Fabricating Fashion.
Young children are generally extremely good at inventing imaginative worlds for themselves. As part of their capacity for role playing, they can also be inclined to tell lies in order to orchestrate situations or change narratives so these fit in with their own sensibilities and needs. For children, such ingenuity can establish alleviation, comfort, or control, helping them avoid conflict or trouble, to secure attention from a parent, to invent something they wish were true, to protect privacy, or where they might need to change the nature of a situation otherwise too difficult to handle.
Throughout schooling, in later life and adulthood, we are continually told that lying and forms of deception is unbecoming and wrong, where it can typify evasion, betrayal, or defiance, for instance. But as a means of imaginative world-building, ‘operations of falsifying’ can help nourish perceptual awareness for us. Such ‘thought experiments’ can sustain intuition and inspiration, where acquired knowledge need not rely on academic reasoning or empirical data but is formed as a result of investment in ‘what yet does not exist.’
States of imagining carry implication for how we think, how we engage with others, and how we formulate novel situations. In the realms of philosophy, this condition is variously discussed and debated as qualia (from the Latin ‘quails’), meaning “what kind” of individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.
In a fashion context, qualia might signify what it means to wear and experience a particular garment. If we take a WW2 United States Army Air Force AN-J-3a flight jacket, as a specific example, we might consider this garment to be ‘charged’ with history, function and narrative. We can tactually feel the undulations of the jacket’s goatskin, we might detect musty storage smells, we can read details on the woven nomenclature label, we can peer inside the patch pockets, or we can mentally envisage the tribulations of a combat pilot.
Our encounter with the flight jacket will be determined, accurately or otherwise, by what the garment ‘tells’ us, and how we choose to read it. In doing so, we experience what it is like to be experiencing. But, where we initially engage with a perceptible item of clothing, we also experience something profound in the mind, which no amount of purely physical information may afford.
This can tell us that imagining is not a passive or ‘childish’ condition, but rather a dynamic and highly subjective creative activity. Correspondingly, can we discover different ways in which clothes ‘talk’ to us? Can we intently listen to the kind of lies, fantasies, stories, and inventions they might fervidly tell us in order to change a narrative or the nature of a situation, establish alleviation, or invent something they wish were true?
