Young adults, consumption and material-cultural engagements with clothes

This thesis explores geographies of clothing and accompanying questions of materiality, care and sustainability, among young adults. To date, cultural scholarship on clothing has been predominantly fixed on their symbolic and material form. Clothes are objectified, mutable and unsustainable. Meanwhile, symbolic meanings and narratives of clothing consumption shape public understandings of young adults in increasingly contradictory ways. On one hand, young adults have been lauded for their positive influence on environmental change. On the other, they are critiqued for their purported careless, hasty and thoughtless disposition to resource use and consumption. Seldom has ethnographic research combining cultural and environmental sustainabilities focused on young adults’ lived, material relations of clothes use. This thesis responds accordingly, and provides new perspectives on young adulthood, everyday geographies of consumption, and clothes. It asserts that existing frames which depict young adults’ clothing consumption as ‘unsustainable’ are limited, and ignores the presence and significance of multiple spatial, social and material encounters. Influenced by more-than-human thinking in material-cultural geographies, this thesis offers insights towards a more nuanced understanding of young adults’ clothing use by recognising and engaging with the unruly associations clothes that catalyse between bodies, materials, spaces and practices.