Which Animal is Present in Your Garment? is part of Who Are You Wearing?, a research into the relation between humans and nonhuman (or more-than-human) animals in fashion and clothes. Although fashion is considered a human practice, it has always included a broad range of nonhuman animals. In the form of materials, symbols, rhetoric and more, nonhuman animals and humans mix and mingle in fashion. At the same time the conditions and effects of these relations are generally veiled and disregarded
Which animal is present in your garment? is an on-site cloakroom intervention that invites participants to inspect their clothes for the presence of animal materials and consider whether they know which animal their leather jacket or wool coat is made of. But also, what the social, emotional and familial life of this animal might be, what else they would like to know about this animal and what they think this animal knows about them. The coats and questionnaires are then categorized on a designated clothing racks for the specific animal material origin (pelt/fur, feather/down, cobweb/silk, skin/leather and hair/wool) of their item, creating a garment genealogy that is not based on common fashion tropes such as style, type, trend, color or brand, but that addresses systems of interspecies relationality in fashion.
The printed panels feature visual and textual information from zoology, the agricultural industry, fashion media, pet care etcetera. A selection of this information is printed on long garment labels which will be pinned in the garments and taken home at the end of the day. Where a standard label might say ‘leather,’ these labels instead give insight in how a cow uses a range of different sounds to greet others, how rabbits take care of their young, how geese have dialects and some birds fall in love.
Edition 01: Ways of caring – Practicing Solidarity conference at the State of Fashion in July 2022 at the city hall of Arnhem.
Edition 02: Fashion Fictions exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in LAB: Here//Too//For by Material Matters in August 2023.
Edition 03: Stitches of Care – Practicing Solidarity symposium organized by Daniëlle Bruggeman at the Radboud University Nijmegen in March 2025.
Visuals by Alice Alloggio
Graphic design by Zuzana Kostelanská
With support by: ArtEZ Fashion Professorship, Material Matters, Emily Carr University, Vancouver Art Gallery, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Creative Industries Fund NL, Radboud University.
Cloakroom attendants: Alice Allogio, Anouk Beckers, Élise Ory, Lianca van der Merwe, Maria Spadoni, Selma Dooremalen.
