Avery Trufelman: “Everything Has Fashion. Fashion is Just Taste Over Time. ”

As fashion is increasingly consumed through a stream of images, products and fleeting trends, Avery Trufelman, host of the award-winning podcast “Articles of Interest,” takes a different approach. Trufelman zooms in on her subjects to uncover the histories, systems and human stories woven into the clothes we wear.

“It’s crops, it’s the earth, it’s handwork, it’s culture, it’s society,” Trufelman says. “You tug on a thread and you get everything.”

In this conversation from our archive, Trufelman joins BoF founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Imran Amed to discuss her path into podcasting and why understanding the story behind a garment can transform our relationship with it.

Key Insights: 

• For Trufelman, clothing was one of her earliest forms of self-expression. As a teenager, she wore unusual thrifted outfits that made her stand out among her peers. “It just made me realise how powerful clothing was,” she says. “Dressing in this wild way sort of set me apart.” As she grew older and found other ways to communicate, her reliance on clothing changed, realising that fashion is closely connected to freedom, identity and the ability to express oneself.

• Creating “Articles of Interest” expanded Trufelman’s understanding of what fashion encompasses. She initially distinguished between clothes, which she considered real and universal, and fashion, which she associated with an artificial and potentially alienating industry. Her reporting gradually dissolved that distinction. “Now, it’s all about fashion because everything has fashion,” she says. “Buildings have fashion, cars have fashion, colours have fashion. Fashion is just taste over time.”

• Audio can encourage audiences to look beyond immediate aesthetic judgements. Trufelman learnt how to translate visual subjects into sound while working on the architecture podcast “99% Invisible.” By allowing listeners to encounter the history and ideas behind an object before seeing it, audio can complicate instinctive reactions about whether something is attractive, ugly or fashionable. “There’s something really potent about hearing the story first,” she says.

• The deeper Trufelman investigates clothing, the more complex it becomes. Stories about individual garments lead into questions about agriculture, natural resources, garment construction, labour, social conventions and political history. Learning to sew gave her another perspective on the skill embedded in clothing and the people responsible for making it. Rather than offering simple explanations, her work embraces fashion as a “bottomless well” of conflicting histories and emotions, she says.

Additional Resources:

• The BoF 500: Avery Trufelman 
• Exclusive: ‘Articles of Interest’ Podcast to Tackle American ‘Gorpcore’ Next | BoF 

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