Reimagining our Relationship with Textile

Reimagining our Relationships with Textile: How Labor, Ethics, and Authorship

have Been Neglected in the Modern Fashion Industry

Textile has always been the foundation of clothing. Until recently, humans' primary relationship with apparel has been tactile. Anouk Beckers is a designer and researcher whose practice I will look into. She questions and challenges fashion systems through performative installation, modular garment construction, and textile studies. This led to my deeper investigation into the traditional fashion systems’ long-standing emphasis on authorship and spectacle. This is a concept that completely contrasts Beckers’ nuanced focus on process and collaborative labor. Anouk Beckers created JOIN Collective Clothes as a way to reimagine the relationship between the wearer, maker, and a garment itself. JOIN is an initiative that creates different projects in order to spread awareness about social, environmental and ethical issues, using fashion as a vehicle. These projects all tie into fashion mediation. JOIN makes the social, material, and labor histories visible by embedding it in the clothing being made. This paper explores the hidden social infrastructures of garment production and investigates the complexities of authorship, labor and ethics by using Anouk Beckers’ and JOIN Collective Clothes as a case study. 

Literature Review: How Media Representation Overtakes Materiality

In this essay, I will use the theorists Roland Barthes, Yuniya Kawamura and Joanne Entwistle to discuss how the media and its institutions have completely transformed humans' once intimate relationship with their clothing. It has separated the wearer from the laborer of these clothes but also separated them from the clothes themselves. Most of the garments people see nowadays are through a screen. Roland Barthes famously argued that fashion is not a set of objects but is a system of representation, constructed through language, imagery, and media. A garment that appears in magazines is not the same as the actual textiles that interact with the body. Consumers interact with clothing constantly but almost never in a tactile sense. And usually, the clothing in magazines that they observe, is at a completely unattainable price point, so they will never actually interact with it. Marx’s commodification theory also grounds my research in commodity fetishism within consumers. Another academic that emphasizes this from a different angle is Yuniya Kawamura. She says that fashion is a system full of symbolism that derives its power from institutions and the structures they have set up instead of materials or the actual craftsmanship of the product. The loss of craftsmanship is a concept that is so blatantly clear but isn’t discussed as much as it should be. I will also touch on waste colonialism which is the idea that when developed countries overproduce clothing, the clothes that aren’t sold at thrift stores are often taken to less developed countries which contributes to their waste but also takes away from their local and historical craftsmanship. Finally, Joanne Entwistle explains that the way people dress everyday is deeply tied to the formation of identity and one's relationship with public life. This tells us how deeply rooted our identity is with how we choose to fashion ourselves and how the outside world perceives us. This highlights one core problem within modern fashion. As consumers we interact with fashion as online photographs, magazine spreads, and shallow advertisements way earlier and more frequently than we encounter it as actual fabric, labor or sentiment. 

This immense distance we have as consumers between the image we see when online shopping and the garment-making process creates this alienation that Anouk Beckers explores and critiques in the podcast, ‘A Garment-Magazine-Hybrid’. She investigates how garments appear as surface-level aesthetic and as “pure fashion,” which has been completely separated and lost from the hands that produce them. This raises massive ethical concerns about labor conditions, ecological impact, and the ongoing problem of mass overproduction. At one point she questions “why do we feel the need to keep endlessly producing and buying things?” Fashion production today causes a plethora of consequences from the immense water consumption that is needed to cultivate fiber and dye fabric to the chemical pollution. The sheer amount of textile waste that is created during every stage of a garment’s life cycle is enormous. All of these problems are intensified by fast fashion’s accelerated production model that encourages overproduction on a scale that is so big it even exceeds consumer demand. Clothing brands are constantly making more clothes than can possibly be sold which results in extra stock being landfilled or sometimes even incinerated. The fast fashion system relies on the labor of millions of garment workers who remain underpaid, undervalued and are often working under unsafe or exploitative conditions. Environmental harm caused by the fashion industry often affects vulnerable ecosystems and the labor exploitation affects marginalized communities. It is a totally backwards system and as a result, the true cost it takes to make clothing becomes completely invisible to consumers, hidden behind manicured online shopping platforms. It has become so easy to overlook these elements when fashion is encountered by the average person primarily as imagery in this day and age. This is where JOIN intervenes. They ask: What happens when we reconnect garments to the physical, social, and time-based processes that bring them into being? This question perfectly sets up the main idea of Beckers’s practice, which explores textile work as a form of research and an inquiry into systems, relations, and values of the fashion world.

Case Study: JOIN Collective Clothes

JOIN Collective Clothes is a modular clothing initiative that uses patterns of a sleeve, a top, a skirt, and a pant component. These pieces can be assembled into full garments when participants download the patterns and join workshops where each person produces one part of the garment. This project forces interdependence and shows that no one can make a full piece of clothing or a collection alone. It reveals the complexities of the labor behind creating clothing today. It also highlights contradictions in fashion consumption: “It can’t make sense to spend €5 on a top when it takes a day-and-a-half to make a sleeve.” (paraphrase from the JOIN collective podcast discussion). This project represents a social system. It is a model that reimagines how value, labor, and authorship function in the modern fashion world. It teaches consumers about symbolic production and authorship. Oftentimes, designers' names are on a label, but their hands never actually touch that garment. It goes to show how far removed the labor is from the consumer and how unfair fashion hierarchies can be. JOIN wants to remind people of this and give power back to the laborers. Although this is a serious topic, Beckers makes it clear that the purpose of this project is simply to create a safe, playful environment that supports and fosters critical questions. Beckers also reminds us that we will not find immediate solutions and that is okay, but real change “emerges from collective curiosity and constant experimentation”. All in all, these ideas force us to confront the hidden infrastructures of fashion and help us to envision a system that prioritizes transparency, accountability and ethical ways of making and consuming.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics describes artworks that focus on human relations instead of finished products. In the same vein, Claire Bishop argues that art is participatory and makes people into collaborative producers, creating meaning through activity. JOIN is similar to both of these examples because its main output is a shared experience of making, not a garment, which introduces conversation and awareness. Beckers describes her practice as “asking questions”, a methodology that is rooted in curiosity rather than a solution. The workshop setting embodies this ethos: it is a space where participants collectively investigate what a garment is, what it means to contribute labor, and how the fashion system assigns or obscures value. Ricarda Bigolin and Beckers discuss the idea of “slipping between front stage and backstage,” which is the difference and distance between construction and presentation of products. It is so common that the labor and infrastructure or “the backstage” is hidden in the fashion system. Anouk Becker's JOIN initiative opens it up through participation. Participants are made aware of the labor that goes into producing a sleeve or pant panel. They experience how slow it is to create something. It's hard to ignore the absurdity of fast-fashion pricing when a single component takes days to make. The garment becomes a site for material consciousness. The making process becomes this way of ethical awakening for the people involved.

JOIN Collective Clothes was created in order to move garments away from the trajectory that they are currently on that removes them from their material and social origins. I used material culture theory to further understand how JOIN reframes garments. Daniel Miller, author of Material Culture and Mass Consumption, argues that objects carry meaning through relationships like how we use them, touch them, and integrate them into our lives. Another scholar, Jonathan Chapman, author of Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy, presents research on emotional durability. This research suggests that when individuals participate in the creation or repairing of objects, they naturally form stronger attachments to them. JOIN leverages this in three clear ways. The physical engagement they foster within their program using textiles produces familiarity and care. This also reminds the participant that time investment has huge value, which is so different from how disposable fast fashion is today. This confronts contemporary fashion, which encourages rapid cycles of disposal. People don’t get attached to their clothing anymore. JOIN’s pattern system connects to a growing movement of open-source and zero-waste fashion practices. Also, Holly McQuillan’s project Make/Use or Stitching Together explores how pattern design can invite participation and accessibility. 

Authorship, Labor and “The Replaceable Hands”

A social biography appears for a garment when multiple hands contribute to creating it. This garment almost becomes a living thing with its own experiences. It is no longer a neutral, anonymous object but instead carries the relationships and skills that made it into what it is. Every little stitch was made by a person with their own expertise, cultural background, and lived experiences. The piece of clothing is now transformed into this thing of evidence. Evidence of collaboration. Labor divided and shared across many different moments and contexts. This completely changes clothing into something relational when it was previously something purely material. It makes garments a record of human interaction and collective effort. This causes humans to see these pieces of clothing as artifacts instead of disposable commodities. This social biography shows us that these artifacts are embedded in networks of care, creativity and labor. This makes the act of wearing them encounter the many processes that brought them into being which forms this incredible relationship. A JOIN garment is not just worn but remembered because it holds collective experience within it. As discussed before, this project uses four patterns which are a sleeve, a top, a pant-part, and a skirt, and it is open-source with downloadable patterns and workshops. Each participant makes only one part and the final garments are assembled collaboratively. This kind of work makes us take a second look at authorship and question why we give designers all of the creative power while the consumers and laborers remain passive. 

JOIN pushes this further by distributing authorship of itself. If five participants contribute components to one garment, whose garment is it? It makes the creators rethink the meaning of authorship when it is distributed. This made me think back to factory and atelier workers in the 1970s referred to as les petites mains, meaning “the replaceable hands”. This slogan was coined to reinforce the disposability of factory workers. JOIN’s overarching message relates to arguments from Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, who study participatory design as a method of destabilizing hierarchy and redistributing power. In fashion, this is radical because creativity has always been related to the singular genius. One designer has almost always received credit for a collection. Now, JOIN is shaping this new narrative of garment creation and credit becoming a shared experience. 

Flattened Fashion and Mediatization 

JOIN also repositions craft as critical. Glenn Adamson, author of The Invention of Craft, investigates crafts as something that reveals labor, materiality, and skill. In JOIN, craft becomes a tool for social inquiry. Ricarda Bigolin, Co-founder of JOIN, notes that fashion media encourages us to “look at garments rather than interact with them physically.” Magazines, runways, and digital platforms only allow for visual consumption and this erases all tactile engagement. Beckers makes the point that if even a portion of that media space were used for topics like labor and ethics, transformative change could occur. 

Agnès Rocamora investigates this when she writes about mediatization in Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion. She discusses this idea of “flattened fashion” and how social media has turned fashion into an image prioritized industry. This is the idea that fashion is now flattened to a two dimensional concept by a screen. Customers and fashion show spectators are no longer able to judge fashion by touch, movement or materiality. This causes designers to increasingly prioritize the front view of garments because this is what photographers are posting and what people are primarily consuming on social media. This shift signals a huge loss of depth in the industry. This loss of depth is not only in textile like fabric, construction and silhouette but also in the meaning of clothing itself. Fashion designer Tom Ford speaks to this by “Having a runway show has become so much about the creation of imagery for online and social media [...] I wanted to think about how to present a collection in a cinematic way that was designed from its inception to be presented online (cited in Amed 2015).” The acceleration of media has completely reshaped the way we interact with fashion and turned it into a two dimensional concept. 

Gatekeeping and Fashion: Fashion as an Institutional System

Theorist Kawamura argues that fashion is an institutional system rather than a material one. She says this becomes even more clear when considering the structures that construct and make fashion legitimate today. Global fashion weeks and other institutions like major magazines are like gatekeepers who determine what is considered cool, valuable or timely. There are also fashion councils like La Fédération de la Haute Couture that completely shape the industry by making seasonal calendars and reinforcing the hierarchy that remains to dictate the fashion industry. Another thing that amplifies this institutional power even further are fashion weeks. The fashion weeks that take place in places like Paris, Milan and New York are perfect examples of spectacle where the emphasis is placed on image production rather than textiles and craftsmanship. These runway shows are designed specifically for social media circulation where garments are only shown for a few seconds before they are uploaded into digital content. Magazines like Vogue, Dazed and Harper’s Bazaar also prioritize spectacle by featuring editorials that foreground things like fantasy and visual impact rather than labor or ethical context of the clothing. These institutions of the fashion system reinforce Kawamura’s claim that representation overtakes production and these social structures remaining in place are what gives fashion its power. 

Environmentalism and Fashion 

Even then, sustainable-fashion messaging often remains visual like soft and neutral color palettes, images of hands sewing, or symbolic gestures of “ethics.” JOIN disrupts this by centering touch, time, and collective presence. Its workshops become counter-spaces to the mediated fashion image. Instead of flipping through glossy pages or scrolling on glowing screens, participants hold fabric, stitch seams and exchange stories. This is a form of fashion mediation that exists and operates completely separate from the traditional media infrastructures. It is slow, organic, and community-driven. It highlights the concept that fashion should be encountered as representation and as experience, not just as representation. JOIN’s accompanying publication projects, such as Beckers’s Lookbook that literally unfolds into a garment, further critiques the fashion magazine format. The lookbook becomes wearable, destabilizing the boundary between media object and clothing and between representation and material. This is a direct challenge to the fashion system’s preference for spectacle over substance.  

Ricarda Bigolin’s discomfort with the fashion industry, especially her addressing the shame attached to being a fashion designer, is common within fashion studies and shows us that there are larger problems at hand. The industry is only successful because it is arrogant to environmental harm and global inequalities. Designers often feel pressure to defend fashion’s legitimacy, saying it is artistic, cultural, or empowering, not acknowledging all the harm it is doing. The JOIN collective doesn’t think that it is fixing the industry. It also doesn’t necessarily offer an alternative brand model. However, it does provide a platform for questions about the industry. It shows people that fashion can be used as a tool for questioning and rethinking relationships between people and materials. This unrushed feeling of finding a solution shows us that social innovation emerges from new ways of organizing and collaborating. The answer to this problem will not be found or solved by one person. JOIN is a method and a collective tool that promotes experimentation and reflection.

Martin Margiela and Anonymity  

Visual consumption began to dominate when fashion media rose to popularity, especially when images circulated faster than the garments themselves. Barthes, Kawamura, and Niklas Luhmann all describe fashion as a system of signs, one in which consumption often overshadows production. This system has been challenged by 20th–21st-century designers like Martin Margiela, whose anonymity and deconstruction questioned authorship and whose DIY and open-source design strategies returned authenticity and power to the wearer. In order to investigate Maison Margiela’s values, I took a look at their Instagram. I noticed that they value  visual storytelling through the deconstruction of garments and they show that on their social media. The way they do this is through close-ups of garment construction, raw seams, and unusual fabric manipulation and reworking. They also show videos with pieces being assembled or altered. In other words, they pull back the curtain into the world of their labor. They also have an artisanal focus that is unique to the luxury fashion industry. This shows through their unwavering craftsmanship which is a key component and value of the brand. Featured on their Instagram are slow, detailed shots of handmade pieces.

Industrialization and Fashion

 Another factor that rewired the fashion system was industrialization. This separated the wearer from the maker. Mass production made it so the labor and human stories were completely anonymous. This industry and craft used to require immense knowledge and skill of textile and design. It now has been diminished into this fragmented series of robotic tasks that are spread far and wide though this untraceable supply chain. Industrialization also changed clothing from something that was durable and locally made to rapidly consumed commodities. This separated the consumers and producers even further and not only distanced them geographically but also emotionally. This expansion of factories and outsourcing caused major environmental impacts. Things like chemical dyes, synthetic fibres and fossil fuel-dependent transportation became the pillars of the fashion system. Without these things, the fashion system wouldn’t have been able to expand the way that it did. Labor became incredibly invisible at this time with workers being hidden behind machines and borders. Their stories were swallowed whole by narratives of big brands. Because of this, industrialization created a world where mediation could flourish because the images of fashion were able to distract from the realities of what was really going on behind closed doors. JOIN asks participants to slow down and reconnect with themselves and the material. To touch and listen in order to learn the process of garment creation and confront what industrialization has done to the fashion industry. 

Conclusions

Scholars like Susan Kaiser, Jennifer Craik, Entwistle, and Barthes show that fashion is always mediated through cultural narratives and visual systems. JOIN completely rewrites this model. It shows us a form of mediation rooted in touch and collaborative labor that reconnects the wearer with the processes and people behind what they are wearing. Beckers recognizes that fashion is like research in the way that it is not a closed system. “Everything I do is ongoing,” says Beckers. She states that she often starts her projects with thousands of questions and ends them with even more questions than she started with. Just like her questions lead to other questions, these workshops lead to new connections and possibilities. This openness and ongoing mentality is central to JOIN’s success as a critical methodology. The project’s modular nature is much like the message it is trying to spread. Pieces come together, fall apart, recombine, and circulate. Participants change. Garments travel. Knowledge spreads. JOIN is a dynamic network, one could even say a living archive, of collaborative textile encounters, not just a brand. This ongoing nature reflects the instability of the fashion system itself. Fashion is never static; it is constantly produced. It is produced through collective practices like wearing, making, discuss

Anouk Beckers’s JOIN Collective Clothes looks at fashion from a perspective of ethics, question-asking, participation, and textile material. It hopes to reconnect garments to the people who make and wear them by challenging the fashion system currently in place. Beckers hopes to inspire others to question and distribute authorship, put labor in the spotlight, and make tactile experience central again. JOIN creates a space where fashion becomes a collective process rather than just consumption. I think this calls for a rewiring of the fashion industry to substitute relationships for spectacle, materiality over mediation, and community over hierarchy. JOIN demonstrates that the future of fashion lies in togetherness, not in technology. 

This project also helps us look at and deconstruct the problems we face today and their history. Starting with industrialization which accelerated the environmentally harmful system that is fast fashion. This led to untrackable labor and the notion that clothing is disposable. These material and labor consequences mixed together along with mediatization made the human and ecological cost of garments completely obscured because of the lack of textility and reliance on surface level imagery. Fashion all the sudden became something we see, not something we can reach out and touch. We learn this through looking at theorists like Roland Barthes, Yuniya Kawamura and Agnes Rocamora. When we are so used to seeing garments exist primarily as images, overconsumption becomes natural and forms this system and the material impact of this system becomes very easy for us to ignore. When the environmental costs are hidden from view, it is easy to be arrogant. Things like water waste, chemical pollution, overproduction and landfills all contribute to our ongoing climate crisis. The human cost also must be considered. These are things like underpaid labor, dangerous working conditions and global inequality. 

Using Maison Margiela as my case study explores the idea of exposed labor and processes through their aesthetic of raw seams, deconstruction and visibility of workmanship. Margiela also plays with the idea of anonymity which explores the concept of authorship and who the credit should go to when constructing clothing. This challenges the ‘cult of the designer’ which echoes JOIN’s values that say garments carry traces of many hands. JOIN diverts from this “polished” image by encouraging participatory making and Margiela does this through their creative practice. 

JOIN is a critique of industrialization and mediatization themselves. The program looks at what it would mean to rebuild the fashion industry from the inside out. This would look like focusing on materials, labor and relationships instead of images, consumption and speed. JOIN wants to encourage an industry where garments once again have their own social biographies and where collaboration is cherished. Where hierarchy is diminished and where the act of making is understood and slowed down. If we prioritize human connection and materials, the fashion system could be an environmentally responsible, ethical and socially engaged loop. Meaningful change comes from rethinking how we use and value time, labor and creativity. 

Bibliography:   

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