C. 2017. Materials that linger: An embodied geography of polyester fabrics. Geoforum, 85, pp. 27-36.

Woodward, S. 2007. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Berg.

Irene Maldini – Comparative study of personalized and ready-made wardrobes in the Netherlands

ingridha on 13. September 2023

Irene Maldini, at the time (2017/2018) affiliated to the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as a PhD candidate. Background in industrial design, design for sustainability, design history and theory.

Picture showing the shared wardrobe of respondents 14A (left) and 15A (right), both users of custom-made clothing. — Shared wardrobe of respondents 14A (left) and 15A (right), both users of custom-made clothing.

Aim of the study: scientific knowledge creation

Definition of terms:

Personalised garments: garments involving the user in their design, and being produced on demand (resulting from bespoke tailoring, made-to-measure, mass customization, home or self-production and do-it-yourself)
Ready-made garments: garments produced without user input
Personalised wardrobes: Wardrobes including at least ten personalised garments
Ready-made wardrobes: Wardrobes including only ready-made garments

Hypotheses:

Personalised wardrobes are smaller than ready-made wardrobes
Personalised wardrobes’ inflow is smaller than ready-made wardrobes’ inflow
personalised items are used more often than ready-made garments
personalised items are kept for a longer time than ready-made garments

Inspiration: Available wardrobes studies at the time including the methods in the “Opening up the wardrobe” book.

Novelty: comparative and quantitative approach.

Participants:

	Definition	Description and recruitment
Respondent group P	Subjects whose wardrobes include at least ten personalised garments (personalised wardrobes)	20 subjects recruited from our network. 10 respondents are consumers of custom-made clothing and 10 make clothes for their own use.
Respondent group R	Subjects whose wardrobes do not include personalised garments (ready-made wardrobes)	Control group. 20 subjects with similar demographic characteristics to (and mostly indicated by) participants in respondent group P.

The wardrobe studies included 40 subjects living in different provinces of the Netherlands. The group is varied in terms of age (22 to 71 years old), gender (24 females and 16 males, equally distributed in groups P and R), household composition (living alone, in couples, with children, or in shared households) and income (from <20,000 € to > 80,000 € annual gross income per household). Most of respondents live in cities, but ten subjects live in villages and towns; these are equally distributed in groups P and R.

Protocol:

Includes a complete wardrobe audit and registration of all garments coming in and out of the wardrobe in a 6-month period (the latter completed by 25 of the 40 participants). In group P, two garment types including both personalized and ready-made garments are chosen by respondents, for instance all sweaters and cardigans, or all trousers. They are requested to organise such items in 5 categories based on usage (used always, frequently, average, rarely and never) and age (old, relatively old, average, relatively new and new).

Picture showing the storage space in respondent 11B’s bedroom, including bags with clothes, which were integrated in the wardrobe study. — Storage space in respondent 11B’s bedroom, including bags with clothes, which were integrated in the wardrobe study.

Analysis:

The number of items owned by both respondent groups were statistically compared, as were the number of items coming in their wardrobes in a 6-month period. No statistical differences were found.

For the comparison of age and usage in personalised and ready-made garments (same user and garment type), the number of personalised and ready-made items in each of the five categories listed above were documented, we assigned a value to each category, and divided the total value by the number of items in the garment type (keeping personalised and ready-mades separately). Lastly, we statistically compared the resulting score for personalised and ready-mades items in the same garment type, further using data visualisation to discuss the qualitative findings.

No statistical difference was found for garment usage. For garment age, and contrary to one of the study hypotheses, the age of ready-made garments was bigger than that of the personalised garments, meaning that ready-mades were kept for longer.

Results:

None of the hypotheses of the study was confirmed, but we expected that to be the case. The hypotheses were based on the assumptions of other people in the field, and we suspected that these did not meet reality.

Unexpected finding:

The results of the inflow-outflow exercise made me realise that the whole idea of reducing the demand of clothing based on product lifetime extension did not apply in reality, because clothing consumption dynamics do not follow a logic of replacement. Keeping a garment in the wardrobe, even if it is actively used, does not stop people to purchase other items. Inflow and outflow are only sometimes and indirectly connected. This finding, which was not considered in the design of the study, has been central in my work since then.

Picture shows weaters and cardigans owned by respondent 11A (a knitter) organized according to use frequency (from used “never” to “always”). — Sweaters and cardigans owned by respondent 11A (a knitter) organized according to use frequency (from used “never” to “always”).

Development of methods since then:

Wardrobe audits (counting the number of garments owned) have been used by others before and after this study.

Methods partially based on the inflow-outflow registration are being used by Vilde Haugrønning in her PhD (which I co-supervise). Moreover, I am planning a new research project using such an approach for all consumer goods in the household. This method can give insights about clothing consumption dynamics, the relations among garments and the causes and consequences of wardrobe movements (inflow and outflow).

To my knowledge, the quantitative comparison of garments used to assess age and usage has not been further developed or used. This (more complex) method can have a variety of uses. For instance, to compare the use value of garments made of different materials or shapes. This method was developed after testing other ways of understanding garment age and use frequency that did not work. People do not remember how long they have owned things or how often they use them. However, comparing is much easier for them and they are more confident about their responses. That was a main reason to use this method, next to the possibility of analyzing the data quantitatively.

Use of results since then:

This study has been referenced by others to question the environmental value of product personalization. The limitation of durability (the secondary finding of the study) has had more repercussions, due to the importance given to product longevity in clothing environmental policy. We (OsloMet colleagues and I) have referred to this study in numerous policy briefings, reports, articles, and talks to explain why the focus needs to be placed on production volumes rather than product durability, expecting that volumes will be reduced in an indirect way.

Recommendation:

Always run a pilot of your study and analyze the results before designing the final study

This study has been key in the following publications:

Maldini, Irene, Pieter J. Stappers, Javier C. Gimeno-Martinez, and Hein A. M. Daanen. 2019. “Assessing the Impact of Design Strategies on Clothing Lifetimes, Usage and Volumes: The Case of Product Personalisation.” Journal of Cleaner Production 210:1414–24. (sciencedirect.com)

Maldini, Irene. 2019. “From Speed to Volume: Reframing Clothing Production and Consumption for an Environmentally Sound Apparel Sector.” Pp. 519–24 in 3rd Product Lifetimes and the Environment conference, edited by N. F. Nissen and M. Jaeger-Erben. Berlin: TU Berlin. (researchgate.net)

Maldini, Irene and Pieter J. Stappers. 2019. “The Wardrobe as a System: Exploring Clothing Consumption through Design Fiction.” Journal of Design Research 17(1):3–25. (researchgate.net)

Maldini, Irene, Vilde Haugrønning, and Lucrecia De León. 2023. “Studying Clothing Consumption Volumes through Wardrobe Studies: A Methodological Reflection.” Pp. 610–16 in Proceedings of the 5th PLATE conference, edited by K. Niinimäki and K. Cura. Espoo: Aalto University. (kth.diva-portal.org)

Wardrobe inventories combined with inflow and outflow of garments in 15 Norwegian households

ingridha on 12. May 2023

Vilde Haugrønning, PhD Candidate, Consumption Research Norway, Oslo Metropolitan University

My story of using wardrobe studies is based on the study I conduct as part of my PhD project, which is based in the CHANGE project. The aim of my PhD is to study how women’s and men’s clothing consumption in everyday life impact the material flow of garments in wardrobes and clothing volumes. The study is anchored in consumption studies and combines various methods that builds on the methodological approach of wardrobe studies. My project builds specifically on the hypothesis of the CHANGE project, which is that the specialisation of clothing for occasions and the expectations of variety are two aspects that are likely to have a big impact on the volume. To explore this hypothesis, the main objective is to study the constitutive elements of practice that influence clothing consumption and how this is influenced by gender.

The fieldwork is conducted in Norway and involves home visits to 15 Norwegian households with a man and a woman. Participants were recruited through various channels on social media and through personal networks. Potential participants were asked to fill out an online form and from this a sample of 15 households were selected. Since the overall perspective in this study is clothing consumption in everyday life, the participants were not recruited based on an interest in clothing or fashion, even though some had a stronger interest than others. The most important recruitment criteria were that the household consisted of a man and a woman, as the study aims to compare social constructs of gender. In addition, it was aimed to have a variety of informants in terms of age, occupation, location, and interests. The final sample consists of a variety of households from four different counties on Norway, from both urban and rural areas. Ages varies from late 20s to early 70s, some of the participants are retired, some live in houses and some in apartments, and some have children living at home.

The data collection has two phases and two visits in total to each household. The first phase involves a wardrobe inventory combined with a semi-structured interview. In this visit, two researchers, myself and my colleague Ingrid Haugsrud, are present. The participants are asked to count all the clothing they have access to, including underwear, socks and accessories but excluding shoes. The counting takes place with one participant at a time in front of their wardrobes, storage spaces or other places in the home where they store clothing. We use a template form to count the clothing based on garment categories and for each garment we ask what it is used for or what occasion it belongs to. After this, the counting form is transcribed and gives an overview of each participant’s wardrobes and its content. For example, the number of dresses for summer or number of trousers for the everyday.

The second phase starts at the end of the counting exercise, and the participants are asked to download an app that they will use to document inflow and outflow of garments for the next 6 months. This includes all the garments they acquire, make themselves or are gifted and garments that are donated or disposed of. The participants take photographs of the garments and upload them in the app, which also has a reminder function to keep them engaged. After 6 months, I conduct a final interview with the participants to talk about the garments they have documented.

The analysis and presentation of findings is yet to be done in my project, but the preliminary findings from phase 1 show that female participants have more clothing than male. By comparing the wardrobes and the different occasions attached to the garments, it is possible to see tendencies for why the women had more clothing. For example, several of the female informants have more clothing for everyday occasions and for party and formal occasions. Therefore, one of the reasons for the difference in the amount of clothing is likely to be related to the different expectations and conventions of gender roles in dressing for occasions and in varying between clothing for the same occasion.

From phase 2, I hope that the results can give insights into the dynamics of wardrobes from a volume perspective to better understand clothing quantities and the turnover rate of garments going in and out of wardrobes. For future research, I believe that doing a wardrobe study that involves a quantitative aspect, such as counting the whole or parts of the wardrobe, can give important insight to the content of wardrobes from a volume perspective. This could also be combined with a use frequency aspect, to investigate the connections between clothing quantities and the daily use of clothing.

As a final note, I would emphasise the data richness that wardrobe studies provide and the peculiarity of this way of doing field research, as people open up their wardrobes to complete strangers. There is something unique in being able to access people’s most intimate spaces through their clothing and hearing stories about good, bad and ordinary clothes.

Clothing longevity: the relationship between the number of users, how long and how many times garments are used

Lisbeth Løvbak Berg on 28. May 2021

Kirsi Laitala & Ingun Grimstad Klepp

Abstract

Reuse of clothing is a central strategy in circular economy for keeping the resources and materials in the loop longer. This paper studies the correlation between clothing service lifespans measured in years, number of wears and number of users, and whether there is a difference in length of lifespans between new and preowned garments. The analysis is based on an international quantitative wardrobe survey conducted in China, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA with 53 461 registered garments. Results show that newer garments are used more actively than the older garments. Garments that are less than two years old are used about 30 times per year, while garments that are over 15 years old are only used about 3 times a year. Second-hand garments are worn on average 30% times less by the current user than garments that were acquired as new. Garments that the user anticipates donating or selling are worn 22% times less than garments that are planned to be discarded. The results show that reuse is beneficial for increasing the clothing lifespans, but it does not increase the active wear as much as expected. These findings have theoretical, managerial and political implications on which measures contribute to the longest garment lifespans with the least environmental impact and which kind of measures could help to implement these changes. This should be considered in life cycle assessments where various disposal methods are compared, as well as in policy development where in increasing the lifespan with first user should be focused more on.

Laitala et al_2021_Clothing longevity The relationship Download