Vestire: Social Divesting and Impact Investing in New Materialism

Fashion, with its social gloss of being the most transient of commodities in postmodern Western capitalistic societies, undergirds the hunt for the next “it” item in our modern liquid worlds (Bauman 2006). In fashion, as post-Marxist socialist Zygmunt Bauman argues, there is a perpetuum mobile, or social dynamic, in which progress is articulated as each individual’s avoidance of exclusion (Marx 2015 [1867]: 85). As individuals fear exclusion, the individual’s relation to fashion fulfills a continuous cycle of becoming, a hedonic treadmill with temporary happiness, via materialistic consumption, as its constant goal (Bauman 2010). However, the rise of secondhand markets in the liquid West and consumers’ engagement in both the brick-and-mortar and ecommerce varieties thereof undercut dialectical revolutions of consumption habits for the newest and shiniest of baubles. Taking a new materialist approach to lives and values of clothes, I show how females are oriented toward a particular type of (in)vestment that is underrecognized and undervalued under the lights that cast the pursuit of fashion as superficial. In other words, at the root of the term investment is vestire, to clothe, already suggesting that popular (mis)conceptions about fashion’s frivolity lacks material evidence. Using auto-ethnography as my primary method and the Buffalo Exchange secondhand chain of stores and particularly the East Village, Manhattan location as my primary field site, I illustrate the cycling through of clothing and the changes in these commodities’ value. I complicate the easy narratives that Western political economists have used to explain away Marx’s theory on value and commodity fetishism. The lifecycle of commodities, as symptomized in the classic macroeconomic example of guns versus butter, shows a production possibility frontier circumscribed by the assumption that consumption is a one-time deal. Yet, consuming and wearing secondhand clothing can be upheld by new materialism as a socially impactful (in)vestment. As I show in this case study, in the secondhand market for luxe designer garments, the concept of value changes quickly as it moves through hands in the handed-down, preowned, preloved nebulas that make value itself amorphous. Moreover, as shown by the entrepreneurial example of Brass, alternative extra-industry solutions to accessing such (in)vestments can close the wardrobe gap for women.