Solarpunk fashion isn’t frivolous

debmerriam:

I’d like to remind those who feel that caring about clothes and aesthetics is ‘too frivolous’ and ‘not solarpunk enough’ that they’re rehashing a conversation feminists have already had. “Don’t you have more important things to worry about than fashion?”

(1) Clothing is wrapped up with culture and identity. It’s shaped by local climate and social mores. If you’re writing speculative fiction, how people dress is going to be part of your world-building process. 

(2) The same goes for art and architecture. 

(3) We can care about more than one thing at a time. Being interested in fashion and design does not make a person less interested in creating a world that’s more just, renewably powered, and moving past net-zero to drawdown.

(4) Clothing is read differently on different bodies, with heteropatriarchal sexism, ageism, racism and colonialism all playing roles in how what a person is wearing changes how they are perceived. Want an anti-racist, decolonized future? Want to challenge gender norms? You’ll have to think about clothes.

We can critique the solarpunk fashion posts that are out there for a variety of legitimate reasons: too many flower crowns, too much green, too much colour, too many impractical outfits with lots of excess fabric, too much cultural appropriation, not enough size diversity or representation of people with disabilities, and so on. (Personally, I predict re-localization of fashion design and manufacture, combined with bioregional dyeing of natural fibres, cradle-to-cradle design for synthetic fibres, and zero-waste pattern cutting.)

There are legit critiques of solarpunk architecture posts too, depending on whether your solarpunk is urban or rural, flooded or desertified, techno-optimistic or permaculture-low-tech, post-scarcity or scavenged from the ruins.

But, please, quit it with the gatekeeping and faux-intellectual snobbery. People who got interested in solarpunk for aesthetic reasons instead of political reasons have just as much to offer in imagining the future as you do; they just have a different area of expertise than yours.