Fashion, or rather, the current fashion system favours financial and socio-cultural capital over human and natural capital.

It privileges symbolic capital, the non-tangible. As such, fashion is mediated in reductive and glamourised ways: a ‘bright cellophane wrapper.’ In 1938 fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, in Fashion is Spinach, predicted that women, more precisely the American woman, would eventually look inside ‘the wrapper,’ question its contents and reject most of it. Today, on average, U.S-Americans purchase one item of clothing every week.

However, while recent decades have seen a hundred-fold increase in fashion consumption rather than its informed rejection, they have also seen a significant rise in coverage, discussion and the study of fashion — of ‘looking inside the wrapper.’

Since the 1990s there has been a discursive explosion around the subject of fashion in different media and within both the popular and academic spheres.

This rich landscape of commentary is a reaction to the explosion of fashion itself. Beginning in the 1960s and particularly since the 1980s fashion has surged in horizontal and vertical scope. It has exploded as a global industry and socio-cultural phenomenon.

The principle of fashion, of permanent and accelerating change, governs much of contemporary global life and culture. The proliferation of fashion has entailed a diversification of meaning — and its loss to some degree. Fashion not only refers to the principle of changing styles, but also to an industry, to a system and to objects, ideas and images

Yet, the way it is mediated stands in contrast to the richness of fashion, to its diverse impacts, its complexity and ambiguity.

This article, then, takes three pervasive claims often made in relation to fashion — both within popular and academic literature — and aims to counter them or, rather, complicate them. I thus seek a fuller understanding of fashion in relation to different forms of capital and aim for an ambiguity in the perception of fashion.

Taiba Akhuetie

Capitalism, according to Marx, is based on commodities: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.”

He refers to a commodity as ‘a mysterious thing’ and details: ‘simply because in it the social character of the men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’

The objectification of our relationships with one another and with nature under capitalism forms the basis of an abstraction of creative labour into ‘dead labour,’ of creative products into commodities.

In relation to fashion, the notion of commodity fetishism ‘captures the gap between fashion’s appearance as a visual feast, from catwalk to high street, and its origins in, and continued existence through, socially productive labour.’

Thus, fashion is discursively constructed as a constantly shifting series of style-building products. Fashion is constructed as ‘new’ through what is said and what is done — through words, images, how it is staged in shows and shops, the visual and verbal narratives. As such it epitomises post-truth. Fashion is fake news. Bright, cellophane wrappers.

Ever changing, perfect and auratic products on display in shops, represented in magazines and increasingly on screens obscure their origins, ingredients and makers, their supply chain and impact — emphasising instead their sign value.

Human capital and natural capital, the skills of most of its makers, their contributions and the world’s stock of natural assets are largely written out of the story fashion tells. This privileging of economic capital is emblematic of capitalism. The fact that we think of people and our planet in terms of capital, in terms of worth is inherent in our political and economic system.

It is thus that fashion in its current system can get away with favouring economic capital over human and natural capital.

Bourdieu distinguishes between three fundamental forms of capital: economic, cultural and social, all of which are essential for fashion, which, is, however predominantly reduced to its economic dimension. As a result, the process of fashion is sidelined. Yet, when we buy a garment, we pay hundreds of people involved in global production processes.

While the final retail price and its current shares devalue both, creative labour and the cost of nature, we still support and invest in existing and future supply chains. I would argue that fashion is one of the most unsustainable industries because of our disordered perception of fashion as product, because of the way it is discursively constructed as a commodity and how that affects our relationship with our garments. However, we can, as human geographer Louise Crewe suggests: ‘use our economic and cultural capital to resist the worst excesses of the free market.’ What does that mean? And is it more easily written than lived? Yes and no.

We can ask questions about the products we buy and all their forms of capital.

We can educate ourselves about the processes and people involved and resist fashion being reduced to a product, a fetishised commodity. We can call into question the oxymoronic nature of sustainable fashion, call into question the promise that we can buy our way out of a crisis that has largely been created by buying stuff, by global mass consumerism, as Greta Thunberg is currently reminding us. Finally, we can question the premise of the current fashion system, which largely relegates us to the role of passive consumers rather than active makers and acknowledge fashion as process and creative human labour.

Gab Bois

The common understanding of the mirror perceives it as a neutral ref lective surface of ‘bare facts.’ Fashion as a representation of society, its ‘most precise reflection,’ as the fashion reporter Angelo Flaccavento put it when interviewed by the style blog The Sartorialist.

Yet, specular reflections are optical illusions based on light and its energy. Standing in front of a mirror, we see not only a virtual image, but also a fundamentally distorted one.

Thus, caught between magical and objective knowledge a mirror is much more subjective and altering, much more of a virtual social presence — particularly in the act of getting dressed, which mostly takes place in front of it and essentially impoverishes our experience of dress.

Seeing how mirrors work, this metaphor needs to be reconsidered. Fashion, a highly distorted ref lection of society. Take a copy of U.K. Vogue in 1967, or the garments from that year preserved in a museum’s dress collection. What kind of a society would you glean from this (subjective) selection? A young, white, slim, middle-class one. Fashion, a reductive and misleading mirror.

Gucci

Moreover, underlying this metaphor seem to be two further prevalent perceptions of fashion: that fashion communicates accurately and that what we wear is indicative of who we are.

This reading of fashion implies that if fashion were a mirror of society and its members, the mirror can be read. These two ideas are inherently connected and have been naturalised so thoroughly that their arbitrary nature, their constructedness appears remote.

To comment that fashion is a precise reflection of society implies that the commentator can read that reflection, which in turn, points towards a certain cultural capital on the part of the critic. How fashion communicates and how accurately it does so, has been the subject of much debate however. Rather than a ‘silent visual language,’ the communicative properties of dress might be most usefully conceptualised as a ‘clothing code’ because dress cannot produce permanent symbolic solutions. Its symbols are too ephemeral, its ambivalence too deeply rooted. An excess meaning always escapes. Although the relationship between language and fashion is at best metaphoric and misleadingly metaphoric at that, the idea that fashion can be straightforwardly read stubbornly persists.

The second idea, that the self is immanent in appearance seems equally naturalised. In 1528 the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglionewrote of the correlation between outward appearance and inner being.

He was writing at a moment when merchant capitalism was on the rise in Italy and against the backdrop of a burgeoning meritocratic society that placed greater emphasis on fashionable dress as a form of self-expression.

Within contemporary consumer society fashion is said to be a central marker of identity and the most important form of non-verbal communication.

Fashion is discursively constructed as a mirror that can be read, notwithstanding its deeply distortive qualities and the historical arbitrariness of the metaphor itself. This construction is also indicative of a naturalised correlation between fashion and capitalism.

Parker Day

Werner Sombart’s predicament of fashion as ‘the favourite child of capitalism’ has taken on a life of its own. It has often been reiterated in popular and academic writings, yet, mostly without reference to its original source

Both Louise Crewe in The Geographies of Fashion and Tansy Hoskins in Stitched-Up include the metaphor as central arguments in their recent analyses of the fashion system. This conclusion to the early analysis of consumer demand in fashion by the German economist and sociologist has most prominently been restated by Elizabeth Wilson in her seminal Adorned in Dreams, one of the founding texts of contemporary fashion theory.

She connects the origins of fashion to ‘the early capitalist city’ and its rise to ‘the development of mercantile capitalism.’ ‘Like any other aesthetic enterprise fashion may then be understood as ideological, its function to resolve formally, at the imaginary level, social contradictions that cannot be resolved. It has in fact been one site for the playing out of a contradiction between the secularity of capitalism and the asceticism of Judaeo-Christian culture.’ Fashion, ‘the child of capitalism,’ as she terms it somewhat more neutrally, ‘speaks capitalism.

Fashion speaks capitalism. Capitalism maims, kills, appropriates, lays waste. It also creates wealth and beauty, together with a yearning for lives and opportunities that remain just beyond our reach. It manufactures dreams and images as well as things, and fashion is as much a part of the dream world of capitalism as of its economy.

The infantilisation of fashion means that it does not have to assume responsibility for its impact. It permits fashion to disassociate itself from its supply chain and the social and environmental impact of its production, for example. More generally, it permits fashion to disassociate itself from human and natural capital.

While the acknowledgement of the co-dependence of fashion and capital is essential for an understanding of either, the nature of their relationships remains somewhat obscure. Moreover, the historical role of fashion in the development of capitalism is so complex that it might even turn the existing metaphor on its head. Considering the central role of dress and fashion in the Industrial Revolution, the role of textile manufacturing in particular, fashion might be assigned the parental role, or at least that of a midwife, helping to give birth to capitalism. ‘As the Industrial Revolution progressed, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the fashion stimulated the mechanisation or the ability to produce the fashions by mechanisation created the fashion,’ writes costume historian Phyllis Tortora.

Thus, fashion, according to Marx, is far more than the child of capitalism, far more responsible, historically at least.

While the principle of fashion continues to drive capitalism, so too does the principle of capitalism continue to drive fashion. Their relationship appears to approximate the chicken or egg causality dilemma. Fashion and capitalism are co-dependent, caught in an inextricable cycle, a relentless cycle, a relentlessly accelerating cycle. Few concepts in our culture are as loaded, few have been so transformed both as to their meaning and materiality, their impact and interpretation, few carry such extremes of dismissal and pursuit, few concepts match the richness of ‘fashion.’

Our Western society is a society on f light from ambiguity. It favours rational thinking, insists on categorisations, scientific proof and certainty. This flight from ambiguity manifests itself in binary ways of thinking: either/ or. It manifests itself in binary language, such as right/wrong, left/right or woman/man — which in turn creates binary realities that are highly reductive and incredibly difficult to undo.

In relation to fashion, an enduring discourse which has currently regained momentum, divides it in good/bad.

There are reports on good or bad fashions, ethical analyses of good or bad brands, or critiques of fashion that denigrate it as altogether bad. As I write these lines Extinction Rebellion (XR) are protesting at London Fashion Week. After previously calling for the event to be cancelled, very well curated and visually poignant protests in the form of ‘die-ins’ and a funeral procession are being staged outside fashion shows.

They illustrate the perceived absurdity and obsolescence of this biannual construction of fashion based around a number of ten-minute spectacles, which completely obscure their substantial human, natural and economic resources — however creative the outcome may be. Some of the XR protesters are wearing T-shirts with the following words: Fashion, Beauty, Truth, Justice.

While I agree with Greta Thunberg that the climate crisis is a matter of black and white thinking,46 that ‘there are no grey areas when it comes to survival,’ I don’t think fashion and truth are mutually exclusive, neither are beauty and justice.

I would argue that at the core of climate action is beauty, a notion of beauty that has nothing to do with an industry, but a fundamental motivation and human need. We live in society on flight from ambiguity that favours categorisations and rationality. Yet, fashion is hard to categorise. It can be irrational. It thus needs to be thought ambiguously. We can have ambiguous relationships to fashion. We can oscillate between love and hate, critique and praise. We can simultaneously acknowledge its creative force and destructive impact. And we can hold contradictory ideas about fashion in our minds and act on them without having to resolve them.