A Global History of Secondhand Clothing
Author(s)
Shell, Hanna Rose
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Clothing, almost by definition, is a medium of transmission within a spreadable media ecology. It is both the means and the site for the storage and spread of information. Clothes are made to be carried by the human body (as in the French porter and the Haitian Creole pote). Textile skins were, from their origins, portable artifacts and temporary prostheses, shaped by the demands of a mobile body and inscribed with markers of that body’s history. The demands on clothing have always been high—armor (protection against shame, enemies, and the elements) and aesthetics, comfort and durability. Clothing is portable, proximate to the human body, and eminently changeable. Clothes remain artifacts in continual flux. They convey messages to the world, and they also provide the raw material for subversion of precisely these messages.
Date issued
2013Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and SocietyJournal
Spreadable Media
Publisher
NYU Press
Citation
Shell, Hanna Rose. “A Global History of Secondhand Clothing." chapter essay in Spreadable Media: Creating Value in a Networked World, eds. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: NYU Press, 2013.
Version: Author's final manuscript