FASHION: Wardrobe ethnography

We should all undertake a personal reflection on your wardrobe: Can you identify which items you wear the most? How many items per year do you add and remove? What is the most expensive item in your wardrobe? Which items hold the most emotional value and why?

Wardrobe ethnography is the study of people’s accumulated clothing in their wardrobe which sheds light on their identity, personality, customs, ideas and habits.

So why is it interesting to study people’s wardrobes? It gives you insight into intimate and personal choices, and discloses relationships between cultural, social and economic structures that can reveal a particular spirit of a particular period in history or present time. You could say that wardrobes capture and bare the zeitgeist of the time.

The amount of fashion bought in the world, both in terms of its global quantity and the amount bought or acquired by each person has dramatically increased. 

The problem of fast fashion

The fashion apparel industry has significantly evolved, particularly over the last 20 years. The changing dynamics of the fashion industry have forced retailers to desire low cost and flexibility in design, quality, and speed to market, key strategies to maintain a profitable position in the increasingly demanding market. there's been a rapid amount of changes that have happened in the fashion apparel industry since the 1990s, highlighting the emergence of a concept of ‘throwaway’ or fast fashion. It describes fast fashion from a supplier as well as a consumer's perspective, and draws attention to several potential research issues.