Stop Wearing Fake Clothes
How fabrics place you within God’s creation
The emerging division of our times is the false vs the real. You can read this in any number of dichotomies populating modern discourse: appearance vs substance, in person vs digital, creation vs simulation. Take your pick.
In your own life, it’s likely that you both work and relax primarily through devices that sever you from reality. If so, what you put on in the morning may be one of the few points of contact with the real. You probably don’t “touch grass” every day, but you are in physical contact with clothing most of your life.
So although many believe that the material we wear is inconsequential, the choice between artificial or natural fabrics carries great significance. One choice can bring you into harmony with, and contemplation of, divine creation, while the other further entrenches you in an increasingly disposable, unhealthy, and artificial world.
Today, we explore why what your clothes are made of matters, and how the right choices can help you pursue beauty and virtue.
Editor’s note: we’ll be off between Christmas and Epiphany (Jan 6), so this is our last email of 2025. We are honored that nearly 1,000 of you have joined us in the first 2 weeks of this publication, and we can’t wait to see what 2026 has in store.
From Evan and PJ both, we wish you and your families a blessed and merry Christmas! We’ll see you in the new year.
The Natural World Directs Us Towards God
But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?
–Job 12:7-9
The natural fibres in your clothes are an everyday reminder of your connection to nature, where you can find that which ties directly back to God.
Aquinas asserts in the Summa Contra Gentiles that, though your senses can’t allow you to know God in his fullness, your experience of the world through those senses can still help you to understand Him better:
[B]eginning with sensible things, our intellect is led to the point of knowing about God that He exists, and other such characteristics that must be attributed to the First Principle.
Likewise, Paul writes to the Romans that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship”.
There is undoubtedly a connection between the natural world and the divine. Creation proceeds from God, which means there is a line through creation that traces back to Him. The more you contemplate the natural world, and the closer you get to it, the more you’ll see things which direct you to its creator.
But how exactly does that apply to clothes, and why does it matter?
The Small Virtues of Everyday Care
Natural materials like wool, linen, leather, cotton and silk are clothing staples all drawn, with minimal processing, from creation. Each has a unique provenance derived from the earth or its creatures that you can easily retrace. They are just a few steps away from something you could come across out in the world. And though they vary in texture, quality and use, one thing they all have in common is that they demand something of you.
These materials age, wear down, and require upkeep to be at their best. They’re often costly, sometimes they itch, wrinkle, shrink, stretch, tear or become stained beyond hope. In other words, they require you to pay attention to them if they’re to last. In this way, they present a microcosm of man’s larger duties of stewardship towards creation.
In their own small way, they make you a caretaker, requiring you to exercise attention, patience and diligence. With every stitch, every manual wash, every application of wax or waterproofing spray, you come to recognize these things as beautiful, valuable, and worth preserving. And if you take care of them well enough, they become quality pieces the next generation will learn to appreciate as well.
Just as spending time in a redwood forest or trekking through a mountain range encourages you to slow down, focus on the present, and consider the beauty in front of you, so too do these materials by their very nature require you to be more attentive in your life. As you maintain these garments, keeping them viable through the years, this presence of mind allows you to eventually notice more and more about them.
Maybe you’ll read the tag that shows where the sheep that provided the wool were raised, perhaps you’ll notice a patina on your leather jacket thanks to years of exposure to the elements, or begin to wonder how a worm can produce something as beautiful as silk. The more you reflect on such clothes, the more you’ll have to think about and the more you’ll recognize how they connect you to the rest of the world. For in the words of Pope Benedict XVI:
Beauty, whether that of the natural universe or that expressed in art, precisely because it opens up and broadens the horizons of human awareness, […] can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate Mystery, towards God.
Artificial materials, by contrast, offer the opposite bargain. No maintenance, attention, or patience is required of you. In fact, you are encouraged to think about these materials as little as possible, since contemplation of a petrochemical product rarely puts you in mind of the wonders of nature.
Clothes made with such materials are expected to be unobtrusive, hassle-free, and disposable. Don’t worry about how they’ll fare in the wash, repairing them when they tear, or cleaning tough stains. With clothes like these, it’s cheaper (and encouraged) to buy new ones, and besides, it looks good enough right? Often, it’s even indistinguishable from the real thing!
So why worry about it?
Appearance Is Not Enough
How something appears is not enough to indicate its worth. Paul cautions you in 2 Corinthians that Satan masquerades as an angel; Christ teaches that you are to know a person by their fruits. We are thus encouraged to look closely at something before ascertaining its true value, as looks can be deceiving.
Often synthetic fabrics are used to simulate the look or feel of real ones. For instance, acrylic was explicitly developed in the 1940s as an alternative to wool, while materials like nylon and polyester are often made to imitate natural fibres like silk, suede or cotton. These imitations can look and feel like materials drawn from nature, but they are in fact born from chemical processes and sometimes even derived from toxic substances. If you’ve never seen how plastic is turned into clothes, take a look.
But the worst aspect of these “fake clothes” is what they represent symbolically.
Consider the relationship between, say, a painting of a forest and its actual subject, where one pays homage to the other. The painting aspires to the natural, but does not seek to replace it. It seeks to highlight and elevate the natural, and in so doing, invites contemplation of beauty and the sacred.
Contrast this with the relationship between artificial and natural materials: rather than direct you back to the nature it imitates, the artificial garment seeks to replace the natural altogether. Symbolically, it’s the simple, cheap and disposable usurping the well-made, valuable and lasting, with the promise that things will still look just as good. But such beauty of form, to draw again from Benedict XVI, “is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself.”
Unlike the natural fabrics which prompt you to wonder about the world and how they fit into the grand order of things, the artificial folds you back in on yourself. It does not point to the natural world, or anything outside of itself. Symbolically, it is an orphan material which has no real connection to the beauty found in nature. Thus it both keeps you isolated and, in the notorious world of fast fashion, discourages you from asking too many questions about how it was made, lest you regret knowing the answer.
The Symbolic Value of Natural Fabrics
The idea of replacing the natural with the synthetic is especially jarring when you consider the values natural fabrics represent. The Bible explicitly uses natural fibres like linen and wool as symbols of purity and goodness. The noble woman of Proverbs 31, upheld as a model of virtue, is shown selecting wool and flax (used for making linen) with which to work. She is “clothed in fine linen and purple,” and makes linen garments to sell.
According to John’s Gospel, linen is also what Christ’s body was wrapped in before placing Him in the tomb. In Isaiah, God promises to transform sin from crimson red to white as wool. In Revelation, linen clothing is used as a metaphor for being clothed in the “righteous acts of the saints” while Christ’s hair is described as “white like wool.”
Symbolically then, to replace biblical symbols of purity with synthetic creations whose fate is to add to the mounds of fashion garbage actively polluting the world is, to use a technical term, not a good look.
So Why Does This Matter?
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
–Philippians 4:8
Simply put, all of this matters because the small choices you make snowball into larger ones. The world increasingly wants you to settle for the things it can produce quickly, cheaply and without connection to the real. But if you go along with those values, your life will eventually start to reflect them. When you instead choose real things that require your attention, care and patience, you choose to direct your gaze back out to the world — and maybe even a little higher than that.
As a reminder, our mission here at Letters from the Old World is to share the secrets of Old World elegance, and our approach is two-fold:
1) Every Wednesday, we send a free article exploring the theology and philosophy of why beauty matters, particularly in regards to decor and dress.
2) Every Friday, we send What’s In a Fit, a members-only article exploring practical tips and guidelines for dressing well.
If this resonates with you, then subscribe below to join the aesthetic renaissance.
Beautifully articulated. And the detailing on your suit is outrageous! Thank you for sharing.
Excellent and timely insights! My husband and I have recently been discussing at length how shocking it is to realize how people can perform their own maintenance and upkeep, whether it be on houses, yard, cookware, cars, or clothing. We wonder if it speaks to a larger issue and informs how many of us also struggle to keep relationships of all of kinds alive.
Merry Christmas to you and yours! Your newsletter is a wonderful addition to the Substack universe.