The Weight of What We Wear

By Julia Vilardi

Most fashion lovers, or even the mildly fashion-curious, understand that the industry is an expert at recycling trends. What many people don’t fully grasp is how those trends and traditions are born in the first place. The items we casually pull from our closets each morning are rarely accidental. They carry histories, meanings, and echoes of a past we may not even recognize.

Love it or hate it, The Devil Wears Prada captures this truth perfectly. In the now-iconic “Cerulean” monologue, Miranda Priestly responds to Andy’s dismissive attitude toward high fashion. Andy believes she has opted out, that her blue sweater is simply a neutral, practical choice. Miranda dismantles that illusion. The color, she explains, represents millions of dollars, countless jobs, and years of aesthetic decisions made long before Andy ever stepped into a store. “It’s sort of comical,” she says, “how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry.”

The message is simple: fashion is never neutral. Even indifference participates.

The pieces hanging in our closets did not appear there randomly. They reflect cultural shifts, political forces, and inherited traditions, shaping rituals and habits in ways we rarely notice. 

Take Brazil on New Year’s Eve. Wearing white to manifest peace and protection for the coming year feels almost universal. The beaches fill with white dresses and linen shirts, as if the country collectively agreed on a palette. Yet while Brazil is officially secular and overwhelmingly Christian, this tradition has Afro-Brazilian spiritual roots, particularly in Candomblé.

For many, buying a white outfit in late December is simply a habit: festive, aesthetic, unquestioned. But history complicates that simplicity. Brazil was a central hub of the transatlantic slave trade and the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery. African religions, languages, and practices were violently suppressed for centuries. And yet, here we are: a Candomblé-rooted tradition quietly embedded into a national ritual.

That is not accidental. That is resistance woven into fabric.

Fashion carries weight we may not always see. It survives erasure. It moves through time disguised as trend or custom.

And sometimes, it becomes deliberate again.

Bad Bunny’s recent visual identity surrounding Debí Tirar Más Fotos prominently features the jíbaro straw hat, which is traditionally associated with Puerto Rican rural workers and agricultural life. To some, it may appear as a stylistic flourish. But it is far more than that. The hat invokes the working class, the countryside, the people who built Puerto Rico outside of glossy tourist imagery. By wearing it, he transforms a humble, historically loaded object into a contemporary symbol of pride.

Clothing can be quiet. But it can also be archival. Political. Protective.

Fashion is never neutral. The belt around your waist, the hat shielding you from the sun, the sunglasses resting on your nose. Each object exists within a web of history. To learn where they come from is not to overthink getting dressed. It is to recognize that self-expression has always been intertwined with memory, identity, and power.

The morning routine may feel casual. But it is never empty.