Amelia Bird: Art, Design, Trends

I have a red leather jacket I haven’t worn in three years. It’s not ugly, or broken. It fits, technically. But every time I reach for it, something stops me: some internal stylist, unpaid and opinionated, says not today… and I put it back without quite knowing why. This happens more than I’d like to admit. There’s a whole archaeology to a wardrobe if you’re willing to look at it that way. At the front: the things you’re currently being. Further back: the things you were, frozen in fabric, waiting to be relevant again or quietly phased out. And at the very back, in the dark, the stuff you can’t explain keeping but can’t bring yourself to bin. The jacket lives back there. So does a pair of trousers I bought on a trip abroad and have never worn in real life, as though they only work in that specific latitude.                          

I think about this when I think about trends: the way they don’t just live in shops and on screens but in the accumulated choices hanging in our homes. Every piece you own was once a decision. A small optimistic bet on a version of yourself. Retail is about a store understanding who I am and what types of bet I am willing and ready to make. I am not buying items, I am building out this topology I move across. Who am I? How do you first perceive me?

What strikes me about the current moment in fashion is how openly we’re reckoning with that. The resale market, the “wardrobing your existing pieces” content, the slow fashion conversation. Underneath all of it is the same quiet question: who did I think I was buying this for? It is a curiosity and a guilt come to bear by the climate crisis, and our understanding that mindless consumption has real effects on human lives. How can we rethink the trend machine to match this change in identity? I’m interested in that space between the purchase and the person. That’s where most of the interesting stuff is happening, I think.