What Clothes Carry (2026)

This essay draws on research conducted for my thesis, Everyday Experiences of Beauty and Awe and the Role of Fashion (2024), completed as part of my Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Psychology of Fashion at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

---

There is a particular kind of morning light that does something to the street. Low, yellow, slightly indiscriminate. It lands on everything equally, and somehow makes everything matter a little more. I noticed it once leaving my building, the way it caught the pavement, the air, the people walking by, the ordinary weight of a Tuesday morning, and made all of it feel oddly significant. I didn't know what I was looking at exactly... but I knew I didn't want to look away.

That kind of moment, brief, ordinary, and disproportionately felt, is what this essay is about. Not fashion, exactly. Not beauty in the abstract either. But the experience of being stopped by something before you understand why. And what that stoppage means. And what that has to do with the stories we carry on our bodies every day.

---

1. The Unexamined Question

Beauty has occupied Western thought for so long that the disagreement itself has become a kind of tradition. Plato located its highest form in the moral. Kant refused the object entirely: for him, beauty was a judgement of subjective perception, meaning what one perceives as beautiful depends on their relationship with the object being perceived. In other words, beauty is never simply seen but always, in some sense, constructed. I find that compelling. It means the morning light I described before is not beautiful on its own. Something in me, in my act of perceiving it, made it so.

Contemporary neuroscience agrees, in its own way, explaining that encounters with beauty activate the brain's reward circuitry. Positive emotional states heighten our sensitivity to it. Which raises a question I keep returning to: if beauty is partly a condition we bring to things, what determines when we are capable of it? What opens that door, and what closes it?

That is where awe enters. Awe sits at beauty's outer edge: the point where aesthetic experience stops being pleasurable and becomes something closer to destabilising. The literature describes it in terms of vastness: one-in-a-lifetime encounters, experiences of finding one's soul, or being moved by something larger than themselves. Researchers document its effects: expanded perspective, increased life satisfaction, a shift from individual concerns toward something more collective. What remains underexamined is its texture. Whether it can exist below the threshold of the extraordinary. Whether it has, as I suspected, an everyday form.

What no empirical study had asked, before mine, was whether any of this could manifest through fashion. Not fashion as cultural spectacle: the runway, the couture house, the mythology of the archive. But fashion as the intimate, daily negotiation between interiority and appearance. The stories carried in fabric. The symbolic weight of what we choose to put on our bodies, and why. That gap felt less like an oversight than a symptom. And it felt, to me, worth examining.

So I designed a study around it.

---

2. The Word They Kept Reaching For

I recruited six people. Young, mostly London-based, varied in background and profession: fashion designers, UX designers, a technology engineer, a business professional. I sat with each of them individually and asked them to talk about beauty. About awe. About their clothes, and what those clothes meant to them, and whether any of it connected. The conversations lasted around thirty minutes each. What they gave me was considerably harder to summarise than I expected. But let me try.

Nearly everyone, when pressed, moved away from the visual almost immediately. Beauty, they kept insisting, is not something physical. One person described it as emotional closeness: the feeling of being with someone you love, the particular quality of that proximity. Another said they experienced it most intensely watching strangers on the street, not stylish strangers necessarily, just people who seemed entirely, unbothered, themselves: "Observing those moments of social awkwardness in others is a huge trigger for beauty in my life." Someone else told me that beauty in fashion was less about what something looked like and more about the meanings attached to it: about what wearing a certain piece allowed them to embody, and what that revealed about who they are.

"[...] How can that (clothing item) say something about them? How much does their style reveal about their personality? I think... beauty is in how you define your personality with the things you wear."

What surprised me was not that people had rich inner lives around clothes. It was how consistently they reached for the same word. Not wearing. Not owning. Embodying. As if putting something on was less an act of dressing than an act of inhabitation: entering a story that already existed, and making it move again with your body.

One participant wore almost entirely vintage pieces that had belonged to her mother. Nineties pieces, not always conventionally beautiful. She wore them not despite that, but because of what they carried, "there is a storyline in the clothes. It is a very strong experience to wear something and see it in action and motion." Another described his grandfather's suit, his cufflinks. The weight of them, what it feels like to put them on now that he's passed away, "it gives me this feeling of awe and beauty inside... also luck, and joy."

These were not descriptions of aesthetic preference. They were descriptions of something closer to continuity: of fashion as a way of staying connected to people, to time, to versions of yourself that no longer exist except in what you choose to carry forward. The clothes were not beautiful objects. They were vessels. And the experience of wearing them was less about appearance than about what the body. To dress is to be allowed to remember.

This is what the research kept returning to. Not the silhouette, or the colour, or the cut. But the capacity of a garment to hold something beyond what is immediately visible. Fashion, understood this way, is not decoration, but a form of embodied memory. It is a way of making the past present, and the present meaningful.

---

3. The Threshold

Awe, the literature insists, is at the point where the ordinary ends. The scale is always vast. The frequency, by design, is rare. And my participants agreed. All of them. When I asked whether awe could have an everyday expression, their first reaction was an unanimous and immediate 'No!"

Awe's premise is its exceptionality. To experience it daily would be to transform it into something else: into background, into habit, into the very ordinary thing it defines itself against. One participant was precise about this, "if I could experience this daily, it would be so ordinary... and the experience of awe is extraordinary." There is a logic in that. You cannot call something rare if it happens every morning.

And yet, when I pushed further, not asking whether everyday awe existed, but how awe arrived at all and what opened or closed the possibility of it, the answers changed register. One participant described it like a practice, "seeing something beautiful and that growing into awe, jumping that gap, does not occur daily; but it happens often because it is something I try to practise in a way." Another went further and said "I guess awe could happen daily because it is a mindset and a way of looking at the world." A third offered something quieter, "when you know what evokes that awe feeling within you, you should, well, follow that guidance."

None of them were saying that awe was common. They were saying something more careful: that the distance between beauty and awe is crossable. That what begins as an ordinary response, can tip, under certain conditions, into something else. There's a gap. There's a crossing.

What the research could not settle, and what I find most interesting, is whether the threshold is a quality of the experience or a quality of the perceiver. Whether awe requires the right stimulus, or the right attention. The literature leans toward stimulus: vastness, scale, the vertiginous encounter with something that exceeds comprehension. My participants leaned, tentatively, toward attention. Toward a cultivated capacity to let something in far enough that it reorganises you.

The experience one participant described as “feeling like everything is alright at this very moment, the knowing that everything will be alright at all times” is not, in itself, overwhelming in scale. But it is, somehow, larger than the moment that contains it. That may be the closest definition I found to awe: not the sublime, not some catastrophic expansion, but a distinct suspension of smallness. A moment in which the perimeter of the self softens.

Whether a piece of clothing can produce that moment is a question the research opened without closing. What it did establish is that clothes can hold the conditions for it. The right story, the right weight, the right act of becoming. The threshold may not be the garment. But the garment can bring you close enough to notice it.

---

4. Still

The morning light is still there. Some version of it, most mornings. I still don’t always know what I’m looking at, or why it seems to matter more than it should. What I know now is that the not-knowing is part of it. Like what the body does, dressed and moving, continuous, as it holds forms of meaning the mind hasn’t yet caught up with. The clothes are already in motion. The story is already being told.

And none of it was ever only about clothes.