Conspicuous conservation: The green clothing of Swedish environmentalists

Focusing on the notion of ‘green clothing’, this article shows how a sartorial aesthetic informs group cohesion for environmentalist activists. Using qualitative data gathered through open-ended questions posted on the Field Biologists’s Facebook group, which is no longer active, the article explores subjects’ memories and opinions on clothing and style covering the period from the late 1960s to the present. The article mixes this method with historical textual analysis of the tradition of frugality and asceticism back to nineteenth-century forerunners. This mixed method approach provides rich material on counter-consumerist aesthetics in both cultural and political contexts within a historical framework. Theoretically, the article revises the classic notion of clothes as a cultural membrane between body and society, showing how a third element – nature – works in certain ideological frames to dissolve that membrane between body and society. In this way, clothes are worn in order to demonstrate harmony between the wearer’s body and the environment. This dissolution of culture into ‘nature’ serves the collective pursuit of political community espoused by the Field Biologists. Through tracing a number of ‘vestemes’ (units of sartorial semiotics), this article decodes an identity formed around nature as opposed to culture; the old as opposed to the new; second- as opposed to first-hand; as well as around a complex relationship with gender.