Part of the Introduction: Flows of clothing written by Joke Robaard

You can see the history of garments in terms of different speeds. Whenever the wearer ‘tests’ new clothes these decelerate irreversibly, they immediately drop out of the rapid fashion processes. So an essential aspect is the extent to which a product is to be adapted. If it’s success is instant, chances are that it represents a fashion or trend and will sink from view. Commercially then, it’s a success. If it requires a longer time to enter into an alliance with its wearer, however, there is no immediate economic upshot. Instead the wearer acquires in time a new addition to their clothing vocabulary. Call it personal gain. Call it perception. It’s impossible to say when this will happen.

For that reason you might describe it as a step of dedication: three steps forward, two steps back; three new items of clothing forward, one back.
‘ Forward’ can be associated with acquiring new propositions; ‘back’ implies the actual ‘testing’ and wearing along a path slicing through time. To give an example: you decide to wear a sweater longer than a season. The fashion attribute then sinks through its immediacy and modernity: it becomes a true article of clothing, a commodity. In so doing aspires to the league of chrystalclear archetypes such as a duffel coat, trenchcoat, tartan and so forth.
Fashionable clothing hyperventilates, long-term clothing breathes freely. And the longer ‘sinking’ process, the more eligible the item for a place in this slow moving history of body and clothing. This history has scarcely been addressed in the literature of the past 50 years, which tended instead to follow the upper layer of society, and fashion itself was too often touted as a producer of alienated forms. No knowledge was imputed to the wearer himself.