The Year In Garments

As the SSENSE editors contemplated our annual Year in Garments, we paused to recognize that we were not just overwhelmed at the prospect of summarizing a year that defies categorization: we were overcome by the feeling of remembering itself. Recalling 2020 is to catalogue too many kinds of pain. We have grieved collectively and privately; we have mourned openly and in secret; we have counted seconds that passed slow as weeks and months that felt like hours. This year sometimes feels like it has been lost, but that is not quite the whole truth. This year has been taken from us.

How, then, to account for the sweeping scale of so much hurt? How to reflect the moments of small, sweet care we encountered? The photos of protests over the summer show a glimpse of that spectrum: millions of people around the world in their streets, calling for justice and handing out hand sanitizer. Even these images and statistics don’t show the extent of how many people participated: for every one who went out, there was another who stayed home by the phone to provide jail support, or to take care of a loved one, or to work a job they needed, or to protect themselves from harm.

What, then, can we say about all the other parts of our year? What micro-eras do we want to remember when we look forward? What do we take with us, and what do we leave behind? Every time capsule is incomplete, and maybe that’s by design. Our diaries are loud with the words we don’t write, our wardrobes filled with outfits we couldn’t wear. Instead of articles or items, we’ve tried to pull out the moments and meanings themselves — hazmat suits, “VOTE” masks, yoga leggings and Zoom-call earrings, all too singular to be considered out of context. What, then, can we say will be next? We wouldn’t be so callous as to say wait and see, but maybe we would say we are ready to pause and consider.

“I want to set clothes free,” said Alessandro Michele, during a Zoom press conference about GucciFest, the virtual film festival he used to present his SS21 collection amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “I don’t want fashion to be imprisoned in shops any more,” he said—a natural pivot, given that going to places like shops or shows constituted an existential threat this season. For perhaps the first time in its contemporary history, the fashion industry had to contend with life or death this year, both fiscally and quite literally.

What replaced physical shows and experiences was a virtual fashion week—livestreams, Zoom calls and interviews, short films, music videos, and in the case of Loewe, a “show in a box.” Some of these make-shift presentations created buzz, while countless others failed to draw attention from an audience full-up on politics and public health crisis. GQ writer Rachel Tashijan questioned whether this scrappy season might have made for the best fashion week ever, while critic Robin Givhan was more skeptical, stating only one thing for certain: “These past few weeks have been a test—not just of how well fashion could tell its seasonal story in the midst of a pandemic. It was also a challenge for the industry to make the case for its relevance in a profoundly scarred world.”

Nobody entered 2020 prepared for every human interaction to double as an involuntary home tour, but here we are, wondering how our DIY haircuts will compliment our new throw pillows on the next Zoom call. These days, what we consider high glam has become entirely literal—where out-of-frame (and probably stained) sweatpants are ignored in favor of above-the-neck adornments: exaggerated collars, a dab of lipstick, the perfect pair of diamond statement earrings. After a year of collective and personal undoings, in more ways than one, we can still find joy in getting ourselves—and our living spaces—done up.

In 2019, our collective anxiety was trained on the rapidly intensifying gravity of the climate crisis. That August, environmental activist Greta Thunberg embarked on a transatlantic voyage by way of a solar-powered yacht to attend the UN climate summit in New York City, subsequently touring the continent to participate in climate protests in Canada and the US. Months later, Australia’s bushfire season bolstered this necessity for more immediate action: with nearly 19 million hectares of land burnt, several endangered species driven to extinction, and 103 billion in property damage, awareness around the issue felt undeniable, change felt within reach—just as another crisis was building stamina: COVID-19. We went from worrying about an uncertain future that was years away to worrying about one in terms of hours.

Grappling with the threat of contracting a potentially airborne virus, becoming ill or spreading it unknowingly, perpetuated an any-means-necessary mentality—disposable gloves, plastic cutlery, throwaway masks, garbage-bag scrubs. In scarcely a month we pivoted from shunning the use of single-use plastics to depending on them for our lives, the acute dilemma of personal safety transcending the ambient desperation of the natural world.

Earlier in the year Naomi Campbell was seen traveling in a hazmat suit, agitating the already fraught issue of whose protection is prioritized. The supermodel admitted she has an Amazon subscription for them: “I bought them in bulk and I bought them on subscription, so they keep coming,” she told WSJ Magazine. “There was one point when my subscription hadn’t come because they’d run out, and I panicked, even though I wasn’t going anywhere.” In this image and accompanying quote we see a complex ethical dilemma rendered in minute detail: Naomi’s suit carries the same symbolic weight as the latex gloves we’ll indefinitely be fishing out of the sea. They are equally markers of 2020: the very human attempt to persevere with whatever means one might have.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed swiftly by the Black Lives Matter uprising against racial injustice, people around the world came together in an outpouring of care and financial support for everything from basic food and housing to bail funds, recovery funds, and support for frontliners and activists.

In the face of an unprecedented level of need and desperation, one quick solution that designers, artists, and brands landed on was to merch-ify mutual aid. T-shirts, caps, tote bags, buttons and stickers exploded onto Instagram stories and online listicles as fashion-forward incentives to give. While some criticized the inability to conceive of giving without receiving, this merchification of care also underscored our collective desperation to replicate a social support network that has been denied those who need it most.

As the ultimate gesture of “wearing your heart on your sleeve,” mutual aid merch became a receipt both of charitable donation, and of the prideful participation in an attempt to build a better world. COME TEES “Rage Against The Machine” Bernie Sanders t-shirt, which raised tens of thousands of dollars for Bernie’s campaign in January (and continues to sell-out in support of various mutual aid organizations), is perhaps the ultimate example of how, this year, we used clothes to try and untangle complicated feelings about what’s right, what’s wrong, and what power we have to incite change.

Is that a new limited edition merch drop? Oh…no…it’s just a Joe Biden campaign t-shirt…cool…

The election was called for Biden on November 6th, and the months leading up to that would almost modestly be described as “frantic” or “frenzied” by any standard of contemporary political theater. While voters are banned from wearing anything that even whispers of political affiliation at the polls, candidates and designers alike flooded their online stores with t-shirts, socks, hats—clothing that shouted their intentions and directions alike. The Stuart Weitzman “VOTE” over-the-knee boot was a celebrity favorite, as was the “VOTE” mask, even though many of the wearers acted as if they were already in that booth, and kept their preferred candidates to themselves.

Since Demna Gvasalia took the Bernie Sanders logo and made it read Balenciaga, the line between ironic homage and sincere representation has become more of a wedge: when someone wears it, are they endorsing a candidate or a concept? When someone shouts their call to do exactly what the moment requires but does not really add much else, what are they asking? One knows, of course, that it is far harder to fit organize your communities and your workplaces to hold elected representatives accountable on a single item of clothing; one understands, obviously, that the complex realities of an antiquated electoral system depend on refusing to stan any politician the way one might a really excellent merch drop. On the other hand, in a year when there were so few moments of accidental interactions, who could deny the thrill of getting a passing nod from someone on the sidewalk wearing the same t-shirt for the same cause or candidate? These clothes and accessories are not really as loud as they initially appear—better to think of them as little flags, waving to find a friend.

Have you seen the latest TikTok drama? The caption reads below a split-screen image of, on one side, someone wrapped up in their blanket, hoodies pulled over their head, their eyes focused on the video that plays to the other side: perhaps it is an ordinary household image revealed to be a cake, a man aggressively guessing what color paint is being mixed, a hamster being rolled like sushi into a blanket, a llama dancing to a tinny cover of a song from a Russian cereal commercial. My #fyp, finishes the caption, which is that user’s way of saying: no, I haven’t seen what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to.

The only social media network in which being relentlessly tracked and pursued by an algorithm feels like a true reward, on TikTok a niche can become an entire subculture and a feed can become proof of a personality. The toxicity that exists inside the app is like any other—the racism, the anger, the threats of violence or erasure—and spend one beat too long on an anti-vaxxer’s monologue or wait to see what kind of put a finger down: Trump supporter edition game someone is playing, and your algorithm will be wrecked for weeks. Watching the app take you farther and farther away from what you don’t like or don’t care about is the experience itself: by noting which sounds, tags, locations, or images make one pause their swiping finger, turns a feed into the lottery of what for-you page will be made for you.

The goal of this game—and it does feel like a game—is to be cocooned by the faster, funnier people who use the medium to its full advantage: K-pop fans who wrecked Trump rallies, NYU students posting the quarantine meals that just make sense, ballerinas rehearsing in N95 masks, entire families learning the choreography to a popular song, “bark” mitzvahs, extremely polite babies enjoying a plate of fruit, teenagers presenting their elaborate theories for why they believe they were kidnapped, recreations of couture runway looks made in childhood bedrooms, cardboard cut-outs of Lorde stalking people through Los Angeles, “cartel TikTok,” philosophical investigations into the nature of math, rare aesthetics—memes come and go at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speeds.

To be surveilled is, whether we like it or not, to be known. One may freely give up all control for one app and then download another designed for the express opposite purpose. For those who have had Signal for longer than six months, this summer was an overload of contradictory notifications: the messaging service designed for total privacy has a way of letting one know when every former roommate, weed guy, Tinder date, bad boss, or ex had downloaded it as well. Signal group chats have a different tone than others: over the summer it was the app of choice to coordinate plans to meet at the protests, the kind of digital hygiene that acts as a form of hope. Please stay safe, the disappearing messages reminded us, even as we knew there is only so much safety within the hands that hold our phones.

On the 91st day of worldwide protests against police brutality, a journalist asked Toronto Raptors point guard Fred VanVleet if he was excited to play an upcoming game with the Celtics. VanVleet responded honestly: he was not thinking about it. He was thinking about Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old man shot seven times in the back by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while three of his sons were in the backseat of his car. "We're the ones with the microphones in our face, we're the ones who have to make a stand," VanVleet said. "At what point do we not have to speak about it anymore? Are we going to hold everybody accountable, or are we just going to put the spotlight on Black people or Black athletes or entertainers and say: What are you doing? What are you contributing to your community? What are you putting on the line?”

“For example, this happened in Kenosha,” VanVleet continued. "Wouldn't it be nice—in a perfect world—if we all said we're not playing, and the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks steps up to the plate and puts pressure on the district attorney's office and state attorneys and governors and politicians there to make real change and get some justice? I know it's not that simple, but if we're going to sit here and talk about making change, then at some point we're going to have to put our nuts on the line and actually put something up to lose rather than just money or visibility."

The next day, the Milwaukee Bucks did not play their first-round playoff game against the Orlando Magic in protest—leading to what Vinson Cunningham called “undoubtedly the most memorable image from an already bizarre N.B.A. season: a totally empty court.” Unwilling to let anything like a global pandemic affect the bottom line, the basketball bubble was intended to keep players safe and profits undisturbed. But the collective grief was too great to be contained—the death of Kobe Bryant, his teenage daughter, and the seven other passengers on their flight in January was the beginning of so many mournings felt on and off their courts.

For months—years—the WNBA has been a league of players who have both a conscience and convictions. Sue Bird, the All-Star guard in the Seattle Storm, organized her colleagues to publicly endorse Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, the Democratic candidate running for senator in Georgia against the incumbent Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream. Loeffler had written that she “adamantly” opposed the Black Lives Matter movement. Players planned to wear t-shirts that read “Vote Warnock,” deliberately choosing a nationally televised game to do so for the first time. Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the WNBA’s union and a power forward for the Los Angeles Sparks, told Louisa Thomas that she was always aware of which players weren’t in the bubble with them. After each game, Ogwumike’s team would send out memos with post-game updates, and a running tally of how many days it had been since Breonna Taylor had been shot and killed in her apartment.

In a season explicitly “dedicated to social justice with games honoring the Black Lives Matter movement,” players could choose to wear jerseys printed with “Say Her Name,” the same chants that carried across the cities they played on behalf of. The work stoppage lasted three days before playoffs resumed. In a summer full of indelible images, this brief wildcat strike showed both what wins were possible and which scores cannot be settled.

Taking time to step away from the screen has been one of the year's most important practices. But for Adriene Mishler, also known as "The Reigning Queen of Pandemic Yoga," and her community of cult followers, the screen has become its own resolve. Her YouTube channel, called "Yoga With Adriene," with over 8 million subscribers, garnered one million new daily views during the first few months of the pandemic. In an era of kettlebell shortages and trending at-home workouts like the Goop-cosigned "The Class," Mishler's approach requires no financial commitment or total lifestyle transformation. A recently-uploaded video titled "Blanket Yoga" features her dog (and costar) Benji in a 40-minute sequence of breathwork, stretches, and self-hugs—beginning and ending bundled up in a position that looks more like sleep than exercise. Mishler encourages her students to use whatever they have on-hand, and to dress as comfortably as possible. She turns Zoom fatigue and blue light burnout into real, intentional rest for the body and the mind.

In a brand new genre of dark and twisted satire, all bohemian garb and lost musicality, the star-studded cover of John Lennon's "Imagine" was a far cry from a shared moment of comfort in times of crisis. The chaos of 2020 added uncharted layers to the old catchphrase "Celebrities—they're just like us!," as talk show hosts and their regular A-list guests seemed to prioritize misguided gestures of togetherness over putting their money where their mouth is. Unlike us, the pandemic produced a problem specific to the lifestyles of the rich and famous: celebrities without celebrity culture floundered, seemingly untouched by the global crisis and unchecked in their attempts to remain in the spotlight.

Luckily, we had Brooklyn-based comedian and creator of the Instagram Live series "Baited" Ziwe Fumudoh, who brought us interviews with everyone from the famously "cancelled" Alison Roman to playwright Jeremy O. Harris. With conversations around politics, race, and paying reparations, and her original hit singles "Make It Clap for Democracy" and "Universal Healthcare," Ziwe's listening material landed when we needed it most—buy her album on iTunes now.

“Anger is a potent spice. A pinch wakes you up, too much dulls your senses,” remarks the unremarkable Harry Beltik of Queen’s Gambit. The scripted miniseries has garnered attention from over 64 million Netflix-stan households, and sparked a renewed public interest in the game at the crux of its narrative—but how much of this has to do with the integrity of the entertainment, and how much to do with the fact that we are all, likely, navigating the world with “dulled senses”? In the stages of grief, anger comes after denial, and is the precursor to bargaining, depression, and (sometimes) acceptance. During a time of fluctuating peaks and valleys, curves and charts, these stages have become more like familiar cycles, perpetuated by forces we are unable to predict. Our moods become calendars, marked by our distractions.

Once a guilty indulgence, binge-watching feels collectively palliative—the privilege to tune out has become vital. Earlier days of lockdown offered us Tiger King, The Last Dance, Normal People and (contentiousl[ee]) Emili[ee] in Par[ee]. Each title jarrs the respective mood with which it was initially viewed—they measure our memories, or at the very least, the degree of our apathy. “Are you still watching?” you might read, after waking up: on the couch, lights on at 4am; from a fever dream; with a coffee ready to call in to your first meeting forgetting last night’s binge; with chin to chest, like a prawn in bed; or maybe you never stopped watching. You might wonder upon which word to place the emphasis—am I still watching? And more importantly, who is watching me? As grief continues to obscure our perception of time, our senses continuously dulled, may 2021 wake us up à la Beltik: with just a pinch.