When Clothes Speak: Material Agency of Fashion Objects and Disruption of Human-Centered Sustainability

This paper challenges dominant sustainability discourses by reimagining clothing as a material actor in fashion consumption. Drawing from New Materialism, it argues that garments shape sustainability decisions not solely through human intention, but through their physicality, persistence, and affective charge. While fast fashion encourages rapid turnover, many garments resist disposal, not only due to emotional attachment but also because of their material properties, embodied memories, and spatial presence. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines survey data with in-depth interviews and a garment-alteration experiment, this study explores how clothing asserts agency in subtle yet powerful ways. Participants described garments that lingered in wardrobes for years, shaped bodily practices, or demanded transformation rather than abandonment. These findings suggest that fashion sustainability must move beyond moral appeals to ethical consumerism and toward a deeper understanding of the entanglements between wearers and garments. Rather than treating clothing as disposable or symbolic, this paper positions garments as enduring co-actors in the lifecycle of fashion. It contributes to both New Materialist theory and fashion studies by offering a materially grounded alternative to identity or trend-driven models of dress, emphasizing the need to center matter itself in analyses of sustainable fashion.