From Entrenchment to Entanglement: A New Materialist Re-Reading of the Humans-Clothes Relation E-BOOK

This paper concerns “the clothing”, a technical nominalisation that shall here be used to denote the relation between humans and clothes.Three ways in which this relation can be conceptualised are discussed here. (1) The modern worldview dictates a hierarchical understandingof the clothing relation in that it sees the human as using clothes for her purposes. Yet the modern conception “humans-via-clothes” remains unable to account for how and why we are affected and guided by clothes. For this reason, this paper sets out to explore two more current ways in which the humans-clothes relation could be read. (2) Objectoriented ontology is capable of re-reading the clothing relation from hierarchy to equality, and thus of witnessing the ways in which clothes act. Yet seeing human and clothes as equal eventually entrenches both entities, and by consequence creates a dualism, “humans-versusclothes”. As human and clothes cannot be understood separately from one another, a third reading of the human-clothes relation is tested, and eventually favoured. (3) New materialism is a relationalist school of thought, and thus is capable of inverting the conventional equation human + clothes = clothing, and instead reading the human-clothes relation intra-actively, clothing = human + clothes. In a new materialist vein, humans and clothes are equally made up by and take on equivalent roles within the clothing relations in which they do not come to be engaged, but ontologically are entangled: “humans/clothes”. The point at which this paper comes to a close is the selection of the new materialist as an adequate method for a postmodern re-reading of the clothing.