Imogen Carter De Jong

A love of secondhand clothing lies at the core of this research project.

Curious about the pleasures of secondhand garments, the project departs from recent interest in secondhand fashion in terms of sustainability and subculture and turns its attention to the embodied, affective experience of wearing. It is argued that there is a particular genre of sartorial pleasure associated with secondhand clothes in which visuality, sensuality and the imagination all play a part.

The project is informed by a burgeoning interest in affect and the senses within fashion studies and works towards developing an appropriate methodology for researching the affect(s) of secondhand clothing. It takes cues from work in creative ethnography, auto-ethnography and wardrobe studies and experiments with these processes as a means of effectively capturing, articulating and understanding the pleasure(s) of secondhand garments.