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A 17th-century box-chest, a slender modernist closet from the mid-1950s and a wacky shelving unit designed in 1999.
On view together at Designmuseum Danmark, as part of a temporary display about the environmental consequences of the contemporary fashion industry, the three pieces tell the story of the “evolution of the private wardrobe”, says curator Anders Eske Laurberg Hansen. “They all have the same function. But they signify how careless we have become.”
The volume of clothes that all three examples might hold is roughly the same. Hansen’s premise is that our addiction to fast fashion — “cheaper and cheaper, yes, but poorer and poorer quality” — has changed the look and shape of our wardrobes — and our perception of the value of the clothes they contained.
The 17th-century chest is barely bigger than a picnic hamper. It is made of oak, and bound in a decorative iron case with its own lock and key, its heavy armoury reflecting a period when clothes were expected to last a lifetime. “All the textiles in a house would have fitted inside that,” says Hansen. “They were so expensive you had to be careful.” The chest, he says, would have been a typical piece in a middle-class German home.
The 1950s iteration of the closet is by Danish architects Grethe Meyer and Børge Mogensen, a unit from their streamlined Boligens Byggeskabe storage system. It is the closest example to a conventional freestanding wardrobe, but prescriptively modernist. Meyer and Mogensen set out to calculate the exact minimum number of clothes a person required, then designed a wardrobe measured specifically to contain it. Their closet would probably hold three suits and a handful of shirts.
The point was democratisation — easy-to-access modern consumer goods through standardised mass production of clothing. But in the 1950s, clothes were still expensive, still valuable, and meant to last. Owning as few as possible was a rational move.
What Meyer and Mogensen failed to foresee was globalisation, rapid supply chains and prices so cheap that clothing became practically disposable. Fast-forward to the nonchalant shelving designed in the late-1990s by Copenhagen-based Louise Campbell — at the dawn of the era of fast fashion.
Campbell’s closet is a tall, cigar-shaped maple frame designed to lean against a wall like a lazy schoolboy, with bendy open shelves, which seem to encourage random stuffing and discourage neat folding. They look handy for fast lives and clothes retrieval in a hurry; not conducive for the care and protection of its contents.
Even Campbell’s shelves no longer reflect modern habits. In the decade that came next, our appetite for fast fashion went into overdrive.
Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, and the average person bought 60 per cent more clothes by the end of that period, according to McKinsey. That at least partly explains the modern hankering for walk-ins and dressing rooms that take up far greater architectural space within our houses — we need a place to put it all.
Today, on average, 70 per cent of garments hanging in our wardrobes are “passive”, says Else Skjold, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation, who has studied clothing accumulation habits, and who co-curated the exhibition.
Skjold has observed people sorting through the clothes in their wardrobes since 2010 and interviewed them as they went along. What she found is that the value we place on clothes today has shifted entirely. Now, it “lies in the fact that [clothes] are fashionable,” she says.
However the look and shape of our wardrobes might be about to shrink, perhaps even return to the dimensions of Hansen’s three examples, as we are forced to reckon with the value of clothes once more.
Fast fashion’s business model is looking increasingly unsustainable, as retailers are hit by rising costs in raw materials, labour and freight, and consumers’ disposable income dwindles with rising inflation.
European regulators are also pushing for an end to cheap, mass-produced clothes, with proposals to reduce the environmental impact of the fashion industry. The proposals are at an early stage, but could result in regulation governing everything from how long a garment should last to how much recycled yarn it contains.
For the Copenhagen exhibition, Hansen has rammed home the environmental point by hanging a selection of near-identical mid-blue work shirts for men around his three wardrobes. He found them in charity shops.
“I wanted it to feel like a human being was around,” he says. “I used these blue shirts because I found them everywhere, thrown out.”
They look pristine. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them,” he says. “But when I go into any second-hand shop, I see rows and rows of perfectly similar, fine blue shirts. We stop noticing them.”
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