is almost as American as consuming itself.30
Changing the nature of our relationship with material goods can start here and now. If we begin to develop a real reverence for materials and their creation, reviving pre-materialist ideals of thrift, frugality, and sufficiency, we can encourage the design of products for repair and reuse, allowing us to consume materials fully before discarding them. If we practice a materialism that takes materials seriously—both individually and institutionally—we’ll have a better chance of creating a culture in which we have more human satisfaction with less stuff.
Changing college culture is a way of changing American culture. When students change their lives, they change the world. When they transform their institutions, they transform the default settings of the places they live. When institutions leverage larger changes (in purchasing, in green building, in transportation alternatives) and establish new expectations, everyone begins to see the first solid evidence of the ecological revolution of the twenty-first century. And that revolution, harmonizing finally with nature’s evolution, changes the possibilities for life—and the good life—both on campus and on a small and fragile planet.
3
The Nature of Clothes
My dream is to save women from nature.
Christian Dior
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.
Elizabeth Bibesco, as quoted in The Virtuous Consumer
Joe College is getting dressed. He finds clean underwear in the drawer, sorts the laundry pile to see how dirty his Gap jeans are, and searches for a sweatshirt that passes the smell test. He slips on clean socks and his Nikes, and he’s ready to go. His sister gets dressed, too, but it takes her a little longer. For many reasons, college women are taught to worry about keeping up appearances, so Jo has to consider issues like fit, color, and style more than Joe does. In addition, while he’s working mostly with a wardrobe of pants, shirts, and athletic shoes, she’s got more choices—pants or skirts, T-shirts or blouses, sweaters or sweatshirts, clogs, sandals, or athletic shoes. Today, she settles on jeans and a blue Hollister sweatshirt.
Before leaving for classes, Jo and Joe College always get dressed, because, as Mark Twain suggested, “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Of course, naked people also have little or no environmental impact from their clothing, but nudism isn’t the best method of reducing a student’s ecological footprint. Instead, most students still dress themselves in nature, wearing fibers, petrochemicals, water, and energy as they go about their daily business. But that’s not what’s on their mind when they put on their clothes in the morning.
In general, we often don’t even have clothes in mind when we get dressed; we’re thinking about girlfriends, boyfriends, food, sex, or the party that we’re planning. Usually we just get dressed as a matter of habit. But, like a nun’s habit, our clothes are more than just fabric—they’re everyday expressions of our beliefs and values, as well as implicit statements of our relationships with nature and human nature. Because any dress code is also a consumption code, we need to think about the moral ecology of clothes—and how our fashion ethic affects the world.
The Common Sense of Clothes
In middle school and high school, clothes are a kind of put-on. We put them on to try out different personas. We try on different clothes to see what they do: how they attract attention, how they affect other people’s interactions with us, and how we feel when we play this part in costume. Growing up, we’ve learned about clothes in many different ways: from parents and relatives, neighbors and peers, and the advertisers and marketers who flak us with fashion from the day we’re born. In this sartorial socialization, we learn about dress codes, formal and informal, material and mental. We learn to follow the fashion scene, whether or not we actually buy into it, and we learn to express ourselves with this second skin we wear every day. We know what’s in and what’s out, and we can all tell the dorks from the preppies, the geeks from the goths, and the fashionistas from the rest of the crowd.
By the time students get to college, therefore, they have a kind of clothing repertoire for the dramas of their daily lives. On campus, first-year students play again with dress and the presentation of self, each adjusting to the expectations of a new college culture and trying to craft a suitable persona. Though most colleges provide students with food and shelter, they don’t supply clothes, and there’s usually not an institutional dress code either. Professors are mostly clueless about fashion, so students need to learn primarily from their peers. Learning the common sense of clothes, they settle into a style of dress that’s comfortable and acceptable to the people they hang out with.
The Common Sense of College Clothes
Getting dressed in the morning, we usually put on clothes that reflect and reinforce the common sense of culture. Because it’s common sense, we don’t have to think about it, but if we did think about it, we’d notice how complex it has become.
Like all Americans, college students value comfort, so they usually put on clothes that put them at ease. Mostly, this means cotton clothing—because cotton is soft and breathable, and because cotton trade groups have done a good job promoting their product as the “natural” choice. There’s also a style of college comfort that’s as important as the substance of comfort itself. A finely tailored three-piece suit can be perfectly comfortable, for example, but college students don’t generally dress that way. Pants with elastic waistbands are very comfortable, but most college students aren’t comforted by that look either. College students want the comfort that comes from familiar fashions like jeans and sweatshirts and T-shirts—clothes that signify comfort, but also informality and a laid-back lifestyle. They choose their individual look, but—in another act of indi-filiation—they tend to choose what everybody else chooses.1
Beyond comfort, Americans wear clothes that are functional, that regulate the air temperature near our skin. All clothes are a kind of habitat, designed to control airflow by trapping body heat in cooler weather or inviting the evaporation that cools us in warmer weather. Given such functionality, clothes could help colleges (and other fossil-fuel consumers) regulate carbon consumption by keeping indoor temperatures lower in the winter and warmer in the summer. Thermostats at sixty degrees in the winter and eighty degrees in the summer, for instance, would likely encourage a more weather-wise dress code. But Americans seem to have decided that indoor air temperatures should be standard no matter the season, and we keep temperatures at a level where we can wear T-shirts year-round. We pay more attention to fashion seasons than the natural seasons.2
We’ve also been taught by advertisers that we need specific clothes for specific occasions. These days, you need sportswear for sports, activewear for activity, and clubbing clothes for dancing. This means that most of the time most of our clothes aren’t being
