In an era defined by environmental breakdown, fashion can no longer rely on familiar tropes of beauty and permanence. The Anthropocene prompts us to reconsider clothing not as a mere adornment of living bodies, but as material artifacts entangled in planetary life‐death cycles. As one study warns, “the unbridled consumption of clothing threatens the environment,” demanding new materials and models that respond to climate collapse . Under the sign of the Anthropocene, fashion becomes a site of rupture: fabrics that were once seen as immutable luxury now enter into cycles of decay and renewal, while the very notion of “wearing” in a warming, species‐depleted world acquires new meanings. No longer can fashion presume the body or even humankind as its natural home; instead clothing is recast as part of a mixed assemblage of matter, memory, and loss. In such a context, traditional assurances of style and longevity unravel. The urgent questions become: what might garments look like in a time when biodiversity itself is vanishing, when carbon dioxide and plastics outlive human lifespans? How might the values of beauty, luxury and self‐expression be reconfigured if clothing were meant to biodegrade, to carry ancestral memory, or to stand as elegy for the lost?
Under the Anthropocene’s weight, scholars have urged a profound shift in how we think about matter. Anthropologist Donna Haraway provocatively rebranded our age as the Chthulucene, a multispecies epoch, insisting that human culture is entwined with other life-forms in tangled, story-laden ways. Similarly, new‐materialist theorists argue that fashion too must be seen through a posthuman lens. For example, Anneke Smelik notes that in a “new materialism” approach, human bodies, fibres, fabrics, garments and technologies are “inextricably entangled,” and that things and nature have their own agency . In this view, clothes do not serve only human whims, but participate in material networks where even a T-shirt or shoe might be seen as an “actor” with effect. Fashion ceases to be an expression of a sovereign human identity; instead it becomes a hybrid mesh of organic and synthetic, living and inert. The key concept is material agency: rather than the human subject simply imposing meaning on textiles, the “intelligent matter” of the body and cloth contributes its own force, and garments themselves partake in the choreography of life . From this perspective, it is not surprising that some designers and researchers explore fabrics grown from living organisms – bacteria, yeast, fungi or algae – so that garments literally decompose into the earth at life’s end . Such bioengineered threads, though still experimental, point to a future where clothing remains on the ground, nourishes microbes, or returns to dust, rather than piling up in waste. In effect, posthuman fashion asks us to imagine clothes that meet death with grace: that are biodegradable by design and vibrant in use.
A fully posthuman fashion would blur the line between ornament and organism. In laboratories and workshops, scientists have begun to weave with algae or grow leather from yeast cultures, precisely to make apparel that breaks down into “nontoxic substances when eventually thrown away” . In this scenario, a dress’s afterlife might be a forest floor, and a jacket’s legacy, compost. Textile dyes, too, are being rethought with living cells: one initiative uses pigmented bacteria to color fabrics, requiring less water and toxic chemicals than conventional dyes. Yet even if such innovations become common, they raise questions of heritage and memory. If garments are meant to dissolve, how do we remember them? Here the notion of memory-wear comes into play: clothing as a repository of stories, experiences and even ancestral traces. Even now, anthropologists observe that clothes often serve as “records of [a wearer’s] past” and that a wardrobe can function much like a personal library . In other words, garments are mnemonic media: they bear the imprint of bodies that inhabited them. Fashion scholar Bethan Bide argues that “clothes and textiles play a special role in recalling the past due to the way they take an imprint of the body that wears them and are left marked by the traces of wear” . A stitched pocket or faded hem can thus become an index of a lived experience, a tangible scar of days gone by. In a future where the planet may remember human presence more than humans themselves, clothes might serve as the last witnesses – or spirit-containers – of those vanished lives.
This leads to the idea of extinction aesthetics – beauty and design shaped around disappearance, decay, and mourning. If fashion once celebrated perpetual novelty, the Anthropocene invites a melancholic turn. As theorist Timothy Morton notes in Realist Magic, every tangible object is shadowed by its absence: “every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects” . A flower-patterned scarf, for instance, may evoke its now-endangered species; a wool sweater may recall the icy landscape where its fleece sheep once roamed. In this mode, beauty itself becomes permeated by loss. One can imagine future designers intentionally weaving in decayed materials, or crafting textiles to fade and fragment: garments as palimpsests of extinction. The very act of wearing such clothing could become an act of remembrance – a gesture of care for what is gone. Fashion in mourning might favor tattered silk and frayed edges, developing an elegance of erosion rather than novelty. In this context, traditional luxury – long-lasting, rare, pristine – might be supplanted by what could be called luxuries of impermanence: a dress meant to evaporate, a textile meant to bleed pigments into the earth.
If garments serve as elegies, so too might the archive and museum. Cultural institutions preserve fashion history, but the Anthropocene forces them to reconsider conservation itself. Bide’s studies of museum collections show that without stories, garments in storage exist in a “bodiless, empty” state; memory can bridge that gap, allowing old clothes to “invoke the past” . Indeed, she argues that museums must become more than warehouses of fabric – they should hold alive the ghosts in the textiles. In one poignant image, Bide writes of the “material and remembered traces” of wartime austerity that still “haunt contemporary London,” and calls on curators to accommodate “the ghosts contained within extant garments” so that intergenerational memories may surface . In practice this could mean displays that foreground wear marks, oral histories attached to dresses, or digital archives where visitors add their own stories to museum pieces. Conversely, archives might also allow decay as part of the narrative. A new paradigm of “post-conservation” fashion is emerging in preservation circles: instead of preventing all degradation, conservators may document a garment’s disintegration over time. One recent proposal suggests that rapid material breakdown can in fact create “new ‘material relationships’,” enabling alternative aesthetic narratives and “fashion memories” to coexist . Under this postconservation model, a biofabric dress would be kept in the record not as a static relic but as a story of its lifecycle – how it faded, composted, or sprouted seeds. In other words, institutions might not only preserve the object, but also choreograph its departure. A biodesigned shirt could be archived in partial form, along with footage of its decay and perhaps samples of the soil it enriched, so that the disappearance is as much part of its history as the weave.
All these shifts point toward a broader anthropological and philosophical reckoning. If human presence is unsteady or even disappearing in the era of mass extinction, then fashion must find meaning beyond dressing a recognizable self. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory offers a useful parallel: humans are no longer the sole actors, and the “social” weaves humans with microbes, soil, water, and even clothing. Fashion, under this view, is a mesh of relations – between species, cultures, technologies, and the elemental forces of climate. The garment may outlast its wearers, but what it “means” will depend on the assemblage it enters. A jacket abandoned in melting permafrost might become nutrient for a new plant, while a digital pattern on a screen might archive the human silhouette that once wore it. Posthuman theorist Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action could be invoked: fabrics and bodies shape each other, intertwining in volatile ways. In Braidotti’s terms, the posthuman body dissolves into a ‘body of earth’, and fashion sits uneasily between the material and the virtual. Could there be recycled fashion in which fiberglass or nanotech skins fuse with microorganisms? Could garments be grown to mirror ruined ecosystems, dyed with bio-matter that glows with microplastic?
One speculative future is that fashion becomes a craft of cultural mourning and wild hope. We may see designers treating extinction as muse: assembling garments from endangered seeds or camera-obscura prints of glaciers. In the face of human decline, clothing could turn into a form of testimonial. After all, clothes outlast flesh: we bury our loved ones in their clothing, and museum mannequins wear relic garments long after their owners. If homo sapiens were to pass, what vestiges would remain? Perhaps not atomic bunkers or silent cities, but fragments of cotton and wool inscribed with trace elements of the past. By infusing textiles with provenance or messages (imagine a quilt embedded with DNA spores or a jacket printed with ancestral languages), one could transform every garment into a time capsule. When humans depart, their “fashion” might survive as organic matter or as code in an archive – as literal “what remains” of human culture.
Yet even as fashion turns outward, human psychology and social memory remain entangled with cloth. Psychologically, clothing has long been a second skin, imprinted with emotion and identity. Our research shows that this does not vanish in the Anthropocene. Some relationships to clothing will remain deeply personal – the embrace of a cherished sweater, the anchor of a familiar color – even if those garments now carry the weight of planetary damage. Sociologically, garments still signify belonging, status or protest. Perhaps the next style movement will be one of critical beauty: aesthetics that confront the climate emergency rather than escape it. Trends could valorize the remedial, the repaired, or the reclaimed. Imagine a vogue for “heirloom grief,” where people intentionally wear the clothes of species or civilizations being lost, as a political and personal statement. Or a couture where seams leak seeds, so that every walk in a designer dress might sow a wildflower.
In this speculative frame, archives and museums again play dual roles: they preserve artefacts for future reflection but also educate for present activism. Just as Walter Benjamin saw in old objects a “dialectical image” of history, future archives may read climate maps in the pattern of faded textiles. But unlike Benjamin’s inscribed “aura” of vanished presence, Anthropocene fashion may no longer be tethered to a single master narrative. As Bide and others argue, allowing “personal memory” alongside curatorial narrative can produce a multivocal archive. In the absence or diminishment of the body, fashion archives become collaborative memory sites, embodying a polyphony of stories: of indigenous practices, of everyday makeshift resilience, of loss and of adaptation.
Ultimately, what remains after the body in fashion is a mixture of material and myth. Clothing will be remembered as both ruin and resource, as ashes and archives. In the Anthropocene, every garment holds a lesson about limits and legacies. We cannot know whether future observers will wear resurrected fibers from our doomed era or simply study our fabrics like fossils. But one thing seems clear: fashion will have to weave together mourning and imagination. It must learn to celebrate the beautiful and the ugly equally – the vibrant life of a coral reef pattern and its bleached death; the warmth of wool and the warning of wildfire. In this world, elegance lies not in staying pristine, but in surrendering gracefully, in nurturing what comes after. Fashion’s last act may be a radical one: to dissolve itself into an ecology of care, memory, and regeneration.