Love-Clothes: Exploring Post-Consumptive Narratives Stored in Contemporary British Wardrobes

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Research in fashion studies has tended to focus on the clothing of the young or, more recently,the very old, leaving middle-aged working women's experience of dress largely unexplored. Thisproject's feminist approach to material culture aims to correct this absence, making theseoverlooked relationships to everyday dress visible through in-depth wardrobe interviews andsensory ethnography.Having conducted an initial version of this study for my MA Dissertation (2020), I found thatnone of my participants had considered clothing through the lens of love before. Theconversations about the love stories they associated with their clothing revealed a complexdesire/shame dichotomy around clothing consumption that merits further study. By positioning Mundigo-Moore 2love clothing as an autobiographical access point, this project will foreground these women'sspecific life experiences-menopause, having grown-up children, gaining seniority at work,change in health and to significant relationships-to develop a counter-dominant rhetoricaround the participants' relationships to clothes which subverts orthodoxies around love, desire,fashion and fashionability in mid-life.