The Minimalist Universe of Things. Living with Less in German Speaking Households

ABSTRACT In an era of affluence and overflow, minimalism presents a way to live with mindfulness and care. Minimalists research and evaluate their surroundings and adapt them to a way of living with less. This article describes how the day-to-day life of minimalist persons changes as the relationship to the clothes that they keep is deepened through practices of care and alternative forms of consumption. Two ethnographers conducted research on forty-five minimalist wardrobes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, attending minimalist meet ups and a convention. We found that becoming a minimalist is a process often described as a personal journey. As media attention is focused on sorting out and discarding possessions, we chose to explore the kind of practices and revaluations that characterize this minimalist process.

HEIKE DERWANZ IS ASSISTANT
PROFESSOR FOR CRAFT/DESIGN
EDUCATION AND SUSTAINABILITY AT THE
ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS VIENNA. AS
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST AND ART
HISTORIAN SPECIALIZING IN
METROPOLITAN CULTURE, SHE PUBLISHED
AN ANTHOLOGY ON MINIMALISM
(MINIMALISMUS. EIN READER) OR EDITED
THE SPECIAL ISSUE “SAVING THE CITY:
COLLECTIVE LOW-BUDGET ORGANIZING
AND URBAN PRACTICE”.
H.DERWANZ@AKBILD.AC.AT

KEYWORDS: minimalism, wardrobe studies, sustainable clothing

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2024.2338007.

In the Global North, the minimalist lifestyle has increased in popularity and the minimalist scene has grown significantly since the global economic crisis in 2008/2009. This development has made itself apparent through multiple blogs, podcasts, video channels and social media groups, as well as the number of published guidebooks on minimalism (e.g. Carver 2017; Jachmann 2017; Fields, Millburn and Nicodemus 2018; Kondō 2018; Sasaki 2018). As a result of this phenomenon, a growing number of people are reflecting and refashioning their current lifestyle and consumer behavior. Minimalism often includes a reevaluation of what is needed and appreciated, followed by reducing and changing everyday practices. The most popular practices through social media can be found under hashtags such as decluttering, big sorts, clear outs and minimalist sorting out challenges. However, in this paper I argue that the minimalist lifestyle is not simply about sorting out or discarding possessions, but mostly about establishing a different kind of relationship to the fewer items that form a household as a long-term effect.

After a quick introduction into the many fields that use the term ‘minimalism’ today, the ethnographic field and methods applied will be explained. In the next paragraph, the ethnographic data will be unfolded to reveal two other sets of practices beyond the reduction of possessions: firstly, care and maintenance practices, and secondly, different practices for acquiring clothes that characterize minimalist everyday life. To study and to understand the changes that occur when living with things in a minimalist way, I will introduce the concept of the “universe of things” (Hahn 2015b), which underlines the constellation of the entire wardrobe and allows us to understand how people organize their working and private life with just 40 pieces of clothing.

The term minimalism exists in different fields within the humanities disciplines and in the media. It is described as an aesthetic cosmology reflected in a particular ‘style’ in fashion, architecture, literature, design and music. Within these disciplines and practices, minimalism denotes a perceptible reduction. The term derives from the Latin minimum, meaning the least or the smallest. Historic references are frequently made to modern design and especially the Bauhaus school, Scandinavian design or Japanese aesthetics. Contemporary references are also made to minimal art, a 1960s reaction to expressionism where geometric forms and industrial material gave art a new aesthetic (Chayka 2020). Minimal art was highly influential in the fashion of the 1980s and 1990s, described as purist (Derwanz 2022). However, reductionist design has a longer and much more diverse history, taking on the designs of movements such as the Franciscan habit, Calvinist aesthetics or Shaker design, to only cite some of the Christian

traditions. Accordingly, aesthetic minimalism is used both as a description for reduction in its broader sense and geometric forms in its narrow definition.

Minimalism today appears as a lifestyle with a particular view on the material dimension of the everyday, the household, and the array of things we consume. From this perspective, minimalism reconsiders how we live with things, how we use them in the ordinary realm, and also how much value we attach to them. A key question minimalists ask is ‘Do I really need this?’. Schools of thought regarding reducing one’s lifestyle to one’s needs and not pursuing material overexposure, however, appear in different times and cultures such as Buddhism, Christianity, or the voluntary simplicity movement beginning in the 1970s (Elgin 1981; Rebouças and Soares 2020). Not all self-described minimalists refer to these cultural roots though. Some turn to minimalism as a reaction to a personal crisis, debts and/or as a means of personal development (Chayka 2020). A recent literature review on minimalism and voluntary simplicity draws a connection in particular to wellbeing expressed through concepts such as happiness and meaning, while “satisfying one’s core needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness” (Hook et al. 2023: 8).

Accordingly, in the minimalist process, things are evaluated with regard to a different set of qualities, their lifecycle and the things that are needed to sustain them. From a transdisciplinary perspective, different strands of today’s minimalism (Derwanz 2015; Rodríguez 2017: 287) become apparent that have not yet been fully studied, such as the emphasis on the minimalist aesthetic (Chayka 2020), the attention on “[making] ends meet” (Fields Millburn and Nicodemus 2018), a focus on psychological effects (Hook et al. 2023), a pure functionalism of things (Sasaki 2018) or even a political movement (Rodríguez 2017), which may be related to the disciplinary use of the concept of minimalism as explored above.

This research is part of the project ‘Textile Minimalism. Pioneering Sustainable Action?’, which started in 2018 with two ethnographers, Verena Strebinger and myself, visiting forty-five minimalist households in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It posed the question of whether minimalists could be seen as pioneers for more sustainable and resource-austere consumption, specifically in the case of clothes. Our main research method is wardrobe interviews, according to which the ethnographer interacts with clothing, furniture, space and other household objects (Woodward 2007; Fletcher and Klepp 2017; Hausgrud 2017). Alas, we did not focus on valuable garments but on the inter-related everyday practices such as storage, care, laundry, repair, consumption and disposal. Instead, we took photographs of garments, how they were stored, and care tools such as brushes or moth paper.

This direct contact with the actual garments within the surrounding household was beneficial for mainly two reasons: On the one hand, the wardrobe interview is a memory-stimulating method. The haptic interaction during the interview enabled interviewees to have a better overview and talk in more detail. When asked about their oldest garment, they usually had to visually search through their wardrobe. On the other hand, we could correlate their verbal expressions to observations. Interviewees who stated that they reject synthetic fibers, for instance, could prove that. In this way, we could observe people's emotional and physical interactions with their stuff and not only rely on verbal expressions (Skjold 2014; Niinimäki 2018).

Contemporary wardrobe studies provide an expanding range of instruments in a research-process-oriented manner (Klepp and Bjerck 2014; Fletcher and Klepp 2017). In minimalist households, practices appear under a magnifier: With fewer pieces of clothing, wear and tear occurs more frequently in turn. But there is also a remarkable increase of awareness regarding one's belongings and care practices, making it easier for our interlocutors to speak about these and demonstrate what they do. In this research, interviewees were mainly contacted through minimalist meet-ups that took place in bigger cities. Organized by locals, these groups were formed mostly between 2010 and 2016 through internet sites and social media. We visited 12 meet-ups in ten cities to compile issues of concern for minimalists and get into contact with possible interview partners. Additionally, some of the most well-known minimalist bloggers or media activists were contacted online and asked to participate. Within this sample, nearly half of the interviewees lived alone, 32 of them were female and 87 per cent were younger than 50. Interested individuals were visited at their homes for 46 wardrobe interviews, taking between 45 to 180 min, and in a few cases up to four hours. Because of the intimacy of this research method, it was important for us that people could get to know us in person before deciding that we could visit their homes. They could choose if they would like to be recorded, have their household photographed and if we could use both in publications and talks. The higher percentage of women might be due to the fact that, as we are female ethnographers, women were more interested to discuss their clothing with us or that more women in general pursue a minimalist lifestyle in German-speaking countries. However, none of them specifically minimized their clothes, but they did consider themselves minimalists in general.¹

The minimalist lifestyle is characterized by the pursuit of owning fewer objects and often also saving consumption time for other purposes (Derwanz 2015). Key to the resulting change is the processuality of

the “minimalist journey” that is characterized by embracing change and learning. In her thesis on minimalism between downshifting and deferred consumption, Susan Helbig (2015) – as well as Verena Strebing (2019) in her work on minimalist capsule wardrobes – describes sorting out as a starting point for many minimalists. In contrast to the media attention given to sorting things out, in our ethnographic data we found three sets of practices with clothes that are typical for everyday minimalism. In the following, I will firstly describe sorting out and all its varied forms as reorganization, but these practices will be accompanied by new routines of care and maintenance as a second aspect, as well as new strategies of acquiring and choosing things as a third aspect of living with fewer items of clothing.

At first glance, it seems as if minimalism is a counterpart to hoarding in that it holds control, order and beauty with regard to living with things. Coming back to the question of how minimalists can live a more content life with less belongings than before, the role of order in achieving a feeling of control and beauty comes into view again. Things are functionally grouped into an order even though different systems of order exist in one household (Hahn 2015a: 70f), a concept that the editors of this issue similarly refer to as 'a relational ecology'. However, I choose to draw on what Hofer and Fel (1972: 115) describe as the 'Sachuniversum' (universe of things), namely the interaction between things and their wider ecological constellation in households. In contrast to the Sachuniversum metaphor, which beautifully describes the different attention or distance to things in a household like planets in the universe (Hahn 2015a: 71f), it would be possible to also use the term infrastructure, which for its part describes the functions of consuming clothes as entering, being used up and leaving the household in various possible wastestreams.

Things such as clothes belong to a household and form their own functional and meaningful assemblages (Hahn 2015b: 24). To fulfil the extent of dressing household members, households assemble actors of care with a whole universe of things around the clothes themselves. Conducting an ethnography with our methods allowed us to ask about those actors of care that did not come up in narratives

or guided interviews themselves; they are buried deeply in the invisibility of household work. The following items occurred: dust cover, coat hanger, needle, thread, sewing machine, collection of buttons, anti-moth remedies, lint roller, lint shaver, clothes peg, clothes brush, sewing basket, chair for worn clothes, laundry bag, washing machine, washing detergent, optical brightener, fabric softener, stain remover, special soaps, starch, washing net, iron, ironing board and drying rack. The objects on this list could be found in bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms in the flats we visited, mostly in the places where they are used (Figure 4).

Some always come in collections, such as objects for repair in a sewing basket or detergents for the washing machine. They enable clothing to be consumed in a culturally acceptable way: to be washed and maintained so that they can be used in a “proper” way again. Gill et al. write: “For instance the restorative practices involved in maintenance like spot cleaning, washing, drying and ironing involve making clothes ready again for another use by removing explicit indices of use” (Gill et al. 2016: 35). The “proper” way itself shifts and moves, and can include variations according to social differences, as Ingun Grimstad Klepp describes with regard to the connection between a dirty piece of clothing and the image of the person and family (Grimstad Klepp 2007). Other studies underline how time- and place-specific cleanliness is practiced and that cleaning today is highly influenced by convenience, therefore neglecting clothing care practices (Jack 2017), and depend on the value of clothes (McLaren et al. 2015). Studies documenting that the use of fabric conditioner increases pilling (Chiweshe and Cox Crews 2000: 46f.) are simply not known and washing instructions are only followed in the first washing cycle (McLaren

et al. 2015). This means that not all items of the Sachuniversum of clothes found in the household prolong the life of the clothes – indeed, they can also do the reverse.

Clothes are particularly grouped together and mostly belong to one person in our society. This assemblage of clothes is known as a wardrobe. It is highly individual and time-specific so that it develops over one's own lifespan and reflects the development of one's body and social identity through different fashions. In 2017, the ethnologist Ingun Grimstad Klepp and designer Kate Fletcher published Opening up the Wardrobe, a collection of 50 different methods in the field of wardrobe studies. They describe that these methods "provide insight into collections of clothes and the garment-related world that takes place in the extended "space of the wardrobe"" (2017: 3). The study of this garment-related world, or the "universe of things" that Fel and Hofer describe (Hahn 2015a), is thus important to explore in order to understand how to live a minimalist everyday life in a consumer society. It is not the case that the minimalist households presented in this paper "save" on the number of things they possess in that they do not have a lint shaver or moth paper as part of their minimalist everyday practices. They instead develop a more intense relationship to their things through evaluations of clothes, conscious care and maintenance, as well as conscious practices regarding how to add new clothes to their wardrobe according to their concepts of quality, scientifically known as "use quality" or "subjective quality" (Connor Crabb and Dulcie Rigby 2019). Within the framework of the universe of things, a minimalist's relationship to the things they know well is strong and clothes are consciously experienced and observed. Other actors surrounding this relationship help to maintain this intensity.

In our study, we did not only want to know how people live with fewer clothes in times of fast fashion but also how this impacts a more sustainable everyday life. Muñoz, Errázuriz, and Greene (2022) studied sustainable practices in private living spaces in two different social classes in Chile. Their findings show that sustainable practices are grounded in socio-specific valuation connected to aesthetic principles and functionality. Working-class homes were much more accustomed to reuse and repair and therefore sustainable practices (ibid.: 21–24). While our own empirical data revealed a lot about shifting material preferences and growing competencies around sustainability, the minimalists interviewed actively changed their earlier, potentially class-related, values and behavior. The sample of minimalists in our study shows a wide range of stances from wanting to be a role model, saving the world, being frugal or just being less burdened by material possessions. The fieldwork examples might in some cases not look different from non-minimalist households but the owners actively reflect on their

relationship to things and their lifestyle, actively changing it and learning continuously. The range of practices among the sample itself should be taken into consideration: A minimalist wardrobe can range from a backpack in the case of one pensioner, a clothes rail with bags holding underwear that replace drawers (Figures 2), as well as a fully furnished wardrobe wall.

It is, however, important to note that we found a substantial difference in how minimalist lifestyles are staged in women's or interior magazines and social media in comparison to the homes that we visited. This becomes most apparent in the contrast between minimalists working as influencers who follow minimalist aesthetics and minimalists who do not publish pictures of their home. Muñoz et al. (2022) explained that the "staging" of homes, the functionality of things within them and their potential to be used sustainably is a matter of socio-economic background. Throughout the project, we discussed the question of the social background of our sample as we did not ask for income or occupation. We formed the hypothesis that minimalism might be a strategy to prevent social decline from the middle classes who still hold social and cultural capital in order to reduce both consumption and spending, such as on rent and energy for living. Finances were also discussed at the minimalist convention with a session where some minimalists explained how they make ends meet only with social welfare or small pensions. But, although interviewees had mostly middle-class occupations, social backgrounds were diverse, also with regard to downshifters who work and spend less to gain more free time (Alexander and Ussher 2011: 7, 15).

It is also worth drawing links to a further study concerning our field of self-described minimalists. Lucy Chamberlin and Asa Callmer (2021) conducted an interview study in Sweden, the UK and Ireland to find out what happens when people start to sort their things out according to the principles of the KonMari method, which we also saw in the form of clothes piles frequently in our own sample. In their study, over 95 per cent of interviewees in all three countries also reflected on this and consequently restricted their acquisitions (Chamberlin and Callmer 2021: 17). It made them more aware of their home environment and they even stated that they felt relieved by following the decluttering rules in the next years. These findings are very similar to ours in the group of minimalists. However, the relationship to sustainable practices is not a direct one, as Chamberlin and Callmer have argued (2021: 22).

This article showed how the minimalist lifestyle in the Global North today is less a mental construct than a set of strategies experienced through everyday practice. The minimalist cosmology takes place within three sets of practices: firstly, reduction and reorganization; secondly, enhancing product lifetime; and thirdly, conscious consumption.

Although practices like choosing clothes, wear, care and washing are routines and therefore often occur on an unconscious level, minimalism's key message highlights the awareness of the material world around individuals and their relationship with each other. Having fewer items of clothing and keeping them functional provides the opportunity to engage more intensely with them.

Minimalists are therefore confronted with the aesthetic and material quality of clothes. In combination with their own usage and care, the quality results in the lifetime of the products. Likewise, minimalists therefore actively try to consume their clothes for a long time and frequently buying new clothing is not desirable. They think more about acquisitions, reflect deeply about their needs, establish subjective quality criteria and search for durable clothing. Once the clothes have entered the households, interviewees explained how they integrate them in organizational care and maintenance routines to prolong their use life. Therefore, despite the public image that minimalism as a lifestyle means sorting out belongings after continuous overconsumption, minimalism as we encountered it means coming into a close relationship with one's things.

To study how the minimalist management of clothes works, it is important to study the relatedness of the clothing items themselves in the assemblage of the wardrobe and household. The most popular example presented in this article is the capsule wardrobe, containing all fitting and suitable clothes for most everyday occasions. But to sustainably prolong the life of clothes, actors of care and maintenance such as moth papers or sewing baskets for repair also came into view through the concept of the "universe of things", surrounding each garment to fully explain its use and meaning in an era of fast fashion. Beyond the problem of evaluating practices for their "real" sustainable impact today, studying sustainable everyday practices requires methodological and analytical tools, such as wardrobe interviews and the concept of the universe of things, to fully assess the hidden aspects of everyday life.

taken part in wardrobe interviews, which were also recorded, transcribed and analyzed via MAXQDA software like the group discussions.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This work is part of the research project Textile Minimalism. Pioneering Sustainable Action and was supported by the German Research Foundation under grant number 316930392.