Quality of Lifestyles – Changing Health Fashions

"A novel coronavirus is spreading in China – and jumping from person to person" was the headline of the NZZ in January 2020. The article was illustrated with a woman wearing a quilted coat and a leopard-print scarf.

She protected her hands with gloves, her hair with a baseball cap, and covered her face with a medical face mask. Since those days, the mask wave has swept across Europe and, along with the virus, is spreading like a pandemic. Amateurs and designers acted and designed masks in a variety of formats, without their physical benefits having been medically proven at the time. The reason for this was the media-driven mask shortage, but the fashionable appropriation seemed to have additional functions, both individually and socially. The intangible pandemic became material, and the invisible virus took on a fashionable face. Things can be vital to people because, in addition to physical protection, they also offer psychological and social protection by accompanying us in changing life circumstances. They enable us to compensate for fear, provide security, and help us readjust our identities. As the face mask explicitly demonstrates, they can potentially trap aerosols, promise to reduce the risk of self-infection, and, as a "community mask," communicate that we also care about our fellow human beings. Fashion thus has diverse qualities: it protects, promises, and speaks to us. Renowned lifestyle brands are responding, collaborating with virologists, producing anti-viral twin sets of masks and hats, and innovating the market with futuristic coronavirus killer masks. Today, a year later, we can say that the mask, like sweatpants, belongs to every collection—not because it is mandatory as a medical facial uniform, not because it symbolizes a pandemic event, but because it stands as a fashionable symbol and warning sign for health, illness, and death. Thus, the health accessory is becoming a "must-have" that will hybridize and continue to expand and mutate in its function from facial to physical clothing. And this brings us right to the point: Fashion creates bodies, bodies create fashion, and fashion creates health policy. It materializes socio-economic and socio-cultural change – in short, trends – in a sensual way.

Infection trends

Epidemics are temporal and spatial clusters of a pathogen within human populations, which we can classify as infectious diseases. The way they spread is of virological and sociological importance, because the way a virus spreads illustrates how small, inconspicuous niche phenomena (microtrends) are capable of bringing about social, political, and economic change. Birkenstock's health sandals can leap from person to person and spread like an epidemic if the message of the phenomenon ("Live healthy and be eco-friendly") finds fertile ground. Megatrends such as health and sustainability are the foundation upon which various fashion trends thrive, and this has been the case long before Covid-19. Health, synonymous with a good life, has become deeply ingrained in our self-image and culture and has been nourishing all areas of life for some time. The pandemic is disrupting the values ​​of health-conscious people who live in health-promoting environments and demand an extension of lifespan as the new normal. It is assumed to act like fertilizer in the field of health, and this will become more important than ever in the future. Health and mood trackers, sportivity, detoxing, mind sports, yoga, well-being, spiritual self – all these are expressions of the healthy living trend that has been unfolding under the term holistic health over the past few years. At its core is the holistic approach of keeping "burned-out" bodies and souls, "exhausted" environments, and "depleted" economies alive for as long as possible – revitalizing and rehabilitating them. Companies like H&M and Zara are responding, attempting to regenerate themselves with detox fashion by declaring war on the chemical-contaminated body through clothing. Organic, sustainable , and karma fashion pursue similar goals, focusing on healthier raw materials, better work, and mindfulness. But health itself also seems to offer a way out, as fitness fashion and athleisure demonstrate. This fashion reinforces the feeling of having to be fit for life and helps shape our healthy bodies. Fashion implements physiotherapy concepts, integrates products like kinesiology tape, and attempts to remain attractive with sports medicine and body-sculpting shapewear .

Self-care fashion

Healing fashion is an alternative fashion mutation that is spreading further through self-healing messages. This fashion merges not with conventional medicine but with complementary and alternative medicine, as can be seen in collections such as Victoria Beckham's "Crystal Alchemy" and Viktor & Rolf's "Color Magic." They pave the way to spiritual fashion and demonstrate how energetic clothing becomes a second skin. Textile surfaces integrate healing crystals and metals, undergo rose quartz filtering processes, and are marketed with Ayurvedic dyes. And designers like Marie Lea Lund align their materials with the chakras, energy lines, and pressure points of their wearers. Thus, wearing fashion now becomes holistic medicine, helping to optimize the body both preventively and curatively, but also attempting to alleviate emotional pain. Fashion has always offered resilience in crisis situations by helping us understand the changed world we live in. What makes the difference is the narrative, which no longer focuses on glamour, ecology, or retro, but rather on conventional, complementary medicine, and virology. The face mask is therefore not just an iconic stand-in for the fight against hostile viruses, but also against all diseases and the associated death. It heralds a new era of self-care fashion that aims to reanimate attacked and injured identities. It becomes both a medicalized protective garment and a therapeutic comfort blanket for a health-care society shaken by fear of death, one that seeks to push our mortality out of our field of vision. It can thus be interpreted as a life-prolonging accessory and a powerful signal for a thriving market for life-prolonging fashion . It thus responds to a zeitgeist that prioritizes quantity over quality of life. Complementing this are holistic textile offerings that offer alternative approaches to changing lifestyles and health concepts.

Caring designs

finally circulates between activity and fragility, incorporates medical and care-specific knowledge, and attempts to care for attacked and injured identities. However, the focus here is not on the unbridled desire to expand lifespan. finally promises neither fitness nor healing, but rather accepts finiteness and fragility, offering textile companions that facilitate discourse on taboo topics such as illness, the need for care, and absent health. They are designed bridges that link the middle of life with the end and create connections between people who are affected or who provide caring support to those affected. Palliative care physician Roland Kunz also focuses on quality of life rather than quantity in his work. In his opinion, extending life is often feasible, but he questions whether this improves quality of life (Kunz 2020). His social diagnosis is that many people suppress the question of their own finiteness until the end. In his view, this is "understandable and, in a sense, enables a carefree life." On the other hand, maturity in life means looking back on one’s life so far and asking oneself what one still expects from life, while also considering the end of life” (ibid.).

finally doesn't close its eyes. This allows questions like: "Where are we actually? What happened? What awaits us? What decisions might lie ahead?" (Kunz 2020) to be asked without fear, even outside of acute distress. Because the more we overcome fears and speechlessness, and the better and earlier we discuss our ideas about the end of our lives, the easier it is, according to Kunz, to realize the ideas and wishes of patients at the end of their life journey (ibid.).

Literature:

Kunz, Roland (2020): “Gerontology Today,” Beat Steiger interviewed Dr. Roland Kunz during the event “Quality of Life in the Final Phase of Life – Palliative Care, Nursing, and Medicine,” September 18, 2021.

Footnote: This text excerpt is taken in a slightly modified form from the book contribution “Mask Have” by Bitten Stetter, published in the HKB newspaper “Wann gibt es die Pille” (When will the pill be available) edited by Christian Pauli, editorial staff of the Bern University of the Arts, published in Bern, March 2021.

Further reading:

Heinz Rüegger, Roland Kunz:
About self-determined dying.
Between Freedom, Responsibility, and Overwhelm. Zurich, August 2020. ISBN 978-3-906304-70-0