What is Clothing Without Us Wearing It?

I shoulda never smoked that philosophy minor, now I'm undermining the structures of the commercial fashion industry.

Hi! Some weird, wobbly thoughts today on Object-Oriented Ontology, wearable art, and why designers don’t want to admit clothes can exist without us wearing them.

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I first discovered Object-Oriented Ontology in its perversion—years ago, equipped with little but a BFA in Sculpture and Philosophy (yes, I am in a ludicrous amount of debt and will be ‘till my dying day) and an attraction to the blood orange cover of the anthology Object-Oriented Feminism edited by Katherine Behar, I was plunged into a concept that might seem opaquely academic at first brush, but continues to haunt my material conception of the world five-some years later. “OOF,” as it’s half-jokingly named, is a response, a resistance, and a complication of the original OOO, a philosophical paradigm that emphasizes the agency and independence of objects, treating them as entities with their own existence and not just as passive elements in human perception. 

“Ontology” is the study of “existence,” what it means “to be,” and what kind of objects in the world, from human beings to works of art to pill bugs to storm systems, are afforded what kind of considerations in their “acts” of being. It’s simplest, and most understandable, to default to an idea of the world that positions animals with consciousnesses as the only entities able to “act upon” the world with any kind of greater “meaning.”

You’ll notice that the bajillion quotation marks I’m using suggest how loosey-goosey and fundamentally questionable all of these thoughts are, a point that OOF latches onto in an almost parodic approach toward OOO—it’s impossible to consider all this abstract, common-sense-defying shit without grounding oneself in a sense of humor. Thinking that a pill bug is just as “here” as you and I are is pretty ridiculous, after all, but the general framework of OOO allows for a view of the world that imbues non-sentient objects with some kind of esoteric “agency.” Basically, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, no one even chopped it down, something still really happened, free from human analysis or assignment of meaning. 

OOF deals not only with the humor of this form of viewing the world, but its human implications: what does it mean to consider a person as having the same amount of “existence” loaded into them as does a shoe? Where are the moral and logical lines in this philosophy, and why are they where they are? An OOO perspective doesn’t mean, like, saving a computer over your sister in a burning building is understandable or defensible. How can OOO account for how objectification is used as a violence against marginalized people? Here’s a PDF of Behar’s intro to the anthology that makes much more sense of all this than I can.  

I, of course, immediately latched onto the implications of OOO and OOF on the objects that we wear, or “clothing,” as some call them. They are the non-sentient objects held most closely to, almost always activated and contextualized by, the human body, and considering how they might act upon us as we act upon them was the genesis of my interest in wearable art.

Wearable sculpture, or clothes as art not contextualized on a living body or available for purchase, challenges the connection we often see as inherent between clothing and humanity, suggesting an object-oriented ontology of garments that emphasizes their independence from, and material immortality relative to, their potential wearers. This memento mori that’s made clear in the realm of wearable sculpture but extends to all garments—we’ll die before our SSENSE purchases fully disintegrate into the ether—undermines haute couture’s focus on the humans that display pieces on a runway, rendering the fashion industry’s command of aspiration and consumption trifling and arbitrary in the face of the idea that clothing can exist without, and beyond the bounds of, the lives of those who could put it on. 

Perhaps this is why so many designers, such as Rei Kawakubo and Jonathan Anderson, whose work often seeps into the realm of un-wearability, still choose to set up camp firmly within the bounds of the fashion industry as it stands. By framing their work in the context of runways and celebrity stylings, even when it’s near-completely divorced from quotidian wardrobes, the designers avoid undermining the very premise of the commercial fashion that funds their artistic endeavors. 

Comme Des Garçons SS97

JW Anderson SS24

Instead, creators of wearable art like Nicola Costantino and Louise Bourgeois who identify as sculptors, not designers, firmly plant themselves in a sartorial world where clothes need not be worn to act upon us—they can be displayed on a body, on a mannequin, or hung on a wall and still be seen as having artistic agency. The body is beside the point. 

Nicola Costantino - “Human Furriery”

Louise Bourgeois - “A Banquet”

Other sculptors, like Méret Oppenheim, take ready-made garments and render them unwearable, editing them into fashion-free scenarios—high heels bound like a stuffed turkey or fingerless fur gloves already occupied by disembodied hands.  

Meret Oppenheim - “My Nurse”

Without the underpinning notion that clothes must be worn by us to be clothes, the aspirational economics of the fashion industry falter—we begin to see that runway fashion sells us the hanger more than the garment itself, and that the humanity infused into haute couture by its models is no more than a sales tactic, telling us that the art needs us to consume it, or desire that consumption, to be legitimized as art. Wearable sculpture that doesn’t rely on the potential, no matter how illusory, for actual wear or commercial consumption is potentially paradigm-destroying in its presentation of clothing as ontologically whole in and of itself, sans a model-centric ethos of aspiration and consumption, which is why artists who choose not to submit their clothing to the fashion matrix will never be as societally appreciated as “designers” of sculptural haute couture—their very existence threatens the fabric, and financial interests, of an entire industry. 

<3 HR