The Burden I Am Wearing

This series is my confession. On each image I'm wearing all the clothes I own from one category. Every day I can feel the mental weight of my clothes. It comes from an awareness that I am part of the global problem of the unsustainable fashion nightmare.

We got perfectly accustomed to consuming fashion in an excessive way. Living in the privileged part of the world, it's fairly easy not to see the problem. The carbon footprint per capita when it comes to fashion consumption in the developed countries out scales the rest of the world. We buy a lot, we own a lot and we don't even use it but throw it away or give it away. The world is flooded with clothes produced daily in horrendous number. Each day a huge amount of clothes are destroyed or dumped. Yet, more is being produced.

'The Burden I Am Wearing' is my personal confession. The researchers found that a “sufficient” wardrobe consists of 74 garments and 20 outfits in total. With my wardrobe I'm way above this, even though I adopted a number of positive habits - buying much less and second hand when possible, choosing high quality and durability over fast fashion, fixing and mending. And still every day I can feel the weight of my clothes. It's an energetic blockage that comes from an awareness of being part of the problem and knowing its global consequences. 

Following trends is not my thing. Shopping clothes gives me anxiety. But since I was a little girl, I loved playing with clothes and fabrics, shaping them into something new, sculpting them into the extraordinary. I re-discovered this joy while working on this project. 

'The Burden I'm Wearing' is a series of 17 self-portraits. On each photograph I'm wearing all the items I own from one category: all my dresses, all my underwear pieces, all my trousers, all my coats... The self-portraits are visually referring to the tradition of dressed-up and staged classical photographic studio portraits. But they also carry a reminiscence of typical depictions of women in classical paintings, stripped from extreme emotions, passively letting the rich surrounding overshadow the female character in the center. In that sense, „The Burden I Am Wearing” points out the weight of being a woman – all the dos and don’ts, all the socio-cultural restrictions comfortably resting on female shoulders for centuries.