Introduction: The Four Elements of Fashion

The four elements — earth, water, air, and fire — can be found in most of the clothes we wear. Cotton, linen, and even synthetic fibres, need all four elements to grow and blossom. Without them no cotton or polyester—and no clothes. This insight makes us literally appreciate how everything is made up of the four elements. It also reveals more-than-human connections that we are usually not aware of. This is not only a spiritual way of thinking in the sense of an awareness of inter-relationality, but it is also a highly materialist way of thinking. In the era of ecological crisis, the papers in The Four Elements of Fashion aim to investigate the new paradigms of fashion cultures through the four archetypal elements of matter. By doing so, the authors shift the attention towards the material and sensory aspects of fashion—features that have been largely neglected by fashion studies over the past forty years. This approach fits in the current debate on the material turn inspired by de-centring of the human and a re-centring of matter and the materiality of things, objects, technologies, and bodies. The book intends to analyse this ontological shift through the redefinition of the substance of fashion and its histories.