what if almost all clothes lived in community closets — say, block or neighborhood scale — and we only kept a very few articles of clothing at home?
What prompted this sudden creative spark was being irritated at the volume of clothing in my bedroom/office.
Now, I have vastly less clothing than most people I know. I love fashion and get a kick out of sewing and being creative; I just don’t like owning a whole bunch of things. I enjoy having a few reliable basic pieces, and then decorating with scarves or what have you. Or if I want a fancy outfit for one night I might go to a thrift shop. But usually I just find stuff that’s being thrown away in my neighborhood and turn it into “new” wardrobe items.
But this morning, even the small* volume of clothing in my room was irritating me. Part of the reason was there is this weird musty smell suddenly back there. So I immediately want to blame the density of fabric hanging up.
(* I see a small volume of clothing, but that is very relative. By the much more reasonable standards of other times and places, I still have a vast amount of clothing.)
But my mind generates all these fun and creative thoughts, thanks to some training I’ve had in permaculture design and other thinking out of the box.
So I lit a couple candles and some incense to maybe dry out the moisture and take the edge off the smell til i find the real culprit, and then I really had fun musing about how very few clothes I could get away with owning, if we had a neighborhood-scale clothes closet.
Everybody, just seems like everybody, is trying to get rid of their clothes. People drop off huge boxes of unwanted clothing the way some people who are good at gardening drop off eggplants on peoples doorsteps in the summer and run away.
But we can’t just throw away the clothing. We have to stop sending it to landfill, it off and even ends in landfill in the Atacama Desert or some other foreign land that certainly doesn’t deserve that trash.
I tried to take a picture of my clothes corner of my room for you but it’ll have to wait till it gets lighter. Not enough light right now to take a pic.
Even in cold places, people don’t need lots and lots of clothes. You want layers and a good shell and all that.
The abnormally large volume of clothing we own is undoubtedly yet another artifact of consumer capitalist culture.
I do have some fun experiences of something like a community closet. They have been at multi-day music festivals, art festivals, and other “hippie-ish” camping events events. Usually it’ll be some women who set it up in a tent or something.
Also I have been to clothing swaps organized by friends in somebody’s big living room.
And in my neighborhood, a church that gives out a big grocery bag once a week to local families in need has a little bit of a clothing rack that they bring out. What would be cool is if that could be open most or all of the time instead of just for a couple hours on Wednesdays.
Everything takes work. For something to be open, it would need to be loved and cared for by the community. If not, it falls on the shoulders of one or two volunteers and quickly falls apart.
I even find that as a steward of a Little Free Library for the past 13 years. Seems like it shouldn’t be that much work just providing a few shelves of books for my community.
but it takes an astonishing amount of work to keep things neat, keep the shelves in repair so they protect the box at least a little from the weather. I also have to manage large boxes of unwanted drop offs that people just drop off. I don’t need just large volumes of books; I mean like huge boxes of peoples unwanted clothing and stuff. As many of you who have tried to do a community thing no, a person doing a community thing sometimes just becomes the designated drop off spot for a lot of unwanted stuff.
Just some musings. I tend to not give up on stuff that’s worthwhile. I tend to try to tweak it, add something, subtract something, make something creative that will make it more lovable so people care enough to try to help take care of it.
Honestly I have not been all that good at attracting help. but I’ve realized that it’s not that I’m horrible or defective or something; it’s just a feature of modern life. We are very atomized and isolated, and people have to relearn how to even be in community. The concept of any kind of shared community thing whether it’s a repair café or tool garage or whatever. I have heard great examples working in other communities. I know it can work.
Do you know who inspires me? Coco Chanel! Supposedly she loved to just basically have a uniform, something that looks stylish but doesn’t require a lot of thought, and you don’t need very many of them. That’s really my ultimate goal. The capsule wardrobe concept is somewhat appealing to me.
Also I do need to mention that I live in Florida and operate my house as a low-footprint-living laboratory that includes living without air-conditioning in order to learn how to optimize shade and airflow (Well, I also do it because I really despise closed-up indoor environments, fake cold air, and electric bills over $18).
as such, living in an incredibly humid hot environment without forced air cooling, not only puts me on a quest for how to optimize passive cooling of the home, but also a quest to optimize comfort of the body, through appropriate fabrics and styles of clothing. That’s a whole Nother post and I have to tell you I haven’t gotten very close to the ideal, but let’s just say that sometimes synthetic fabrics such as board shorts used by surfers are surprisingly adaptive to this climate.
I like to say that I am my own experimental lab-rat of the low-footprint-living lab. When the heat and humidity, and mosquitoes finding their way in, and intrusive streetlights at night, and excessively aggressive “landscapers” during the day, and what have you start making me crazy, I take it as an invitation to look around and optimize something! I also remind myself that it’s for the collective liberation and redemption of this gross, dreary consumerist capitalist hell non-culture we have built. That renews my wellspring of energy. (So does my morning coffee, one of my favorite treats which I try to make as sustainable as possible; and which I accept that I may have to do without someday sooner rather than later.)
Post script update!
Update! And just like that, the mini community closet is in the communal space of the house now. It’s one of those trial run tentative experimental structures that will evolve over time. Photo on left shows the clothes hanging on the improvised structure.
Photo in the middle shows it covered with a white sheet because I’m really obsessive about quiet solid tranquil surroundings at every day times. Also, as I was hanging it up, I realized I also now have a projector screen for showing YouTube videos and stuff from off our phones or whatever. I have a little mini projector. It doesn’t get used much but in a fictitious hypothetical communal house, it will be our Indian village TV, indoor version. I also want one outside.
Photo on the right shows the other side of the communal living room area, to show you what I mean when I say I like quiet light color scheme for the communal space. It just seems to feel good and work well. The cool thing is that does not preclude a luscious mix of textures from various beautiful pieces of fabric I’ve picked up over the years including inherited multigenerational handmade etc. Long line of women who love to work with fabric and our hands!
Go here, to the post on my deep green Facebook page, to see the photos (for as long as time and the will of various entities shalt allow, as I am fond of repeating LOL).
(You will need to scroll down through the whole comment thread to see the photos, as the original post is just what I call “attention-grabbing poster-style,” text on a green background.)
Post script: And update on the yucky smell, I came to suspect it might be a dead animal outside, as opposed to something inside. So the yucky smell, a negative, ended up prompting me to do something that brought a positive: adding value to this evolving living laboratory!
On a meta-note: in recent months I have more and more frequently resorted to some thing that I call “laddering.” It’s a way of getting words out of my brain and onto the screen or paper, without procrastinating or just deciding not to post.
So for example, this post here on FB might get edited and later become a blog post.
Sometimes a comment that I make on someone else’s post or a group I’m in, will end up laddering-up to a whole independent post I make here, and then ladder-up to a blog post or work its way into a book or something. Mentioning it in case other people have trouble with lackluster motivation, procrastination, avoidance.