Why we wear
“Wearing clothes is what made us have to wear clothes,” said Mary Harkins, matter of factly. She sat leisurely at her desk, adorned in all black aside from her chic silk scarf effortlessly placed across her bosom. The woman knew what she was talking about. With a master’s and Ph.D. in theatre, she came to Emerson as a costume designer. Harkins wears many hats: one as a member of the Professional Designers Union, one as the head of the theatre design tech program at Emerson and another as a part of the academic administration teaching the influence of society and culture on clothes. I stared wide-eyed at the vessel of knowledge sitting across from me. She continued on, breathing out a long-winded response to my not-so-simple question - why do humans wear clothes? “It’s a commonly held theory that [humans first] wore clothes to decorate, for adornment, not to protect,” Harkins explained. The human body should be able to adjust to many circumstances. Through our cotton coddling, it’s no longer able to. The need to beautify and embellish ourselves does not serve a merely aesthetic purpose. As Harkins puts it, “It’s all about making one look different from and a part of. Humans want to be part of a community, a social group or country, but we also want to be separate.” Clothes, says Harkins, are this unifier and differentiator. “Something about who you are is expressed in what you are wearing. Every day we make psychological decisions,” she explained. Opening up another can of worms, she sat back in her seat and smirked. “That’s why humans wear clothes. But clothes are not fashion, fashion is an ever-changing cycle.” Harkins explained to me the simple circle of fashion: a trend is initiated by a group, it is adapted by another, it goes out of style and then we start anew. While clothes have existed for centuries upon centuries, fashion did not. “Clothes can exist without fashion,” said Harkins, surprising me. Think Imperial Rome. With a rigid class structure, so rigid that
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Words: Marisa Dellatto Photo: ebrima manjang
the only way you could enter the high class was to be born into it, there wasn’t much movement within the ranks. “You have a class that is able to control what each class [below it] can wear,” she explained. “What it takes to have a cycle of fashion is a middle class,” said Harkins. Think England during the Middle Ages: the first time a middle class was able to exist. “You have a middle class - folks who have income who want to look like the upper class,” she explained, her southern charm radiating with every word she spoke. The technical term for this influence on fashion is deemed “trickle down” - when a trend starts at a high class, is copied by the middle and then goes out of fashion. The royals and elites weren’t too pleased with this. Up until that point, you could simply identify a person’s class with a glimpse at their outfit. The peasants were complicating this. Sumptuary laws were put in place to dictate who could wear what. Only royalty could wear the color purple. They didn’t last too long, though. “You can’t govern that kind of human behavior,” said Harkins. Flash forward to the 20th century, and the elite were not the only ones making a lasting statement. Tr i c k l e - a c r o s s fashion - “when a style appears simultaneously across social structures” - was
“What it takes to have a cycle of fashion is a middle class.”