The Practices of Use

The ideas and practices of using garments make manifest the activities and skills of usership and point to an alternative relationship both with material objects and ourselves as people. Unlike the ‘skills’ of ownership, those of usership emphasise the potential for human actualisation, flourishing or ‘being’ alongside consuming and ‘having’. 

The practices of using clothes foreground attentiveness, intelligibility and the continuous process of taking care of fashion garments as a new type of fashion experience; where novelty is gained not from consumption but through practising the ‘craft of use’. Here use is framed not as a static act of purchase, but a process of learning, education and the development of new skills over time, linked within a broad-ranging language of goods reflecting the social nature of fashion.