In Emily in Paris, Netflix’ universally hated show that is also addictive and impossible to stop watching, nothing ever goes wrong. Emily Cooper, the show’s titular heroine, successfully overcomes and emerges happy from whatever professional and personal challenges life puts in her way. As a result of of two painfully banal posts, she becomes an Instagram influencer, and, at work, Emily churns out marketing campaigns that are both excruciatingly bad and universally liked. Generally, Emily is adored, despite (arguably) being one of the blandest protagonists to have ever inhabited Paris on-screen.

Even the most drastic plot twists are conveniently resolved in the saccharine reality of Emily in Paris, and no drama is dwelled upon for too long. Indeed, even as one of the show’s secondary characters, a caricature-like couturier, is hit by a car at the end of one episode, at the beginning of the next one, he is revealed to be alive, and well, and smiling. Predicaments do come up and challenges do appear, but no predicament seems too grave to solve, and no problem is too drastic to disrupt the show’s upbeat narrative. Difficulties are solved swiftly and easily, and are quickly forgotten with little reflection on the part of the show’s characters. Even the show’s central love triangle doesn’t seem to cause much of a stir, and neither of the characters involved in it seems too perturbed.

With its one-dimensional characters and clichéd portrayal of Paris, Emily in Paris is easy to shrug off as a silly fantasy. And yet, there is something offensive about its chirpy mood, simplistic plot and, above all, the inevitable ease, with which all its conflicts are resolved. In fact, the show’s simple, straight-forward, easy-to-resolve plot lines present the perfect example of what I would like to call ‘happy narratives.’ Such narratives offer an optimistic approach to problems and predicaments, affirming that any difficulty can be resolved and overcome. Whereas Emily in Paris provides a selection of crass and particularly unrealistic happy narratives, a multitude of the same kind persist across media and culture. Happy narratives occur in advertising and marketing, they can be found in personal testimonials of self-help literature, they are used in magazine profiles and throughout LinkedIn, which offers a deluge of first-person accounts about overcoming challenging situations, ‘learning from failure and bouncing back.’ They are also a staple of Instagram, with its mandatory positivity. Characteristically, happy narratives present a predicament, a painful episode or trauma, but show as these are happily resolved through labour and use of techniques. In the end of a happy narrative, the story’s protagonist gains something – either it is a learning or added experience (as every second LinkedIn post has it), or material profit, or success, or another aspirational gain.

From the point of structure, the happy narratives of contemporary culture are, of course, not a new phenomenon, similar happy plots have existed since times immemorial – we’d know them from classical literature and from folklore. In the latter, some of the most frequent plots across cultures can be described as happy narratives, as Vladimir Propp described in his theory on folktales¹. According to the predecessor of structuralism and prominent representative of the Moscow Formal School Viktor Shklovsly, a literary plot is a structure that consists of logically organised parts². One of the earliest and easily recognisable folkloric plots is set in motion by the protagonist’s encounter with a challenge. Overwhelmed, the protagonist then finds an object, learns a ritual, or meets a helper, through which the predicament is resolved. Finally, the protagonist lives ‘happily ever after,’ having gained wealth or love.

Akin to folkloric plots, contemporary happy narratives suggest tackling challenges and issues through objects or rituals. One of the most obvious examples of the use of happy narratives, is, perhaps, contemporary advertising, relying on narratives about how it was before (bad) and how it was changed after (for the better). Ads tend to present a vexing problem that then proceeds to be resolved easily and painlessly through the use of a product or a service. According to marketing campaigns, any problem can be solved by a product. Beauty and fashion goods promise youth, confidence and freedom, food is supposed to make you happy and healthy, and some brands assure us that, through their products, we’ll find calm and balance. In the marketing parlance of many a beauty brand, they offer you opportunities to ‘take time for yourself,’ ‘be in the moment’ and ‘find inner peace.’³

In her writings on happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed makes a series of brilliant observations on what happiness is imagined to be⁴. Happiness, she claims, is usually presumed to lie outside the span of a current moment – either in the past or, more often, in the future. Happiness, thus, presents itself as a promise and is naturally aspirational – despite its hard-to-define character, that is something everyone is not just striving for, but is also expected to strive for.

Happiness is elusive and hard to define and, of course, happiness means different things to different people. But, however different our tastes and ideals of happiness might be, Ahmed remarks on the universality of cultural and societal beliefs about the good and bad, the auspicious and undesirable. One example of such universal ideas could be the trope of the wedding day as ‘the happiest day of one’s life.’ On what is expected to be the happiest day of your life you can but feel happy, and feeling otherwise is inadequate and goes against cultural dogmas and, culturally, is unacceptable.

In happy narratives, the concepts that have been socially and culturally constructed as happy and good are usually positioned as desirable outcomes. Thus, the reward that folklore protagonists gain at the end is usually what society considers to be good – wealth, marriage, revenge. And, similarly, in contemporary happy narratives, the gain that protagonists receive is a reflection of current values. Contemporary happy narratives offer recipes for professional success, confidence, increased visibility, or, in the jargon of LikedIn, ‘growth,’ ‘learning,’ ‘impact’ or development – all things considered good and desirable in the current neoliberal imagination.

The structure of ‘happy narratives’ relies on two plot devices – a presentation of a challenge and a happy resolution thereof. If either one or the other is missing, a happy narrative loses its power to convey a cathartic resolution. Such narrative structure, beyond the candy-hued world of Emily in Paris, corporate fables of LinkedIn and marketing scenarios, is also a favourite of lifestyle journalism. In lifestyle and fashion magazines, celebrity profiles tend to unfold as stories about successful overcoming of difficulties. Focusing on those who already are famous and successful, magazines present fame and success as results of a struggle – they appear to be fought for, and, therefore, earned. Thus, in its profile of Bella Hadid from 2022, Vogue US dwells on the difficult aspects of the model’s life – indeed, she might be one of the world’s highest-paid models, living in a luxurious apartment, but she also cries every day.⁵ As proof that celebrities’ wealth, fame and success are deserved, fashion and lifestyle magazines tend to introduce famous people as deserving, calling for readers’ compassion and empathy. The magazines claim that celebrities have fought – either for themselves or for other people as celebrity activists.⁶

Under the economic and cultural conditions of late capitalism, happy narratives no longer involve encounters with magical helpers or use of magical objects. Instead, they portray labour as a means to obtain happiness. What they share with folkloric happy narratives is a hope for a happy outcome and anticipation of happiness as a reward for a life righteously lived. The philosopher Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘technologies of the self’ could probably offer a key to understanding contemporary happy narratives. In Foucault’s words, ‘technologies of the self permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.’ This idea succinctly captures the expectation of a reward for an effort given, suffering sustained, or a challenge overcome. It may also be seen as a coax that sustains and reproduces the existing ways of being and living by feeding into the societal and cultural expectations of happiness. Imagined as professional success, relationship status, fame, visibility, parenthood, power or influence, happiness is an aspirational promise that sets society and culture, with its habits of consumption and production in motion.

While happiness and success are believed to be predicated on personal labour and effort, failure, too, is believed to be personal and private, a proof that you were not doing enough, not doing it right, or not feeling right. In their work on confidence culture, Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad look at the phenomenon of affective neoliberalism, dissecting how confidence and attaining confidence have grown to be regarded as recipes for success. Abundant self-books, media narratives, social media posts, and advertisements discipline users to be confident⁷. Confidence has turned into a happiness pointer, a magical object that is universally believed to bring about good things and change one’s life for the better. But only if one does confidence the right way, will everything work out right – hence multiple instructions on happiness. What the mainstream confidence cult(ure) fails to account for are the structural hurdles and social inequalities that personal effort and struggle can rarely overcome.

What if one’s successful self-work, skillful use of technologies of the self or acquisition of ‘happiness pointers’ (to use Sara Ahmed’s term) do not bring about a happy outcome and satisfaction? ‘Happy narratives’ promote an inherently optimistic view that labour, effort and compliance with societal expectations guarantee happiness. This optimism, however, is cruel in the sense articulated by the cultural critic Lauren Berlant. In Berlant’s view, optimism turns cruel when it channels hope and effort towards something that is perilous⁸. ‘I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel,’ Berlant writes,’because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x [object of optimism] in the scope of one’s attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place.’ In other words, when it generates a false hope in detrimental conditions, the optimism is cruel.

Happy narratives turn bankrupt and risky ways into aspirational ones in Berlant’s cruelly optimistic way. Especially at a time of a climate emergency, deepening inequalities and increasing precarity, optimistic scenarios based on the glorification of labour, success and visibility, seem particularly dangerous. True, advertising and mainstream fashion media would want us to believe that solutions to climate change lie in ‘shopping sustainable brands,’ yet following their lead would be naive, stupid and dangerous. It might be easy to discard self-help books, sentimental LinkedIn posts and, indeed, the optimism of Emily in Paris as meaningless and laughable, but the ubiquity and pervasiveness of happy narratives have a disciplining effect, as they reiterate and entrench what is desirable, happy and good. They continuously trivialise the risks and dangers of living in a time of crisis. Pessimism might do us some good here.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. Vladimir Propp, ‘Study of the folktale: structure and history,’ Dispositio 1, no. 3, 1976, pp. 277–292. ↩

2. Giuseppe Tateo, ‘Viktor Shklovsky, Bronislaw Malinowski, and the Invention of a Narrative Device,’ HAU journal of ethnographic theory 10, no. 3, pp. 813–827, 2020. ↩

3. Examples abound; for some instances see products by brands LoveShea, Inner Sense, abeautifulworld, Rituals. ↩

4. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press, 2010. ↩

5. https://www.vogue.com/article/bella-hadid-cover-april-2022 ↩

6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dua-lipa-cover-june-july-2022
   and https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/collina-strada-small-business-spotlight ↩

7. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, ‘The Confidence Cult(ure),’ Australian feminist studies 30, no. 86, pp. 324–344, 2015. ↩

8. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011. ↩

The sight of murals. Colourful. Monumental. Ubiquitous. On one of the avenues in downtown Bogotá, at an intersection made of bridges and vast cement circuits, the eye catches a few metres of walls that read: ‘Wake up, indolent country.’ Letters are thick. They have been painted in red, white and black. Some are colossal, others stand out for their verbal ferocity (‘With no health and education, we chose subversion.’), others are just a single word, Narcoestado; Resistencia. This is the aesthetic of discontent. Its utterly material sign. The sum of its vestiges, the visible marks of social protest.

In April 2021, with the Colombian government’s announcement of a fierce tax reform, millions of people poured, in protest, onto the streets. The people’s weariness brewed. The explosive display denoted a long-held malaise. What took shape as the paro nacional gathered a collective and perplexed gaze. For many of the younger eyes watching, the daily scenes had no precedent. A monstrous show of police brutality soon became a pattern. Men clad in uniform, wearing heavy shields, helmets and black-padded apparel confronted youth and the bodies that were occupying the streets. Armoured vehicles, deaths, disappearances. Sexual violence. Fierce detentions. Fires. Fervour on the streets. Brutalised young people. Destruction. Financial hits. Fear. Conspiracy theories. Structural wounds. How do you remain untouched by such a landscape? The digital gaze tuned in with what felt, for many, like an unspeakable wound.

This scenario unveiled some tensions that had been brewing also within the local fashion industry. Similar debates had emerged before, during the 2018 presidential election. In Colombia, like in many other places, fashion has the ability to transform into poignant radiography. It can delineate political conflicts, social class realities, ideological spectrums. Here, one finds a rampant sense of bipartisanship – which has also transformed itself along the last decades, spanning from a liberal versus conservative dispute to contemporary feuds between uribismo and petrismo: an aggressive and visceral polarity between leftist and right-wing viewpoints. And also, clothes as ideological markers, as subversive methods but also as gatekeepers of the status quo.

At that moment, in April 2021, commenting on the social protest setting seemed inevitable There was a boiling atmosphere. Renowned bloggers, designers and influencers were silent. Their daily publications kept gravitating towards their usual topics: what and how to wear clothes, luxurious purchases, aspirational shots in European cities. This began to feel like an unsettling detachment, an inappropriate disconnect. Meanwhile, some segments and public figures soon shifted their regular contents to contribute and render visible what was going on in the capital, in intermediate cities, in many neighbourhoods across the country, and in order to declare public solidarity with what had burst on the streets. Later on, rather prominent figures invited their audiences to pray, collectively, with a Catholic rosary to ‘soothe’ the discontent. Others shared videos where the protest was reduced to conspiracy theories, arguing that the opposition was ideologically ‘kidnapping’ the country. Protests extended themselves and took a blow on shipping, deliveries and commercial rhythms. This affected the industry. Certain cities were severely damaged and faced scarcity. Latent tensions stirred up in fierce manners.

Fashion is a polysemic category. When it comes to thinking about it critically, there’s one aspect I particularly like: the way in which fashion is also connected to a more philosophical dimension – referring to a form of temporality; to the search for newness, the ‘irrational’ appetite for novelty; the idolatry of commodities; a speedy pursuit of replacement and therefore, an assimilated rationale based on transitoriness and ephemerality. This particular Euro American narrative of fashion has dictated that ‘the centre’ of ‘real’ fashion derives from European modernity; and that such a ‘centre’ would further land in four great cities that ended up making the global circuit of runways. In this narrative, widely accepted and dispersed, the rest, in other words, everything that stands outside of such a location is considered the periphery. This story has, however, begun to break down. The subject deserves a more hybrid narrative. Please, allow me a detour before I return to the Colombian context.

The circulation of fashion as digital image from the 2000s, the ubiquity of fast fashion, all conflated, contributing to an overall consideration of the entire centre/periphery narrative. This digital and visual omnipresence also coincided with the institutionalisation of fashion studies as a field in a myriad of academic spaces. Hence, uncomfortable questions directed towards the fashion industry have also been on the rise. A lot of them have particularly posited momentum on themes of inclusion, diversity, environmental issues and decolonial thought. With that, the fashion industry has been interpellated from views that consider it wasteful, excluding and exploitive.

This explains why the term fashion is today, in itself, a territory for dissent and dispute. This feels especially acute when the term lands in a specific context, such as the Colombian setting. In contemporary discussions within the field of fashion studies, and in los estudios críticos de las modas latinoamericanas, there is much talk about ‘decolonising’ fashion: an intellectual practice that can also be understood as the problematisation of this traditional narrative. At times, this means ‘reclaiming’ the term. At others, it implies rejecting the term fashion itself, in viewing it as one that responds to a rather European and American vision of the world. Scholars like Angela Jansen suggest, for example, that the word fashion not be used as a noun – linked to an exclusive geography and temporality – but rather as a verb, and hence as an action that embraces and includes every single sort of effort, shape or form of dressing, styling and ornamenting the body. Seen as a verb, the term is significantly amplified, becoming more elastic, more generous, and not completely reduced to modernity (and therefore to colonialism.) Neither does it limit itself – as has happened throughout certain view of its history – to certain places. As a verb, its spectre widens, in terms of geography and time.

It is true that to decolonise can also mean to observe, define and comprehend something in its contextual radicalness. As many other places which have also experienced a boom in the interest for fashion, understanding the term within the context has become crucial. Today, in Colombia, this can mean taking a glance at the intersections between fashions and politics. It is at these crossroads in which fashion has acted as a vehicle for international politics; as a mirror for fierce tensions in terms of social class; and also, as symbolic and material consecration of the political idea of peace – something so crucial and defining in Colombian history. It can also be seen to reflect epistemic disobedience, rebellion and political affirmation.

Seen in this context, fashion also reflects the way in which ‘peripheral’ subjects assimilate a yearning to be validated and legitimised by fashion’s ‘centre,’ and also, as Jansen explains herself, in the ways they utilise self-exoticisation logic and local narratives as linked to tradition, folk dress, crafts, but not fashion. Many designers from the ‘periphery’ tend to render such narratives in order to merchandise a sense of uniqueness for a system always and voraciously hungry for a sense of ‘novelty.’ To decolonise can also mean to look at a term in its radical context. It is the context that enlivens it that allows to dispute, or amplify possible meanings.

Fashion, when seen in context, as aesthetic modes, can mean more than clothing and can be the many city murals that ‘dress’ Bogota’s ‘skin.’ In line with Jansen’s idea of speaking of fashion as a verb, the word moda connects to the term modos – ways, forms, manners of dress, yes, but also of aesthetics, ways of living, of resisting, politicising, rebelling and adorning. Today, the tension, combination and hybridity between splendour and subversion is perhaps what marks the cadence in the Colombian fashion context as it increasingly entwines with politics. It goes from the glamorous and Caribbean-drenched look of women clad in colourful and ruffled dresses, to the myriad of ways in which social protest has become aesthetic in recent times – ranging from the pussy hat in the United States, to the use of the green scarf across Latin America – as well as to the many symbols of resistance being employed in adornment and dress (face cover-ups with frills, the colour purple and political T-shirts).

*

Academics and theorists from the field of fashion studies such as Molly Rottman and Hazel Clark have declared that the very nature of fashion can in itself be political because the ways in which clothes are made and represented usually entail power dynamics.¹ Fashion can thus shape the identities of nations and cities.

In Colombia, fashion has served as a mechanism for global recognition, a vehicle for proper legitimation within traditional spheres in the global industry. And it has done so by using a language that has rendered florals, ruffles and the aesthetic codes found in a Caribbean chicness that sealed itself as a desirable and recognisable look. In this sense, fashion has served as a way of healing collective and national imaginaries. By channeling design languages that have used a flirty, joyful tropicalism, this aesthetic particularly managed to consolidate ideals of national pride, hence shifting consumer habits and self-perception, creating the very notion of ‘being proud’ to ‘wear Colombia.’ An idea that seldom existed before, in a context in which ‘being fashionable’ was exclusively connected to foreignness. This here is a first layer to the expressions between fashion and politics. And it is perhaps connected to Benedict Anderson’s ideas of how shared imaginaries can help to forge a sense of national identity.²

Around 2013, Colombian fashion began to gain a significant and unprecedented notoriety within circuits located in the fashion ‘centre’ (North American and European department stores, highly noted publications, well known editors from these media spots.) At that moment, a particular alchemy began to take place. There was a creative boom in terms of local design, academic offers and classes started to grow and diversify, digital discussions and a general interest sparked a wave of commentators and digital figures, as well as an outburst of events. Fashion became a vehicle to remake collective identity ideals. In a country which had long been associated to ferocious stereotypes based on drug-trafficking, war and terrorism, displaying a sense of pride towards local aesthetic creations was not something minor.

Fashion ‘regenerated’ the imaginaries that composed a possible national identity. The global recognition received by designers such as Johanna Ortiz and Silvia Tcherassi, and the ways in which popular platforms such as Moda Operandi set their gaze on Colombian designers like Paula Mendoza and Leal Daccarett, were all things that pointed out an important and transformative chapter. Then, there were all the publications talking about and representing the northern city of Cartagena de Indias, a place well suited for all things related to the consecrated Caribbean Chic aesthetic. Fashion began to work as a different way of association, one that spoke of a destination now known for its exciting and flourishing aesthetic creativity. This attention also allowed for stereotypes to be problematised as well. Not all design aesthetics in Colombia are, by any means, attached to tropicalism. Edgy minimalism, cool silhouette playfulness, interesting and hip knitwear, to name just a few, have also been a part of creative visions in the local context. Even when certain signs and noticeable looks became associated to Colombian design, variety and multiplicity are at the heart of local fashion.

Politics is also both about social possibility and freedom. It is also true that, in the Colombian context, fashion has also been a significant theme in dynamics linked to social class. Social class is an excruciatingly political subject here. Class distinctions are fierce. Clothes and places are their heavy markers. A visual survey in Bogota’s airport, for example, or taking a look at the very geopolitics of different cities can reflect this in a myriad of ways. During the paro nacional, in April 2021, the action of placing the body on the street, dressing in a certain manner to engage in protest, seeing three queer, non-binary individuals dancing gloriously and fearlessly in front of (Esmad) anti-disturbance officials, were all demonstrations of fashion’s subversive quality and potential.

There is subversion, but in Colombia, fashion can also be a way of maintaining and gatekeeping the status quo. The right-wing and the ideologically conservative segments also have their own sartorial displays, one that anxiously clings onto familiar hierarchies. The fachaqueta – a puffy jacket and sometimes vest often used by the former Colombian right-wing president Iván Duque – is, for example, a potent sign of a certain hegemonic masculinity, which adheres to traditional gender roles and which is frequently worn by men who seek rigid, binary tradition. In this equation, which blends fashion, politics and social class, another recent example can prove to be illuminating. In September 2021, Colombian-born musical artist Kali Uchis launched her ‘buttocks-enhancing’ jeans line in the global market. If there has been a piece within the Colombian context that so acutely illustrates the complexities that certain garments carry in their political connotations and in terms of social class, this is perhaps one of the most emblematic. Construed as symbols of what has been deemed pejoratively as ‘popular fashion,’ the technology found in these jeans has been persistently codified as something that belongs to a conspicuous aesthetic and, hence, because seen quite frequently from a classist lens they have also been rendered as objects of ‘bad’ – or at least questionable – taste. They have also been associated to the vestiges often related to an aesthetic that derives from the narco culture. It is certainly a piece that seems to contain the social class tensions in a country that expresses exuberant pride when it comes to being recognised by foreign spheres for its Caribbean ruffles but that seems more adamant when a global success comes from a sartorial and technological development that achieves what many women seek when they try on or purchase jeans: seeing their butts flattered by the fit. Classism usually renders a hierarchy between a sense of taste that has been acquired from looking abroad, versus the aesthetics that are less concerned about modesty and prudence. Jeans levanta-colas, (butt-enhancing jeans) are all about conspicuous bodily demonstration. ‘Bodied by Kali Uchis’ displays another layer in the ways in which fashion, in its international politics dimension, can prove to be a subversion of some sort. The artist, who has roots in the small city of Pereira has used her background working-class neighbourhoods there to evoke other imageries in terms of taste when filming music videos.

But perhaps one of the most beautiful and hopeful demonstrations of the political power carried by fashion has been materialised by the project and brand called Manifiesta. In 2016, after a complex cycle of negotiations, the Colombian government signed a historical peace agreement with the Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), one of the oldest guerrilla rebel groups in Latin America, created in 1964. The signing of this agreement detonated, with a democratic plebiscite, a very polarised atmosphere. The majority of voters said no to the accord. And yet, the government proceeded, stirring fierce polarities. Manifiesta, created by political scientist Angela Herrera, is a clothes brand that works with ex-guerrilla Farc fighters. This makes it a vision that seeks a deep sense of sustainability, by creating ethical manufacturing processes, as it allows buyers to know who have actually made the clothes they purchase and wear – but most especially because it is a potent and concrete materialisation of fashion as a carrier of social innovation and justice. Manifiesta seems to make the elusive and complex idea of political peace in Colombia a material reality. The pieces in themselves are made by people who are reintegrating themselves into society that has learned to viscerally demonise guerilla insurgency. Manifiesta’s clothes shows a way of literally weaving forgiveness beyond a ferocious war conflict that has destroyed Colombian territory for decades. In a country that has so much difficulty forgiving and humanising otherness, this is everything but minor or insignificant. Plus, Manifiesta has also made a cause for challenging simplistic relations between social justice and aesthetics. They have fought for complexity: the right to dress beautifully and creatively whilst championing social justice.

*

This summer Colombia elected its first left-wing government. The victory was undoubtedly propelled by the youth that took to the streets during el paro nacional, by the weariness of a people tired of a neglectful government that refused to listen. Tension fills the air. Hope brews is the atmosphere. On July 20th, a new Congress took seat. Andrés Cansimance, a representant for Putumayo who defends the LGBTI community wore a deep navy-blue suit, a tie, and heels. María José Pizarro – the daughter of a M-19 guerilla leader who demobilised in 1989 and was assassinated in 1990 – wore a colourful jacket by designer Diego Guarnizo, who has worked for years with women from rural communities. Senator Berenice Bedoya wore an ivory piece, with molas made by indigenous women from Tule, Urabá. Jennifer Pedraza, an advocate for gender equality, peace and environmentalism wore a jacket made by Tarpui and Manifiesta which displayed a natural dye process. Afrocolombian Cha Dorina Hernández, the first palenquera representant, wore a lively African print. Other female senators, like Cathy Juvinao, wore the word despertamos (we woke up) sewn on the edge of her sleeves. Several sartorial compositions contrasted heavily against a right-wing force which tends to perform in conformity to sobriety and tradition. This use of fashion and clothes as political affirmation is unprecedented and reflects a spirit of disobedience, of possible change.

The intersection between fashion and politics in Colombia places two topics in the forefront. One has a structural quality, and reflects the spirit of a time which is being led towards discomfort, a context that has increasingly been meaning to posit uncomfortable questions to an industry that is strongly linked to problematic practices connected to whiteness, a dispossessing sense of capitalism, exclusion and the Euro American ideals as the aspirational ideal. The second topic speaks of the ways in which applying the term fashion to the radical particularity of a context implies disputing such a term. Perhaps it even entails making a distinction between Euro American fashion and the meaning the term acquires within that very context. Decolonial thought encourages us to be disobedient, to reclaim and define the terms of one’s own existence and experience, it implies the political act that is to name the world from one’s own place in it. This also means understanding our local aesthetics as beams of splendour on its own terms. A titanic, rebellious mural; orchids and ruffles; Afro expressions; ancestral craftmanship. Our splendour can only be defined in radical acceptance of beauty in contextual terms. And all the defiance: politicians dressing in colourful and provocative ways, the recent election, the possibility of some change. This may be perhaps one of the most political aspects in contemporary Colombian fashion: the tense, exciting, painful, hopeful, contradictory process of recognising our very own meaning, and the the singular significance of what we are and can be.

Vanessa Rosales Altamar is a Colombian fashion writer and scholar. She’s the author of two books, Mujeres Vestidas and Mujer Incomoda, and is currently at work on her third.

1. Andreas Behnke (Ed). The International Politics of Fashion: Being fab in a dangerous world. Routledge. 2019.  ↩

2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books. 1983. ↩

‘Freedom on hold’ read the caption on the cover of the April 2020 issue of Vogue Portugal. In a visual reference to Magritte’s ‘Kiss,’ the cover showed a black-and-white image of two people, in medical masks, kissing. Created at the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the cover became a viral sensation and one in a series of attempts to capture and define the pandemic-induced social changes.

The freedoms that the COVID pandemic stripped us of were many – the freedom to see and meet our loved ones, the freedom to travel, the freedom to go out, the freedom to traverse our cities. Many of these freedoms we had never even thought mattered so much – and giving them up felt bitter – but also justified. Especially, once it became obvious how the issue of freedom can be manipulated in many a nasty way by the far right, anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdown protesters.

Fast forward to 2022, it feels impossible not to think about the many meanings and ambiguities behind the word ‘freedom’ on Vogue‘s cover, and also about the ambiguities and controversies that the very idea of ‘freedom’ holds. Fashion media and fashion marketing open up a vast discursive space to think about the inconsistencies and ambiguities within ‘freedom.’

‘Freedom’ is a word that is shamelessly overused in fashion media and fashion marketing. The term is a staple of fashion campaigns – which a brief look at ads of the past couple of years can confirm. The Berlin-based e-tailer Zalando, as one example, routinely ‘celebrates freedom’ in its seasonal campaigns. Having assumed the slogan ‘free to be’ in 2019, the e-commerce company has since presented a slate of freedom-centred campaigns, including the most recent ‘Dresscode: Freedom,’ featuring pioneer Finnish LGBTQI+ activists.¹ Then there is the recent #FINDYOURFREEDOM campaign by Fila,² H&M’s campaign ‘celebrating freedom and empowerment’ (through their skatewear and swimwear collections!);³ Givenchy’s 2018 collection ‘celebrating the freedom of having a good time,’⁴ and, in 2021, Calvin Klein was asking on Twitter: ‘What does freedom in the body look like for you?’ If you are wondering what this might even mean, feel free to ‘discover’ their campaign, in which ‘a collection of avant-garde talent explore the questions we ask ourselves.’⁵

In contemporary fashion campaigns, editorials and magazine articles freedom is casually and seemingly randomly assigned to products, campaigns, people. Freedom appears as an unequivocally positive thing, and manifestations of freedom are routinely celebrated. Freedom is also promised to you, the reader and consumer, as long as you buy a freedom-inducing item. Freedom contains a contradiction: seemingly, there is an abundance of it, and yet it is highly desirable and appealing. According to fashion media, freedom can be gained through fashion and consumption of designs. Thus, one Instagram post by Vogue US reads:

A woman’s body is a battleground, as recent legal rulings have reminded us. And whether the fight is over what a woman may or may not do with her body, or how that body is ‘supposed’ to look, the question at the heart of the conflict is the same: How free is a woman to be herself? Fashion has — well overdue — begun to embrace models who don’t fit the sample-size 0 mould and emerging brands like @EsterManas treat shape inclusivity as a first principle in collection design.⁶

The post suggests that fashion has been hindering women’s freedom, making women feel like they aren’t free to be themselves. Then it outlines a solution to this dilemma that, paradoxically, also comes through fashion and from the designers who are beginning to embrace the diversity of women’s body types. Therefore, the ‘freedom’ that women are attaining is still defined by the inner logic of the fashion industry and can only occur if women cooperate and agree with the conditions set up by the fashion industry. This paradoxical emptiness of the term ‘freedom’ evokes the philosopher Michel Foucault’s statement that there is no freedom from the power of discourse. Power, in the Foucauldian sense, is ever present and it is adaptive and flowy, incorporating and coopting resistance and languages of resistance.

Similarly questionable is the collocation ‘freedom of expression,’ another cliché of fashion marketing and media. While fashion media usually encourages readers to embrace their ‘freedom of expression,’ they are also encouraged to do so by choosing from a pre-selected repertoire of designer clothes. Seemingly, you are given the freedom to express yourself, but you are also required to do so within designated parameters.

Foucault’s theory of power resonates with the critiques of neoliberalism and research on consumer empowerment, brand authenticity and corporate social responsibility initiatives of the late-stage capitalism. As communications scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser effectively argues in her book ‘Authentic TM,’ currently, we live in the era where the political, the emotional and the personal are branded. Political commitments, grand social responsibility gestures, big claims about freedom and empowerment, while not always disingenuous, end up serving as marketing and branding tools. It is only logical that in the contradiction-laden neoliberal culture the aesthetic of freedom functions as a powerful incentive to shop. The ‘freedom,’ promised by fashion marketing campaigns and fashion media, is wistfully portrayed through the symbols and language redolent of the big liberation movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Campaigns, fashion features and editorials speak of ‘community’ and togetherness, presenting images of ‘free-spirited,’ determined-looking young people.

A recent, Spring Summer 2022 campaign by Etro, shot by Mario Sorrenti, is called ‘Empire of Freedom’ and captures ‘a new reality, where you can just be yourself,’ as per the brand’s instagram page.⁷ The Dutch edition of the Numero magazine thus comments on Etro’s campaign: ‘Freedom is living according to personal parameters, better if shared with kindred spirits. Freedom is enjoying the moment, lightheartedly. Empire of Freedom is the title of the new Etro advertising campaign, shot by Mario Sorrenti in a space that is both a commune, a house, and an atelier. A laboratory where we live and build, all together, a new reality, sharing passions and exploring the energy of youth.’⁸ Evoking the style and political drive of the 1970s, the magazine proceeds to describe the campaign as ‘an opportunity to reinvent, looking at the future all together with new eyes: the eyes of youth with the spontaneity of a community, following no rules and no orders.’ In all its vagueness, this description refers to all the powerful markers of political change: ‘reinventing the future,’ ‘youth,’ ‘spontaneity of a community,’ ‘following no rules.’

And yet, despite the community-centred talk, the ways to gain freedom remain largely private and individual – they do not involve organised community action. The freedom discourse of the fashion industry casts ‘freedom’ as something shoppable, aspirational and private. Freedom emerges as a commodity, something that you receive as a bonus, along with your apt fashion purchase.

On our go-to fashion pages, we are steered towards ‘liberating’ shapewear, and ‘emancipating’ skincare with ads for freedom-generating perfumes sandwiched in between. ‘Rihanna’s first Fenty drop of the decade is all about freedom,’ reads a headline on the website of British Vogue.⁹ The article proceeds to describe the Fenty collection notes, quoting the press release: it ‘fuses punk military styles with sports luxe, encouraging free thinking and free movement.’ And yet, isn’t it absurd to claim that free thinking should be encouraged through the highly private and quite elitist act of consumption?

Indeed, the venues towards freedom that fashion and lifestyle magazines encourage are often private and de-politicised. A video from Refinery29, titled ‘Finding freedom through roller skating,’ narrates a story of a young woman who turns to roller skating as a way to ‘feel good,’ and has found respite in it from her unfulfilling and ‘toxic’ job.¹⁰ Another Refinery29 article outlines an ever more escapist take on freedom. In the article, titled ‘Why Black women are finding freedom in being delusional,’ the author confesses to be ‘fuelled by my own delusions’ and argues for not ‘subscribing to reality.’

It is by no means easy to be delusional; in fact, it is easier to remain preoccupied with the unrelenting misery of life. Take dating right now as a straight woman; anyone in it knows what it feels like: hungrily rummaging through garbage in hopes of maybe finding a half-eaten banana that will sustain you until tomorrow. It is demoralising to see myself aggressively barter for crumbs of affection and respect. Applying delusion to my love life looks like constantly working to remind myself that I am worthy of love, I’m not ‘too much,’ and the companionship I desire is out there. Every day I look out at the toxic single-use-plastic-filled sea — I’m told there are plenty of fish in — and convince myself that someone is my match. Delusion is about taking stock of your surroundings and telling yourself there is more to life than this.¹¹

The article acknowledges the harshness of the current political reality, recognises the adverse conditions black women are forced to brave, and speaks critically of the dating culture in a patriarchal society. And yet it offers an escapist solution to this issues in de-politicising one’s life and ‘choosing’ to see it differently in order to ‘soar.’ With almost a Matrix-level dilemma about struggle and denial, the article provokes a question about what freedom is supposed to feel and be like.

I am certainly approaching the ‘freedom’ discourse in the fashion industry and media with a great deal of ambivalence. Freedom in itself is a slippery, evasive and hard-to-define idea. And then, shopping and consumption have been recognised as empowerment venues for women, helping women gain a wider recognition of their rights as consumers. Similarly, it has been argued that fashion and lifestyle media (that historically have targeted women) have widened women’s access to modernity. Lastly, as Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser demonstrate in their co-edited ‘Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times,’ we live in times when political intent and authenticity are expressed in a variety of seemingly contradictory ways, shaped by the logic of consumption, spectacle and visibility.

But it is probably the urgency of the currently unfolding crises that make the freedom discourse in fashion and lifestyle industries seem so irksome. In times of political turmoil, climate emergency, disinformation and human rights crises, can we even afford to to shop and delude our way to freedom?

In fashion marketing and magazines, freedom is often shown as something glossy, aspirational and enjoyable – freedom seems to always be within your reach. But freedom, the history shows, isn’t really supposed to be an easy gain. The story of the Civil Rights movement, feminism, queer movement all attest to the fact that liberation is not an easy task. Fights for freedom aren’t called ‘fights’ for nothing. Media’s escapist narratives seem to declare that freedom from oppressions is unachievable. And yet, don’t the stories of organised freedom movements of the twentieth century give us a glimmer of hope that the opposite can be true?

Lately, it does appear that lifestyle media are embracing alternative ways to speak about freedom. Over the past decade, fashion magazines have become more politically conscious, and are obviously searching for new, non-trivialising ways to speak about politics. Teen Vogue offers one example of how a fashion magazine can tackle the freedom discourse.

The notorious 2016 article ‘Donald Trump is gaslighting America’ established Teen Vogue’s reputation as one of the major pop-cultural political commentators. The magazine has effectively sustained that reputation ever since by extensively covering politics in the US and internationally. The references to ‘freedom’ that the publication are mostly political and concern freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of movement. To see these references in a media that claims to be a fashion publication is highly unusual, and sobering.

On a par with ‘celebrating freedom,’ another cliché thing to say is that ‘the personal is political’ – and it seems like the time has come for fashion media and the fashion industry to re-think what that means nowadays. Maybe, in search of the political, the industries that so skilfully cater to the private joys, pleasures and desires, should start looking beyond the personal.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. https://www.adsoftheworld.com/campaigns/dresscode-freedom ↩

2. https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/Fila-unveils-freedom-loving-ss21-campaign-shot-in-london,1297219.html ↩

3. https://www.theindustry.fashion/hm-launches-campaign-celebrating-freedom-and-empowerment-for-new-skatewear-and-swimwear-collection/ ↩

4. https://hero-magazine.com/article/129010/givenchys-new-campaign-celebrates-the-freedom-of-having-a-really-good-time ↩

5. https://twitter.com/calvinklein/status/1367904731482427392 ↩

6. https://www.instagram.com/p/ChHy4kKj0WU/?hl=en ↩

7. https://www.instagram.com/p/CaFgThYNEyT/ ↩

8. https://www.numeromag.nl/etro-unveils-empire-of-freedom-the-new-spring-summer-2022-advertising-campaign/ ↩

9. https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/rihanna-fenty-fashion-new-release ↩

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ3Y8Cj7Cns ↩

11. https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/black-tiktok-delusional-manifestation-alternative ↩

While browsing the resale app Depop, I frown, one eyebrow slightly cocked. I stare at my phone screen trying to distinguish what looks like an architectural slice of fabric strewn on the seller’s bedroom floor. On closer inspection, it is a brown long sleeve top with a network of drawcords covering the torso, corset ties running the gamut of the sleeves and a large keyhole cutout on the back. The caption reads ‘Insaneee cut out top, super sexy loads of ways to wear. Such a unique piece!’ Among others, one tag mentions subversive basics.

A term coined by the trend analyst Agustina Panzoni on her TikTok channel, @thealgorhythm, subversive basics refer to garments that ‘rebel up to the point of losing their utility.’¹ By this Panzoni identifies a subset of everyday garments in both mens and womenswear categories that have been reworked with cutouts, slashes, layering, mesh panelling, ruching and piping. The stylistic applications of subversive basics with its lingerie influences and deconstructivist sensibilities pertinent to the 1990s, define the trend by its accentuation and exposure of the body as well as the garment’s ability to adapt and alter to the whims of the wearer. They are an exploitation of immodesty. T-shirts are made unabashedly revealing with the pull of a drawcord, vests are sliced and spliced together barely clinging to the shoulders. Knits no longer indicate warmth or necessity, they are reconfigured and now are merely an accessory. The little black dress is now even smaller with sections of fabric gouged out of it. At any moment, an ill-judged movement threatens to flash a body part that would rather remain hidden.

With an abundance of skin on show, subversive basics are symptomatic of the psychologist J.C. Flugel’s theory on the ‘shifting erogenous zone.’ It suggests the eroticism of the body is sustained by clothing that continually shifts the emphasis from one specific area of the body to another that conjure sexual stimulus or desire.² Erogenous zones are accentuated through exposure, semi-concealment and other devices at a designer’s disposal. Subversive basics utilises it all, but undermines the body’s proclivity for eroticism. The erogenous zone is fractured into insignificant swatches of skin that vie for attention. To completely reveal the body would be anti-erotic and antithetical to the point of fashion – the display must be extreme enough to be exciting, but not too extreme so that it is obscene. Potency lies instead in our imaginations that extrapolates the suggestion of the nude. The power and allure of the erogenous zone is in its singularity – framed and isolated, a strategic revelation that catches the eye, commands attention, flirts, provokes and coaxes with each movement. When fractured and split into multiple zones, the eye is distracted and the efficacy is diffused. These garments, in all their festooning, signal that the body has exhausted its erotic capital and reached an impasse where, all at once, everything and nothing is erotic.

Previously, notions of taste and respectability were more pervasive with fewer designers defining the fashions of the period and therefore being able to delineate a singular erogenous zone. The 18th century saw significant areas of skin emerge coinciding with the dawn of modern social and sexual relations. By the Empire period, busts were suspended above the bodice, nipples exposed through veiling and fichus. At the close of the 1920s, a woman’s legs were no longer deemed erotic as men grew tired of their overexposure, hemlines were dropped to conceal the legs, attention was shifted to the back, which was bared to the waist, the skirt drawn tightly over the hips to accentuate the buttocks. Comparatively, men’s fashion oscillated with equal flamboyance to enhance various parts of their physique – great voluminous sleeves, padded doublets and codpieces in the Tudor age, and the ‘poulaine,’ a long shoe in the shape of the phallus popular in the Middle Ages, all served to exaggerate a man’s stature.³ Only from 1760 onwards was an anti-fashion uniform adopted and male erogenous zoning became more stable, the contrast owed in part to the continued social and sexual scrutiny of women.

Erogenous zones become sterile with overexposure and erotic capital is maintained through this gradual shift from one area to another, engaging in a game of hide-and-seek between seduction and prudery. What prudery resists and eventually accepts after a particular emphasis has been established has left little to be considered shocking. After all, every part of the body has been paraded and shamed at some point. As the fashion system has modernised and proliferated, more designers and brands compete for attention and a point of view. The speed at which the erogenous zone shifts and oscillates has accelerated and outpaced us, darting across the body, never truly landing.

The multiplicity of these garments with their excess of straps, cut-outs and slits reduce the erogenous zone to a non-place. The French anthropologist Marc Augé refers to these non-places as transitory spaces, in spacial design they might include places such as airports, hospitals, motorways, where we experience a feeling of gentle possession. Our movements and gestures are controlled and guided as we pass through them as anonymous individuals, not relating or identifying with these locales in any intimate sense.⁴ The customisability of these garments render the erogenous zone transient and temporary meaning that we do not relate to it in an intimate, sensual or erotic capacity. In both instances of non-place, individual and erogenous zones experience a sense of identity loss. The individual becomes submissive to the space, while the erogenous zone becomes just an area of bared flesh competing with other points of exposure. Stained by time, subversive basics create an experience of similitude where they reference multiple garments and erogenous zones, without definitively embodying one. Desolate place, desolate garment, the poetics of being cease to thrive here.

The trends proliferation is synonymous with the lifestyles of our current society – one that has become increasingly obsessed with image, excess and novelty. One moment, you are hoisting your top up, yanking at the pulley system of ties to reveal your midriff, and before the marks from the straps pulled too tight have left the skin, you have released the pressure, moved your attention to your trousers, accentuating the cutouts on your thigh, not yet sunkissed, to be paraded to the world. What was once the risqué baring of flesh that tiptoed between the terrain of shame and shamelessness, has now been replaced by an exercise in exposure in both the physical and digital sense. Designs are now created to please the algorithm and market to the influencers who command it. Brands and fashion houses are no longer sartorial authors in the traditional sense, but rather amalgamators of data.⁵

The ubiquity of subversive basics across the collections of designers as varied as Rick Owens and Mugler to Jil Sander and Telfar suggests that what the data demands are garments that reflect the destabilised environment around us. It is well understood that the body represents a physical and social entity under construction and one of clothing’s functions is to assuage our fears and vulnerabilities over our corporeality. Subversive basics acutely reflects the current anthropocene of the individual being a ‘work in progress’ or ‘in transition’ towards an avatar of their own creation.⁶ It makes complete sense that the ties and pulleys of this trend conjure to mind a construction site, while the cuts, tears and slices are reminiscent of the surgeon’s table. As a catalyst to this condition, online media is geared towards simulation, stimulation and desire. Faceless e-commerce imagery, outfit shots, nudes, digital filters and editing have all worked to establish a visual lexicon of bodies presented in vignettes and fragments. Consumption of these fragments reflect desires that are built on a disconnected and disembodied relationship with ourselves. Faceless and limp, interacting with these phantasmatic torsos has contributed to a disjointed perception where stimulation and excitement is derived from dismemberment rather than totality.

In Augé’s later writing, he outlines that ideas of the future have taken on a new dimension that displays several faces that encapsulate our desires, hopes and fears.⁷ Insatiable, complicated and conflicting, the accentuation of this bipolar character is physicalised in subversive basics. Garments become palimpsests, where identity and our relationship to it are being ceaselessly rewritten, mutating from one design to another in an attempt to satiate us for a fleeting moment. The reciprocal interdependence that clothing and the body has with one another will always furnish new conflicts. Subversive basics are not a reconciliation of these frictions, but represent an ongoing project where we are slicing everyone up to create a new set of ideals. There is little left to bare, the traditional erogenous zone exists and continues to shift, but its potency has been undermined. The new ideal being prepositioned is that the body is slippery at the margins, but now the clothes are too.

Felix Choong is a curator and editor of Nice Outfit, an exhibition catalogue and theoretical journal, who lives and works in London.

1. https://www.tiktok.com/@thealgorythm/video/6951466402205224198?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&lang=en ↩

2. J.C. Flugel, Psychology of Clothes, Hogarth Press, 1940. ↩

3. Valerie Steele, Fashion & Eroticism, Oxford University Press, p. 35, 1985. ↩

4. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, 1995.  ↩

5. Taylore Scarabelli, Styling for Social Media, Viscose Journal, p. 71, 2021. ↩

6. Natasha Stagg, Sleeveless, Semiotext(e), p. 233, 2019. ↩

7. Marc Augé, The Future, Verso, p. 7, 2015. ↩

Disability is not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives. World Health Organization. 

26 percent in the U.S. live with a disability. 21 percent in the UK, 5.2 percent in Italy, which is where I come from. One of them is my son.

In 1999 Aimee Mullins became one of the world’s first disabled models, opening for Alexander McQueen’s runway show. She remained McQueen’s muse until he passed away. Despite this successful collaboration, when I entered the fashion world in 2001 not much had changed in terms of inclusivity: to model you had to be thin, at least 1.75 metres tall, and have four fully functioning limbs. None of the agencies I worked for represented disabled models, and I never saw one at a casting. In fact, I can’t remember seeing anyone with a visible disability in the fashion industry in those years.

In 2008 BBC Three aired Britain’s Missing Top Model, a reality TV modelling show for disabled women. Many argued that the show made disability a spectator event, however, it did launch the careers of models like Debbie van der Putten, Sophie Morgan, and Kelly Knox. In 2015, Alexandra Kutas, Jamie Brewer, Jack Eyers, Rebekah Marine, and Madeline Stuart, made their fashion debuts – all of them have some kind of disability. Incidentally, 2015 was also the year of model Ashley Chew’s ‘Black Models Matter’ tote bag.

In 2017 Zoe Proctor and Laura Johnson founded Zebedee, the first modelling and acting agency in the UK focusing exclusively on talents with disabilities. Also, in July 2017 my son was born, and soon diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He was still in the hospital when I covered Milan Fashion Week for a magazine – shows during the day, ICU at night: enough to change anyone’s perception of fashion for good. I didn’t feel a part of it, it was as if the clothes were meant for happy, carefree people, not for me. It stung.

A few years ago, a platoon of Zebedee models have walked for Art School, London, while Aaron Philips and Ellie Goldstein have done editorials for Gucci and Moschino. My son is now three: he can walk, but stairs are hard for him so I sometimes have to carry him because not all venues have elevators; play-parks can also be challenging. He is intelligent and perceptive, still I wonder if he will be able to access higher education, and what kind of job will he ultimately land. I’m sure he’d make a wonderful model – he prances in front of the camera like a mini David Gandy – it’s just that while prancing he sometimes stumbles and falls.

An increasing amount of models with disabilities have suddenly appeared in fashion imagery. It’s only right: why shouldn’t disabled people have access to the fashion world just like everyone else? On the other hand, though, I see my son not having access to so many things, that if I picture him as the next Jack Eyers I can’t help thinking: why modelling of all things? Why fashion? Perhaps I’m just like all those parents who flinch at the idea of their children modelling because, you know, they should be studying law, or building the next Eiffel Tower, except that I really like fashion, and it’s my source of income, so why shouldn’t it be the same for my child? Why shouldn’t it make him happy? But that is exactly the point: would it make him happy? And why has fashion become so interested in disability in the first place?

Mine is a tricky position; I might be living with disability, but I am not a disabled person. I face the challenges only indirectly. The disabled one is my son, and no matter how close I am to him, I cannot feel the things he feels. I grew up in a world where disability didn’t seem to exist; it wasn’t in the media, and especially not in fashion media, and, at least in Italy, disabled people lived a rather secluded life – there was hardly anything around for them. When disability hit me with the force of a premature birth and an emergency C-section, I was forced first of all to dismantle my own stereotypes and taboos. But giving birth to a disabled child doesn’t automatically free you from your background of bias and ignorance: it’s even harder if you’ve spent half your life between glossy magazines and catwalks, where curvy is already big news, let alone cerebral palsy. I might be somewhat more open-minded as a mother, but as a professional, I’m just as conservative as the next person.

Being a model means partially surrendering the control you have over your body: agencies will ask models to lose weight, to work out or to cut their hair, and casting directors will turn them down if they are ‘too fat,’ or ‘too short,’ or ‘not glamorous enough,’ whatever that means. When a model’s picture is put on the cover of a magazine, or on a billboard, then it’s out there – people will see it, hopefully admire it, frequently criticise it. Body-shaming comes in all forms: we see countless fashion campaigns and editorials slaughtered on social media because the model looks ‘too thin,’ ‘horrible’ or even ‘sick.’ Of course, fashion imagery is not always good (whatever that means to you), and it’s the photographers and art directors who are largely responsible for the final result. Still, it’s much quicker and simpler to criticise the model’s looks than it is to address the entire artwork and concept behind a photo shoot, more effective too, because simple adjectives that refer to the person, like ‘ugly,’ ‘ill’ or ‘fat,’ are easily grasped by everyone, unlike the more complex words that define photography and styling. Also, young models who don’t have an involved agency behind them are much less likely to publicly respond to these critics than a seasoned professional. Our bodies are the result of the life we have lived so far and should therefore be respected: this is unfortunately not always the case. And if a body happens to belong to a model, then passing judgment is actually considered acceptable, the down-side of a well-paid job. When disability is involved, this is even more disturbing: the absence of disability in fashion specifically, is partially connected to a lack of inclusion of visibly different people who may not meet beauty stereotypes. These stereotypes on an ‘able’ body, are slightly easier to defeat because, no matter how standardised, beauty is still a subjective matter. But there is nothing subjective in disability: it’s either there or it isn’t, and this is perhaps why we feel entitled to say things like ‘the model on the wheelchair’ in the same way that we would say ‘the model with brown hair,’ or ‘the skinny model,’ except that it’s not the same. All bodies come with a story, a personal one, and the story behind a disabled body is likely to have several dramatic chapters. That wheelchair, for example, is the result of a medical condition, there is pain behind it, struggle, trauma: it means finally being independent, but also facing the fact that you can’t do things the ‘normal’ way. It can’t be changed, no matter how much others talk and glare, and while disabled people might eventually come to terms with their disability and accept it, I doubt they appreciate being defined by it.

Part of my mixed feelings in front of fashion campaigns featuring disabled models simply comes from being the product of an ableist society that grapples with conflicted emotions in front of diversity, and this, of course, is a huge problem. But more of it comes from poor communication; I think tokenism, my son randomly being ‘used’ by brands taking advantage of his disability to improve their image and increase their revenue. I imagine him labelled as ‘disabled’ and suddenly it becomes too much to bear. I speak openly about my child’s disability, and I will encourage him to do the same, but I guess I’m not ready for random strangers, who don’t know what’s behind that word, using it carelessly and putting it under the spotlight. Would I feel better if I knew that at least 20% of models had some kind of disability? Perhaps.

In 2020, writer Melissa Blake modelled at New York Fashion Week wearing an outfit from Zappos Adaptive. She then reported to CNN: ‘I grew up in the 1990s reading magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, where the pages were filled with the likes of Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. As I’d flip over each glossy page, I was always hoping to see disabled women like me, but I never did. Where were the models in wheelchairs? Where were the people who looked like me? The reality was that they just weren’t there, and this absence has as much to do with our society’s beauty standards as it does with fashion itself. These strict beauty standards dictate what is and isn’t considered beautiful and, by default, acceptable.’¹ Models’ bodies are considered aspirational, the rise of models with disabilities questions an acceptable form of discrimination in the industry. I dare say that beauty, like many things, is also a matter of education: just like we sometimes require some kind of education in order to appreciate different forms of art even though they may not meet our personal taste, we also need to educate our eyes and minds to diverse forms of beauty. For decades we’ve seen nothing but ‘perfect’ bodies in magazines, to a point that if someone slightly different appears they immediately stand out, and not always in a good way. Disabled models struggle to get signed to an agency because, apparently, the market isn’t ready. Some are asked to disguise their disability, for example by wearing prosthetic limbs. But isn’t that just going back to the old stereotypes? Why hide the disability? To protect who – the model or the viewers? If ‘the market is not ready,’ is it because disability is so shocking or because our taste for beauty has been watered down by countless stereotypical images?

While disability is not a beautiful thing, and not because of how it looks but because of what it is, disabled models are beautiful: their beauty is unique, different from what we are used to seeing, and it defies the current – ableist – aesthetic canons. Most of all, they are models: they have the right attitude and confidence in front of the camera – they know how to pose. A disabled body can be harmonious, it can be proportionate, it can be photogenic, it can wear fashion well – it’s just a matter of how standards are set. Today, young children with Down’s Syndrome can see Ellie Goldstein looking regal on the cover of Glamour and know that they could too. When Aaaron Philips is shot for Moschino like a sexy pixie, the alluring attitude of models is suddenly taken to the next level. And I find Debbie Van Der Putten’s glamour shots refreshing even after decades of women being shot naked just because. Inclusive representation is liberating, and it’s the only way for disability to stop being the main feature.

Recent campaigns and collaborations have proven diversity to be an excellent marketing tool, hence perhaps the industry’s new interest in disability. However, people with disabilities are still underrepresented and this sometimes leads to the poor communication that I am so afraid of. A brand is seen as ‘good’ when it features disability in a campaign, and the campaign itself is typically praised for raising awareness. But inclusive representation is not ‘good,’ it’s fair, and the models we see in those campaigns are not there to raise awareness – they are there to model. Zoe Proctor of Zebedee Management makes this very clear: ‘Our models are always casted on their skill and talent. Age range and gender are a big part of casting along with clothes size occasionally. I do not believe that any models are cast due to their disability alone.’² However, Proctor also says that while there is an increasing amount of specifically casted disabled people in advertising, there is still a lack of incidental disabilities in campaigns – inclusivity is not standard, it is still not ‘normal.’

In fact, being disabled is not normal, and not because of disability itself but because of the way society treats it. I’m thinking of prejudice, of ignorance, of the staring, and also of more practical things like architectonic barriers. Most people with disabilities could lead ‘normal’ lives if they were allowed to do so. I would like my son to be considered a schoolboy with his own individual skills, not a ‘disabled schoolboy.’ On the same note, I guess I wouldn’t want him to be a ‘disabled model’ but simply a model. I’d like him to be casted with his disability, not ‘because of’ or ‘despite.’ Still, if I look back at how things were when I was younger, I know that there has been an improvement where inclusivity is concerned, and while I’ll never really stop being scared, worried, and even resentful (because I am) I do feel relieved about my son being born today and not twenty years ago. I hope that he will grow up in a more inclusive world, surrounded by all sorts of people both in real life and in the media, and that this will encourage him to thrive or just make him feel less alone, less different, more beautiful.

Sara Kaufman is a fashion writer, living and working in Milan.

1. cnn.com, Opinion: Someone told me I’d never model because I’m disabled. I proved them wrong at NY Fashion Week. By Melissa Blake, October 31, 2020 ↩

2. Interview with author, October 28 2020 ↩

Believe it or not, I hate writing. I am constantly asking myself: am I good at it? Am I saying something truly interesting or is it all just crap? The doubt pesters me greatly. Despite my opinions often being bold and in your face, if not brutal and slashing – I like to think I’m a gentle slasher, though that gentleness does not necessarily come across – I’m always surprised when I get responses, and even more so when they’re positive. In my dreams, I sometimes imagine myself as a draughtsman, and probably should have pursued that career with more dedication, but I did not. A respectable white-collar position was always held highly in my immediate environment, and in the end I succumbed to the societal pressure and obliged. Fine art is not respectable, unless it comes with an academic degree. I am an art historian in fact. I managed to push fashion into that respectability anyway, and that is already an achievement. I can’t complain.

I still draw little kinky doodles every now and then, relying on pen, ink and paper to relieve myself from the dreadful stress of writing. Writing makes me anxious. Lengthy pieces, in particular, terrify me. I incline towards the fragment, the abridged note, the slashed phrase, the succinct sketch: anything that gives the impression of the unfinished, ephemeral composition. I think size matters, in reverse: small is beautiful. Do I feel small? Probably. When 2500 words was proposed for this piece, for instance, I gasped. How could I possibly reach that astronomic – to my standards – word count without repeating myself? Perhaps it’s just writer’s block, or the relentless white page in front of me.

What shall I say? I am never sure about that. Written words linger, and I would hate to be remembered as someone who wrote silly, unworthy things. Better nothing than something stupid. I admire writers who publish little and seldom, like my beloved Ennio Flaiano. Also, contrary to what I thoughtfully explain when asked about my writing process – writers are liars, that’s for sure – I usually form my opinions while and not before writing. I do have a point of view, of course, but I have only a vague idea in mind at the beginning of the article. I compose the draft jumbling notes here and there, then everything really settles down while I furiously edit. The operation can take minutes, in the case of daily fashion show reporting, hours or even days and weeks. The cutting and pasting and erasing and rewriting electrifies me, physically and mentally. That’s when the slasher awakens. Then the doubtful Flaccavento kicks in. Reading my stories in print makes me cringe: days, weeks, months have passed since submission, and I’m kicking myself I didn’t edit differently. That’s a constant turmoil for me: writing is kind of definitive, but as humans we are (to some degree at least) allowed to change opinions without sounding incoherent. I certainly do: suddenly and radically. Writing solidifies, thoughts fluctuate.

I’m digressing, I know. It’s on purpose, I promise: a peripatetic essay feels less fixed and definitive. On top of that, a few hundred words in, and the 2500 word goal seems much closer. Still I’m afraid I haven’t given much. Have I? Back to the facts. Despite my eternal questioning, and probably because I was told ‘you’d be brilliant at it’ when approached to write these notes, I had no hesitation and enthusiastically accepted, right away. After all, I have fashioned my professional approach, liberally adapting from René Descartes famous adage dubito ergo sum. I have a problem with smoke and mirrors and pre-packaged adulation; I’m allergic to set in stone opinions. As a critic, in fact, I tend to question everything, fame in particular, because fame makes onlookers prone to blind acceptance. I used to look suspiciously at popular people in high school. Ever since, I have practiced qualms on success scrupulously. Sometimes it’s a bit annoying. Sometimes I come across as immensely annoying – for designers more than for readers, probably. I am very annoying to myself, too. Still, I’m convinced that without doubt there won’t be any evolution or progress, as the only way forward is to question the status quo. Isn’t it?

One minute after accepting, I started questioning what I’d done. I asked myself: how can I write about doubt keeping a suitably sceptical tone? If doubt is the opposite of dogma, isn’t a written essay on it, however uncomfortably personal, at risk of appearing dogmatic? Non fa una piega we say in Italian – it makes perfect sense. So here I am now, after doubting my doubts, finally having started, 800 and some words after the first line; sometimes you just have to get going, or risk getting stuck in Zeno’s paradox: an arrow thrown does not move because it occupies a fixed space at any given moment in time. Oh well.

Marble-like certitude rules the fashion system, a hierarchical pyramid with one single tyrant – a small court, let’s concede – sitting at the top at any given time. There is no way to fix this structure, I believe, despite all the utopias and dystopias. Even the fiercely anti-elitist movement that is taking shape right now aspires, to my eyes at least, at creating just another tyranny, unremittingly based on morals: one in which the watchdogs and the whistleblowers are the non-self-questioning holders of truth, judging and condemning others. The mere idea frightens me: fashion is immoral, that’s for sure. As industry, of course, it can and should be responsible, but making everything revolve around morals makes me cringe. Fashion needs unbalance – of wealth, status, taste, concepts – in order to attract and propel its transitory truths and convince the elites, and after that the masses.

Because of its tyrannical nature, the fashion system, as any other system based essentially on power, is averse to doubt and self-interrogation. Which is probably why the recent pandemic has made everyone, even the bigwigs, look, and act, so nervous and vulnerable – Marc Jacobs’ make-up vaudeville, anyone? It put everyone on the same level of uncertainty, under ever-present social media scrutiny. Doubt is something, I’m sure – I sincerely hope so! – even the seemingly icy cold Anna Wintour practices in private, though certainly not in public. A person who doubts and admits so is someone who admits weakness. After all, the body of the king always needs to be healthy: the tyrant is never sick. The same is true for the tyrant’s mind. The tyrant knows better, and his or her certitude reinforces power. This applies to editors, designers, CEOs and all the self-centred denizens of this infinitely egotistical system. It is a certitude that is never under question, not even when the winds change, and this is why fashion tyrants fall with so much noise: they never see the end coming. Roman emperors, towards the end of the glorious days of Rome, were much alike. My own glorification of incertitude and questioning is a remedy to time that passes; it makes me more adaptable and sceptical. Or so I tell myself. In hindsight, however, I know that at one point I will be out of sync. Senescence is real: an older colleague tortures me with this, telling me that my ideas are getting passé already. She says my antipathy to certain aspects of contemporary fashion are just the result of not being able to understand the present-day. She makes me livid, furious, probably because deep down I know she’s right and one day, very soon, I’ll turn grumpy and start eulogising the good old days. I’ll do my best not to, but it won’t work.

Designers and houses talk in grandiose statements, with journalists often acting as mere trumpets for all the pre-packaged fanfare, pumping the designer’s ego up in a vicious circle of reciprocal mirroring. Jumping on the winner’s bandwagon gives us the sense of empowerment and self-worth we all depend on. The daily doubt I face, and I’m sure my colleagues do too, is this: am I relevant? Does my opinion hold any true meaning in the eyes of the reader? This might all sound a little too self-conscious but the fact is, this is a fundamental question. Relevance is certainly a status given by the system, sometimes rather arbitrarily, but it also gives worth to one’s efforts. If you are not relevant, your work might be thrown into the void, which basically means in the bin, and that would be extremely depressing. Then again, it might be rescued later on, and gain posthumous relevance – a little too late, frankly. This is extra tricky, because being relevant is closely dependent on fitting into the system, one way or another. As for me, I’d like – actually, I need – my opinions to count for the bigwigs and the very same designers I at times harshly criticise. I want to count for the anonymous reader, too, but that’s a different thing altogether. If I’m ignored by those in the know, the very same persons I try not to be too friendly with, I feel like I’m not part of the inner circle, and a destructive sense of insignificance starts to consume me. The goings, here, get pretty existential, for some rather superficial reasons probably. I hide it all quite carefully behind a very composed, I-don’t-really-care demeanour, but the truth is I crumble inside. Still, I don’t want to play the game by the rules of the system.

Gaining relevance, as a writer at least, is in fact an insidious road, as there is the relevance that comes from sticking to one’s guns, and the relevance, sometimes greater, that comes from accommodating the status quo. The same applies to designers, I’d say. This is where the whole thing gets extremely twisted, and doubt proliferates. The opposite forces of convention and rebellion work simultaneously in fashion. What’s shockingly new, immensely progressive, in one instant becomes conformism the next, and so on in an endless cycle of perpetual creation and destruction. Early champions of the new might face harsh criticism from the old guard – after all they were the vanguard once – only to soon become allies of the powers that be when tides change. Is this change of mind putting personal and professional integrity at risk? I sometimes think so, then mitigate the feeling by acknowledging that, by its very nature, fashion rejects loyalty. Or does it? A scene, religiously repeated at the end of every show, when first opinions are conjured up, is very telling. As the lights go up, attendees immediately turn to the powerful and respected to ask, ‘So what did you think?’ And, if opinions differ, they probably stay schtum for fear of being labelled ignorant, or tasteless. I vividly remember the heated debate outside the first – and, in my opinion, best – Gucci show by Alessandro Michele in January 2015. The emasculating vision of fey, eccentric masculinity incited anger, shock, resentment. It felt quite uneasy to digest, even though there were a lot of familiar tropes – in particular, Prada-isms – in it. I remember talking about the glorious Neapolitan tradition of the femminiello –  the man with a markedly feminine outlook who is woven into urban and popular culture. I meant it in a positive way, but a colleague attacked me as an old fart. It hurt.

Having the clarity and openness of your vision questioned is painfully diminishing, for personal doubt can feel enriching and empowering, while being doubted by others stings. Again, it makes you feel unworthy of your position, or, even worse, unworthy of being heard – irrelevant, that is. Taste, though a cultural construct, is a very intimate trait: no different from handwriting, or tone of voice. Having it questioned touches you deep down, hitting a nerve. It’s hard to translate this into words, but believe me when I say that it has a discombobulating effect. On me at least: my lack of certitude includes self-doubt and if personal doubt is matched with external doubt, well, it all explodes. Which, as I write, is making me realise why doubting someone else’s work in my writing might not be well received. We all depend on approval, and we all want to feel that we’re one of the good guys. It takes a lot of self-confidence to resist these attacks: a confidence I have rarely encountered in my life. But the fact is, taste is just as fickle as everything else in fashion, which is also what makes it so intensely exciting: there is no fixed paradigm. And yet, though it depends so much on change, fashion favours absolutes. It creates its own unshakeable myths and expels whomever does not fit.

Am I trying to fit in? I already do and despite my best efforts to fight the mainstream I’m perceived as part of the establishment, which is as frightening as it is satisfying. In the back of my head, there is always that little petty voice whispering: you have made it. Still, in my vain glorification of doubt, I like to think I don’t fit at all, which is probably the most deceitful of all my dubious convictions. I don’t identify as a fashion person –  a devoted follower of the new, someone blindly accepting of anything that is bestowed originality, someone who judges others on how aesthetically au courant they are – but in truth I am a fashion person. I love fashion. The system stirs up convoluted feelings, yes. I love fashion both as a professional pursuit, but also as the very personal one of putting clothes on. You love dressing, someone once told me, emphatically. Indeed, I do. I hate being perceived as vain – here we go, another self-destructive doubt – but hey, isn’t this whole industry built on vanity? Sometimes the paradox is that we, as fashion workers, aspire to an intellectual status of the higher kind – I certainly do – something that is totally dismissive of the very nature of our job. There is some kind of cognitive dissonance going on: one that can only be solved by embracing all our many glaring contradictions and paradoxes.

Here, I know, contrary to my professed nature, I’m probably turning a little pedantic, didactic even. As an acutely tormented person, in work and otherwise, I find the lack of certitude comforting, progressive. I’m always reminded that there might be another way, another view, another angle. I do that naturally, until I meet someone of absolute convictions who finds my relativist thinking annoying. I freeze, and mumble a bit more. I hate having to explain myself. The more I do it, the more I doubt my relativism. I guess we all need to get dirty if we want to live. Don’t we?

As I was trying to finish up these annotations, help unexpectedly arrived from an Instagram post on the M/M Paris feed evoking the great Milton Glaser, who had just passed away. The caption went: ‘Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.’

I fully agree, with no hesitation whatsoever. Or perhaps I should start over?

Angelo Flaccavento is a fashion writer and curator who lives in Sicily.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Doubt,’ available for purchase here.

By 1818, the forty-six-year-old Henry Sands Brooks had already made his name as a grocer and noted dandy. Given his experience in retail and his love of fashion, it is no surprise that on April 7 of that year he opened a men’s clothing emporium, H. & D. H. Brooks & Co. The original location was on the corner of Catherine and Cherry Streets in the neighbourhood that is often described today as ‘Two Bridges.’ The name comes from the fact that the neighbourhood is nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Of course, in 1818, those bridges were not there; however, it was a bustling commercial district with a view of the East River.¹ The store was also near Catherine Slip, a manmade inlet that allowed for loading and unloading of cargo. The store’s waterfront location was conducive to international and domestic trade. It is also crucial to understanding the company’s connection to slavery. 

The company itself has passed through many hands and many corporate structures.  On Brooks’ death, the business was inherited by his four sons (the eponymous ‘Brooks Brothers’); it stayed in the family until Winthrop Holly Brooks retired in 1946, after which it was sold a number of times. It is currently organised as Brooks Brothers Group Inc., which is privately owned by the Italian magnate Claudio del Vecchio.²

Brooks Brothers’ clientele has always been illustrious. Abraham Lincoln famously wore a Brooks Brothers frock coat (custom-made for his 6’4” frame) the night he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. On the day he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy was wearing a white striped Brooks Brothers shirt. During the 2017 presidential inauguration, both President Trump and former-president Barack Obama wore Brooks Brothers coats during their greeting. In fact, Brooks Brothers has dressed forty of forty-five U.S. presidents since 1818.  

Brooks Brothers commemorated its bicentennial this April, hosting an Americana-themed, cocktail-fuelled fête at Jazz at Lincoln Center with performances by Wynton Marsalis and Paul Simon.³ There was much to celebrate. Today, Brooks Brothers has ‘more than two-hundred-and-fifty retail and factory stores in the United States, shops in airports and more than two-hundred-and-fifty locations internationally.’⁴ Though Brooks Brothers has been subject to the volatility of the retail landscape, the company has maintained its profitability under the helm of del Vecchio.⁵ But gone unmentioned is that this storied clothier, like most American companies and institutions that date back to the nineteenth century and earlier, is entangled in the complicated history of enslavement in the United States. The leadership at Brooks Brothers has yet to publicly acknowledge its connection to slavery. (My repeated requests to examine Brooks Brothers’ archives have been met with unresponsiveness.) Most generously one could speculate that this is due to ignorance of their own brand history. However, it could also be that there is a fear of hurting their bottom line.

Nonetheless, evidence shows that the national reach and different product lines of Brooks Brothers necessarily resulted in the company profiting from the slave economy. This evidence includes the structure of Brooks Brothers’ business, still-existing examples of Brooks Brothers-supplied clothing, and Brooks Brothers appeals to southern clients to pay outstanding bills.

Brooks Brothers profited from ‘servant’ clothing as well as the clothing designed for their masters. Brooks Brothers had a livery department, which provided garments for coachmen, footmen, chauffeurs, etc. in wealthy households, including those south of the Mason-Dixon Line.⁶ Before 1865, most of these servants were presumably enslaved. As symbols of their prosperity, moneyed slaveholders often outfitted their enslaved domestics in fine clothing as a display of their wealth. For example, Thomas Jefferson meticulously recorded the clothing distributed to each member of the enslaved community at Monticello, noting the quality and quantity of materials beside the name of each slave. Their clothing was a visual indicator of their age, gender and status. Curiously, it was not Jefferson’s concubine Sally Hemings who received the best allotment of clothing, but his manservant Jupiter.⁷ 

Misconceptions about enslaved people’s wardrobes may have prevented consideration of how northern commercial interests such as Brooks Brothers were necessarily linked to the day-to-day lives of commodified people of African descent. Though enslaved people’s clothing tended to be drab, shapeless and limited to a few pieces, there were opportunities to acquire more elaborate wardrobes. Enslaved peoples bought clothing and accessories with the small amounts of money from doing extra work for their slaveowners and others, raising vegetables and poultry, hunting, fishing and artisanal work. Enslaved people also bought, sold and bartered garments in the secondhand clothing market. Others were offered hand-me-downs from other slaves and their owners. Slaves most often received lengths of fabrics with which they were responsible for creating their own clothing.

The trade Brooks Brothers engaged in was separate from and parallel to the localised market described above. Brooks Brothers responded to the need of slave masters to adorn their human ‘property.’ In the wealthiest households, enslaved peoples were dressed in garments that ostentatiously reflected the privilege of their owners. A case in point are two Brook Brothers coats that are currently held in the permanent collection of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Given the size and style of the coats, they were most likely made for young male enslaved domestics. The coats were used in the household of Dr. William Newton Mercer.

Mercer was born in Maryland, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army before setting up a private practice in Natchez, Mississippi. In Natchez, he married into a family of cotton planters. When both his father-in-law and wife died, he inherited many of the family’s properties and became extraordinarily wealthy. He eventually retired from plantation life and settled on the toney Canal Street in New Orleans. He even served as the president of the Bank of Louisiana. His obituary extols his virtues.

[The] excellent sense, firmness and consistency of character and thoughtful sagacity of Dr. Mercer rendered him a most successful administrator of a large estate. He not only preserved the estate inherited from his wife, who died not many years after their marriage, but quadrupled its value, and has continued to retain and enlarge it, so that his succession, despite the enormous losses of the war, is estimated at a million and a half of dollars.⁸ 

Upon his death in 1874, Mercer had made his name as a real-estate investor and philanthropist and had become a fixture of New Orleans high society.⁹ Mercer owned hundreds of slaves who worked his many cotton plantations in Mississippi. He also owned slaves who cared for his palatial home on Canal Street. As reflections of his plantocratic wealth, these slaves were styled to represent his power and importance. The elegant Brooks Brothers coats were adorned with silver buttons that bear the falcon crest of the Mercer family, fitting the image of a wealthy planter, real estate mogul and philanthropist.¹⁰ 

Slaves, like fashion and luxury goods, were commodities. Mercer treated his slaves as possessions the same way as finery in his home. Just as he provided his manservants with Brooks Brothers coats with buttons emblazoned with his family crest, the accoutrement of wealth in his home was also adorned with symbols of his dynastic prosperity. For example, the Historic New Orleans Collection holds one of Mercer’s silver trays that also features an engraved falcon and a capital ‘M’ below it.¹¹ 

The coats bring to light the symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and retailers in centres of commerce in the North and producers of raw materials and consumers in the South. Brooks Brothers was decidedly located in lower Manhattan, walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots. The company serviced residents of New York City as well as many clients in the American South (as the provenance of the coats reveals).

Brooks Brothers itself acknowledged its engagement in the slave economy in its attempts to get payments from its Southern ‘work employers’ (a euphemism for slave owners). In 1853, Brooks Brothers was among a group of businesses that published ‘The Tailor’s Appeal,’ a complaint about unpaid bills from Southern merchants. It reads:

Gentlemen: Whereas, a number of the ‘Southern’ work employers, refuse to give us a fair remuneration for our labor, and as it is utterly impossible, for us, working for them, to earn bread for ourselves and families, and as we wish you to fully understand who are the friends of the workingmen, we subjoin a list of employers who have signed a bill of prices, and earnestly call upon you to patronize only those employers who have acted so honorably…¹² 

The companies complained that Southern merchants employed their service, but they were not recompensed fairly or at all. Number twenty-nine on the list of employers is Brooks Brothers. Here Brooks Brothers publicly acknowledges that it included ‘Southern work employers’ among its customers. Given its lower Manhattan location within walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots, it would have been surprising if Brooks Brothers had not been deeply entangled in the American ‘peculiar institution’ even as it established itself as the go-to menswear emporium for Northern elites.  

What lesson are we to take from this evidence of profiteering from human servitude in the foundational years of Brooks Brothers? This is a question that other American institutions are being asked recently. Perhaps due to their nature as loci of inquiry and self-reflection, many universities have been on the forefront of exploring their connections to slavery and atoning for the ways in which they profited from the labour and sale of enslaved peoples. In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a steering committee to unearth the university’s connection to slavery and the slave trade. A group of Harvard’s faculty members and students launched the ongoing Harvard and Slavery project, which examine the history and legacy of slavery at Harvard.¹³ In 1838, Jesuit priests of Georgetown University sold two hundred and seventy two of its slaves to save the school from potential financial ruin. Georgetown is now offering preferential admissions to descendants of those slaves.

Though many universities have started atoning for their connection to slavery and the slave trade, Brooks Brothers, and other for-profit entities, have not. Many such entities have avoided scrutiny by ceasing to exist. Very few of the signatories on the ‘Tailors Appeal’ still exist. Those that do include Hewitt Lees & Company (now investment banking and brokerage firm Laidlaw & Company) and bank Brown Brothers (now Brown Brothers Harriman & Company). While many others American corporations and families have roots in American slavery, few have maintained a continuous brand identity over two centuries. Brooks Brothers has survived in part due to the glacial shifts in menswear trends that protect it from the vagaries of a mercurial fashion industry. Over the course of two centuries, Brooks Brothers has fashioned itself as an American institution, solidifying its status as the go-to purveyor of respectable suiting and preppy wear.

But it is reasonable to ask Brooks Brothers to acknowledge and reflect upon its roots in the trade with slaveowners. Its longevity is also due to the fact that its early profits came in part from selling clothing to slave masters. Brooks Brother is often credited for introducing ready-to-wear suiting to the clothing market in 1849. ‘The ready-made suit was a turning point for the garment industry and for the American population, making fine clothing more accessible to all,’ wrote the company recently in its online magazine.¹⁴ What has not been examined is how much this innovation might have been based on its outfitting of free and enslaved servants who did not have the time or luxury to be fitted for bespoke garments.

The success and longevity of Brooks Brothers is due, in part, to its connection to slavery and the profits it gained from selling clothing to planters in the South. In the end, by counting slaveholders among its clientele, Brooks Brothers directly benefited from the buying and selling of enslaved men, women and children. It is in its best interest to fully acknowledge its part—even if small—in propping up the institution of slavery, rather than remaining silent and sweeping it under the rug. The company, which is considered the epitome of preppy all-American style, is also a benefactor of slavery. But what is more American than slavery?

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is a writer, historian and curator specializing in Afro-Diasporic fashion and visual culture. He holds a PhD in history from New York University and teaches at Harvard University. He also founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.  

1. E G Burrows and M Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 437. ↩

2. E White, ‘Retail Brand Buys Brooks Brothers from Marks & Spencer for $225 Million,’ Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2001. del Vecchio, whose family owns Ray Ban and the Italian producer of eyeglasses Luxottica SpA, bought the company in 2001 for $225 million from Britain’s Marks & Spencer. ↩

3. Z Weiss, ‘Brooks Brothers Rings In 200 Years with a Jazz-Filled Celebration,’ Vogue, April 26, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/brooks-brothers-200-birthday-celebration-yara-shahidi-katie-holmes-christina-hendricks ↩

4. ‘Stores, Emails & Catalogs,’ Brooks Brothers, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.brooksbrothers.com/Stores,-Emails-Catalogs/help-stores,default,pg.html ↩

5. As a privately-owned entity, the figures on the company’s success can only be gleaned from what the company chooses to divulge. A recent New York Times article credits del Vecchio for posting ‘profits for thirteen of the last seventeen years.’ T Agins, ‘With a Glance Backward, Brooks Brothers Looks to the Future,’ The New York Times, April 21, 2018 ↩

6. Evidence of Brooks Brothers livery department include this sixteen-page livery catalog from 1900. ‘Brooks Brothers Livery Department,’ accessed on June 23, 2018, https://www.abebooks.com/Brooks-Brothers-Livery-Department/22684247331/bd ↩

7. Farm Book, 1774-1824, page 41, by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003. Original manuscript from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. ↩

8. ‘William Newton Mercer,’ The Times-Picayune, August 18, 1874, 4. ↩

9. Mercer makes a cameo in historian Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach, which explores the legal battle of the formerly enslaved woman Rose Herera when her former owners the De Hart family kidnapped her five children and fled to Havana during the Yankee occupation of New Orleans. It was the well-heeled Mercer who financed the purchase of Rose Herera and her children for his friend and dentist James Andrew De Hart. For a man of his wealth, the cost of this chattel was small price compared to his vast holdings. A Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, 48-68. ↩

10. There was no Brooks Brothers store in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, but Mercer was well travelled and may have purchased the coats during one of his trips up north. These coats were acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection after they were discovered by descendants of the Mercer family in an attic of a former plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. ↩

11. Classical Institute of the South and The Historic New Orleans Collection, silver tray, CIS-2011-0175, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/hnoc-p16313coll17%3A7342 ↩

12. P S Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941, 1-2; New-York Tribune, August 19, 1853. ↩

13. See http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice and https://www.harvard.edu/slavery ↩

14. The company claims that it began creating ready-to-wear suits for pioneers headed West towards the California gold rush. “A Ready-to-Wear Revolution,” Brooks Brothers, accessed July 8, 2018. http://magazine.brooksbrothers.com/ready-to-wear/ ↩

‘This was a store,’ offers Vogue, ‘where they literally rolled out the red carpet for celebrities who arrived ready to sort through piles of […] bedazzled T-shirts featuring their [own] faces.”¹ Theorist Jean Baudrillard, noting hyperreality’s tendency towards creating a ‘real without origins or reality,’² might as well have been speaking about this environment when he referred to our ever-increasing fascination with the obscene. For capitalism and idiot scandal, it couldn’t be bettered. Kitson was the party-girl incarnation of Nicole Ritchie, gaunt and pre-motherhood; it was Blonde Lindsay Lohan, and Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton’s Assistant, and Britney Spears with acne. Kitson was, most of all, mid-Noughties MTV, beaming out nobodies ‘getting real’ – a relic itself, of a time when TV had only just seized on the idea of faking real-life.

The New York Times, for its part, describes the closure of Kitson as breathlessly as if it were eulogising the Chelsea Hotel. ‘More than a place to pick up Juicy Couture tracksuits and Ugg boots,’ reporter Sheila Makirar explains, ‘Kitson provided a backdrop for celebrity melodrama: Ms. Spears trying on hats at 2 a.m. Ms. Hilton shopping with girlfriends, oblivious to her dog urinating on a display of studded ballet flats. Kim Kardashian, before she went West, browsing the boutique, fresh-faced in an empire-waist maxidress.’³ Once, ‘Ms. Spears’ also went shopping in Kitson with menstrual blood staining her thigh,⁴ though this passes unmentioned; perhaps because, as far as mythologies go, it’s violent rather than melodramatic. Kitson, quite often, was both: a stage-setting for weird tableaux, peopled by seemingly-unhinged celebrity socialites. Surfing its mid-Noughties girl-wave, you had to get raw or be drowned.

It’s strange now, in hindsight, to think about all the world’s girls in their Juicy­-brand tracksuits amid the Clenbuterol boom, when ideal bodies were meant to be radically, hungrily skeletal, i.e. un-juicy: wearing garments labeled with zeroes but shaped nothing like them. Ones, instead, were the bodily trend: lines of straight little ones and elevens, as narrow as Adderall rails, were mobbing Kitson in frenzies at weekends. All over L.A.’s sidewalks, there were girls pulling rank in their pastel-pink two-pieces; girls with Swarovski Razrs; girls with loose, pale hair extensions and plastic French tips. The pre-GRC economy hadn’t yet tanked and so class felt superfluous as a pretense. ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘elsewhere.’ Then, ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘everywhere’ – or, to be accurate, everywhere Westernised on earth became a Los Angeles outpost, and the dogged pursuit of fame that exists in L.A. became something not local, but global, so that all of us found ourselves stepping wide-eyed off the bus in perpetua, dressing for anonymity in expensive leisurewear even with no paparazzi to hide from.

Aspirational brands beget tribes, but Kitson’s following differed from most in the way that it prized a point lower than pinnacle, seeking instead a new power that fed on imperfect girl archetypes. Kitson women were ones who flaunted their alcoholism, their air-headedness and their sexual dysfunction. Within their aesthetic, new-money’s excess sensibility fused with the kitsch preoccupations of mallrat teenhood. T-shirt slogans like ‘I LOVE SHOES AND BAGS AND BOYS’ appeared beside ones that screamed, unselfconsciously, ‘XANAX’ or ‘VICODIN.’⁵ There were sloppy pronouncements like ‘THIS IS MY LAST CLEAN T-SHIRT.’ There were slogans about celebrities, worn by other, lower-grade celebrities, tracing out mirror-recursions of fame and non-fame and half-fame in their casual paparazzi pictures.

The popular mantra of ‘never-too-rich-or-too-thin’ still persisted, but now we agreed that a girl could be messy as long as she made enough money, or owned enough shoes. Dysfunctional socialites, unsurprisingly, proved to be dysfunctional consumers; for the first time, the people we wanted to be like were the people we were like, only richer. Bona fide ‘hot messes,’ they drank the same hyper-coloured vodka shots from their girlfriends’ navels; suffered the same anxieties, shared the same addictions and shortcomings, and called men ‘boys’ as a means of nullifying the terror of possibly dying alone. They blacked out. They crashed innumerable cars. They rarely excelled at anything, but the very fact of their aimlessness made them interesting to us because they validated our lazy ennui.

Some of them, of course, eventually grew up and streamlined their public identities so that their flaws were less prominent. As in Susan Sontag’s definition of camp, Kim Kardashian has since become ‘art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much,”’⁶ and so the kittenish garment sloganeering of Kitson no longer suits her purposes, either as icon or object. Worn in public, statements defy others’ need to project their own values on popular figures, and Kardashian – ever the capitalist – knows this, though she has occasionally played the billboard for her now ex-husband, Kanye West. Britney Spears, in wearing ‘I’M A VIRGIN (BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT)’ and, later, ‘I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM,’ wrote her pre-breakdown memoirs in two lines. There is a famous image of Lindsay Lohan shopping in Kitson, wearing a T-shirt that says ‘SKINNY BITCH’ in lettering made from twigs; its tone – confrontational, smugly flawed, and delivered hot on the heels of an anorexia scandal – is pure Kitsonese, regardless of whether she actually bought it there.

For Kitson’s celebrity girl-gang, the ethos of Barbara Kruger’s ‘I SHOP THEREFORE I AM’ merged with the grimiest texts by Jenny Holzer (‘DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES,’ or ‘WHEN YOU BECOME RICH, DEATH SNIFFS THE AIR AND STARTS CIRCLING’) so that, in playing with medium-and-message, they conjured Umberto Eco: ‘where is the mass medium? Is it […] the polo shirt? And at this point who is sending the message? The manufacturer of the polo shirt? Its wearer? […] Because it’s a question of ideology.’⁷ There, on L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard, wearer and manufacturer had reached – albeit temporarily – an ideological understanding, promoting their own hypothetical slogan, I AM THE IMPERFECT IDEAL. In a Los Angeles Magazine profile of Kitson, back in 2005, the magazine made the decision to lead not with pap-shots or portraits, but with a falsified digital image; one just as redolent of the American dream as a Richard Prince Girlfriend, but even more cheap, and less deep. The picture was of Lindsay, smiling coquettishly, being arrested for crashing her car by the shop-front. ‘IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT,’ screamed the headline, ‘GET OUT OF THE KITSON.’

Philippa Snow is a Norwich-based freelance writer.

1. http://www.vogue.com/13390437/kitson-closing-paris-hilton-victoria-beckham-britney-spears/ ↩

2. J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, Michigan University Press, 1981. ↩

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/fashion/kitson-where-kim-kardashian-and-britney-spears-shopped-sees-the-end.html?_r=0 ↩

4. http://jezebel.com/346256/doth-not-a-mentally-ill-popstar-bleed ↩

5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/kitson-lawsuit-xanax-vicodin-adderall_n_3837291.html ↩

6. S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp,”’ The Paris Review, 1964. ↩

7. U. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, Harcourt Publishers Ltd., 1990. ↩

Vogue magazine was born with power. The founder, Arthur Turnure, conceived and nurtured it during America’s Gilded Age, and as much as he was a typography enthusiast and an ardent bibliophile, he was also anxious to preserve the hegemony of New York’s impenetrable upper class. Turnure was in the middle of a social war against new money, and he weaponised the publication, using it as a tool to assert his circle’s authority.

It was Turnure’s own personality and his position that set Vogue up for initial success; it would become a perfect microcosm of the elite world he was part of. ‘The magazine’s wielding force is the social idea,’¹ he wrote in 1892, in its first ever issue. To guarantee unprecedented insight from this group, and to guarantee the particular elements of codified language and topics of interest pertaining to this group, he put together a staff almost entirely transplanted to the office from his drawing room. The result was an ecosystem of astonishing simplicity: the people who made Vogue put themselves in it and sold it to each other.

From the beginning, Vogue was preoccupied with maintaining the habits and values of the status quo. It was also already an echo chamber. The attributes of the individuals involved were – and are – evidently significant to the assembled whole and show how, in part, Vogue fortified a strong foundation that eventually expanded to international influence.

The French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu advanced his famous theory on capital in 1986, identifying the main forms it takes: economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital.² Indisputably, those participant in the Vogue project had economic capital which supplemented the magazine both directly and indirectly. The founder had the funds to inaugurate a new publication, while his peers became shareholders, backing Vogue with phenomenal fortunes (early supporters included the Astor, Stuyvesant and Whitney families). Their financial resources had another, ancillary role: it meant the Vogue-adjacent had a level of spending power that would assure audience interest whenever their possessions or assets appeared in the pages. They were able to commission the most extravagant ball gowns, host the most lavish coming out cotillions, and curate the most sumptuous dowries, all of which would pique reader curiosity.

They had cultural capital in great measure too, both embodied in tastes, manners, posture; and institutionalised, through education, boards and clubs. The assembly of these created a ‘habitus’ according to Bourdieu, indicating that their deeply ingrained dispositions resulted in a communal outlook. This is palpably obvious if one examines the text; early Vogue is teeming with inside jokes, allusions, remarks, evocations, name-dropping and slights which all require knowledge of a specific set of social codes to decipher. It is through cultural capital, and the way it’s derived from other forms of capital, that ‘a non-economic form of domination and hierarchy’³ can be established.

By virtue of knowing each other the makers and readers of Vogue reinforced their own prominence and privilege. Bourdieu framed social capital as the property of the individual, rather than the collective, but like economic and cultural capital, the social capital of those involved with Vogue benefitted the magazine. Social capital can strengthen symbolic capital, which denotes the resources available on grounds of such as prestige, honour and reputation, and it ‘may also reinforce identity and recognition’⁴ – a precious thing indeed if one is building up a name.

If capital shows where power can manifest, then it seems evident that the economic, cultural and social capacities of numerous important New Yorkers created a kind of pool of power for Vogue to draw from and establish itself. As Bourdieu discusses in a later work, those who put a product on the market ‘consecrate’ it, ‘and the more consecrated he personally is, the more strongly he consecrates the work.’⁵ The producers of cultural products invest their own prestige into the merchandise, in this case, conferring their own status onto the magazine.

The resultant symbolic capital Vogue acquired can be seen in the authority that comes with the name, and the reputation that precedes the product. The dominance an organisation can take on, if it attains a certain level of rank, can pale that of the individual, in part because an organisation can easily outlast a human lifespan. An organisation can also sustain a number of connections far greater than the individual, which results in them being ‘socially embedded in a much stronger sense.’⁶

By dint of its founding circumstances and purpose, Vogue – and the glossy counterparts that followed – standardised wealth, influence and pedigree as necessary qualifications for participation in the fashion media. These distinctions allowed Vogue to continually leverage its employees: for instance, American Vogue retained a travel editor in the 1960s who had connections in Washington, allowing them to shoot in exotic locations others could not access.

As Vogue absorbed and profited from these forms of capital it could generate currents of power, moving it back and forth on a closed circuit. The magazine continues to boost its reputation by virtue of relationships with important individuals, but equally, important individuals are created when Vogue choses to elevate them. There are adequate modern examples of this vacuum: Cara Delevingne, who shot to supermodel fame, is the goddaughter of Nicholas Coleridge, then president of Condé Nast International. Vogue gave her exposé, and as she became increasingly famous, she shared this newly acquired star power with Vogue by continuing to appear in its editorials.

Vogue was a creation of the ruling classes: their power was its power. To this day, it incorporates individuals with significant capital to act as ambassadors with a view to maintaining its status. This can be seen with Edward Enninful’s appointment of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss on the masthead of British Vogue, even though they are models – not publishing professionals.

Aligning with noted personalities to continually consecrate their reputation does not just serve to convey Vogue’s ideological loyalties, it has a very real result in the long-term, for much of this non-economic capital is converted to hard currency if it enhances the publication.

‘The Tyranny of the Status Quo’

All forms of power require legitimacy. To validate its existence as a foremost fashion magazine Vogue would need to show fashion – so often deemed frivolous – as worthy of attention. Throughout the course of history, Vogue has worked determinedly to elevate the whole sector. This can be seen in its efforts to reframe the designer as an artist in the 1910s, then commonly regarded as a craftsman or skilled tradesman. Vogue was instrumental in creating the first trade body against the illegal counterfeiting of Parisian designs, acting as protector to noted couturiers thereby preserving their exclusivity and publicly shaming copycat retailers. During WWI Vogue hosted what is widely acknowledged to be the first ever runway show to promote American design. After the war it hosted a second benefit to promote French couturiers in America and strengthen ties with them.

Through countless such initiatives, Vogue has shown its ongoing mission to promote and protect the fashion sector, functioning as cheerleader and agent. It is imperative for Vogue to ‘build and maintain the cultural weight and authority to proclaim the value of, and invest its prestige in, the couturiers’ cause.’ In this way it takes on the role of ‘symbolic banker,’⁷ offering as a security all the accumulated symbolic capital.

These methods are still in play today. In 2021 alone Edward Enninful has been appointed on the advisory committee of the British Fashion Council’s Foundation and to the judging committee of their Changemakers Prize, while Condé Nast Britain figures amongst their patrons. Through funding, judging or advising on NGO boards they are surely able to direct, guide or press behind the scenes should they chose to. At the very least they are privy to a wealth of information that enhances their stance and consolidates their networks.

As it has grown, Vogue has sought to align itself with a wider corpus of huge, often globally significant institutions. In Britain, Vogue has worked in occasional collaboration with the government since WWII, when they repackaged propaganda from the Ministry of Information to better appeal to female citizens. During the coronavirus pandemic, Vogue allegedly cancelled an interview with musician M.I.A over the latter’s comments on social media regarding vaccination. A message circulated, apparently from Vogue representatives, saying: ‘Considering our August is an issue where we’re chronicling the struggles of the NHS to cope while a vaccine is tried to be made we don’t feel we can have her involved.’⁸ This missive essentially states that Vogue is concerned with supporting the government agenda.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll not list the innumerable instances American Vogue under Anna Wintour has affiliated itself with democratic leaders. Suffice it to say that Wintour personally raised over $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign (placing her on the list of top-tier patrons). She did not do this just as a private individual. She did this as the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, a position she then used to secure three Vogue covers for Michelle Obama. All this activity led to serious rumours the Obamas would reward her with an ambassadorship. It’s not incidental for a fashion publication to be associating with the ruling family of an economic and military superpower, nor is it likely to be an entirely moral decision. There is soft power gained in association with hard power.

Wintour is frequently at the head of such reputation-expanding initiatives. She formed Fashion Night Out in partnership with the city of New York. She has been the chairwoman of the Met Gala since 1999, a celebrity-filled event that makes headlines every year, hosted at a venerated cultural institution: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Ostensibly a fundraiser for the museum, ‘today, the guest list for the gala has come to mirror, very closely, the pages of Vogue’ wrote Vanessa Friedman for The New York Times, in an article titled, ‘It’s Called the Met Gala, but It’s Definitely Anna Wintour’s Party.’⁹

Such extracurricular activities cement the networks that Wintour needs for Vogue, although their purpose is outside the obvious remit of a glossy periodical. Here, once again, we encounter the flow of power back and forth, brokered by Vogue-representatives. Vogue enhances their power by staging such events, those participating – institutions, celebrities, designers, even cities – in turn strengthen their position by being amongst the chosen, and thus validated. As Friedman quotes in the article, ‘attendance at the gala “is something you now have to consider as part of a strategy for any designer in the world.”’¹⁰

It was the economist Milton Friedman who first used the phrase ‘the tyranny of the status quo’ to denote the strange inertia and bureaucracy that springs up around organisations once they are well-rooted. As it has become formalised, Vogue has to face a paradox: how can they continue to represent the cyclical trend-driven industry if they are so concerned with hierarchy that they cannot – or will not – allow entry for vital new ideas?

So determined have they been to administer the sector: oversee fashion hubs; supervise or act as host to parties, fundraisers, competitions and shows; act as gatekeepers and wardens to the elite; and make and maintain relationships with other leaders, in short, to harness every possible application of soft power, that they were not at all prepared for a reckoning with the digital age.

‘It was dense as a brick, as slick as a marlin, and almost perfectly empty.’¹¹

I have come this far in a discussion of a magazine without saying much about its actual contents. The glossy media, once able to appear inscrutable and mysterious, occupied the middleman function between designer and customer by virtue of access to catwalks and couture houses. But the openness of Web 2.0 sparked ongoing disintermediation and the great democratising of fashion through digital showcases, blogs, social media, the rise of fashion film and BTS footage. With the sharp decline of print and steep new competition, glossies have dramatically lost market share.

Nose-diving profits mean they are more than ever beholden to advertisers, which pundits consider a barrier to candid coverage. Yet I’m always surprised when people criticise Vogue and similar publications for a lack of fashion journalism. Omission, rather than criticism, is the mark of Vogue’s disapproval. As the all-in-capitals sensationalist headline of a tabloid is a brute shout, so the exclusion of a designer in Vogue is a social snub, silently embodying the politesse of its original class. These magazines were never intended to provide incisive and balanced commentary, and its staff is not made up of journalists. This is worth demarcating, since as I’ve noted, for the majority at Vogue their job is to protect and attract privilege, to network, organise, promote, publicise, but not to write critically. Where fashion journalism is being discussed I would argue it’s an error to include glossy media in the debate.

It’s common for Vogue and magazines of its ilk to receive criticism for being overfilled with adverts, for being ‘empty.’ Lucinda Chambers, who was let go from British Vogue in 2017 gave an incendiary interview in this publication, in which she said she had not read Vogue in years, and the clothes it featured were ‘irrelevant.’¹² Joan Juliet Buck, once editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, echoed these sentiments in her memoir, describing the magazine as ‘seduction without distraction’¹³ in the 1990s, implying the same lack of usefulness. As the scholars Susie Khamis and Alex Munt note, the imperative of the fashion media is: ‘to oil the wheels of commerce, to satisfy advertisers, and to lock consumers into a perennial cycle of desire and then dissatisfaction.’¹⁴

Arguably, Vogue set itself apart with high-quality imagery, though if discoursed through the prism of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theory on aura, even that has become degraded. I would argue that Vogue’s current output has less and less special quality, for every image is now disseminated on multiple platforms: in print, online and shared on social media, spread on fan accounts, remixed, cropped, edited and filtered. This reproducible reality would be deemed a reckless loss of aura. For Benjamin, the more an artwork was reproduced, the less authenticity it had, for authenticity cannot be duplicated. By endlessly reproducing and making available myriad versions, uniqueness is destroyed and objects lose their authority.

Tied into co-dependent relationships with labels that forbid thoughtful coverage, and unable to sustain the aura of their photographic material under the requirement to publish incessantly and cross-platform, the actual contents of fashion publications becomes of minimal interest. What remains of the name is not a print product but a nebulous structure composed of soft power. Curiously, Vogue themselves acknowledge this. Emmanuelle Alt, editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris said in 2019: ‘I used to work for a magazine, and today I work for a brand.’¹⁵

This paradigm goes some way to showing why few in fashion remark on the emptiness of Vogue. Whether it’s empty or not, its authority is behind the scenes, including bestowing coveted invitations that many high-profile personalities would not like to run the risk of forfeiting. There is the vanity attached to working for a publication like Vogue, but even more so there is the shrinking job market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics job opportunities from 2018-2028 for fashion writers are predicted to increase 0%, while fashion editors face a decrease of 3%.¹⁶ This is visible at Vogue, where several European editor-in-chiefs have departed and may not be replaced, their positions effectively disappearing. If Vogue is a possible paymaster – lucrative or otherwise – hopefuls are likely to keep quiet.

Magazines like Vogue may remain beyond further opprobrium shielded by the pervading idea of fashion as trifling. Unlike in politics or even in Hollywood, calling out fashion media seems thankless, especially true since the wider industry is facing a grave retribution with sustainability. The idea of a fashion informant seems comical, and worse, the idea of fashion magazines as toxic environments is normalised. As fashion has become a kind of celebrity ring of its own, with members recognisable by trademarks and catchphrases, it is easier still to trivialise their problems. To many onlookers, the power dynamics in fashion are a form of entertainment in of itself. As i-D questions in the title of a judicious piece: ‘Is gossip interfering with the fashion industry?’¹⁷

Regardless of how strong a brand might be, it’s wise to have a quality core product or else the rest will come crashing down sooner or later, like the house of cards it is. Celebrities are everywhere, and designers can market their clothes without print ads, but discerning writing and top-flight photography is a true rarity. Print has a luxury appeal that is not dying out as fast as doomsday reports would have us think, and a higher cover price can pay for production costs, as can be ascertained in the business model of indie magazines from The Gentlewoman to Tank. If the glossy media put its efforts into creating high-end collectable magazines as cultural artefacts and keepsakes, a kind of hybrid between high-spec art-books like those printed by Taschen or the impossibly popular Assouline and indie journals of intellectual appeal, readers would surely be happy to part with more money. Pouring budgets into trite Youtube videos, celebrity make-up tutorials or using Instagram to sell hoodies with ‘Vogue’ emblazoned across them is a race to the bottom that cannot prosper.

The Fashion Archive, a Central Saint Martin’s student and Youtuber with a huge personal following of 65k+, proposes in his video ‘The Death of Fashion Magazines (RANT)’¹⁸ that glossies have ‘undermined the intelligence of their consumers’ and goes on to comment that his channel is ‘testament to the fact that young people are interested in fashion’ in a serious way. Paradoxically, to hold on to the reigns of its power the fashion media needs to loosen its grip, for while it can continue to hold the industry hostage for a time, eventually it will be swept away with the final generation of advertisers and designers willing to collude. It is creativity, and not control, that gives value.

Nina-Sophia Miralles is the editor of Londnr, and the author of Glossy: The Inside Story of Vogue.

1. Turnure, A., ‘STATEMENT’, Vogue, vol. 1, issue 1, 17 December 1892, p. 16 ↩

2. See Navarro, Z., 2006. In Search of a Cultural Interpretation of Power: The Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 37 (No.6) p. 19, for the title quote ↩

3. Gaventa, J., 2003. Power after Lukes: a review of the literature, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, p. 6 ↩

4. Lin, N., 1999. Building a Network Theory of Social Capital, Connections, Vol. 22 (No.1), p. 29 ↩

5. Bourdieu, P., 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Columbia University Press, p. 83 ↩

6. Lin, loc. cit. ↩

7. Bourdieu, P., op. cit., p. 77 ↩

8. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/22/mia-claims-british-vogue-pulled-article-about-her-over-anti-vax-comments ↩

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/style/its-called-the-met-gala-but-its-definitely-anna-wintours-party.html ↩

10. Ibid. ↩

11. Buck, J. J., 2017, The Price of Illusion, Atria Books, p. 209 ↩

12. http://vestoj.com/will-i-get-a-ticket/ ↩

13. Buck, loc. cit. ↩

14. Khamis, S., Munt, A., The Three Cs of Fashion Media Today: Convergence, Creativity & Control, SCAN Journal of media arts culture ↩

15. https://www.voguebusiness.com/talent/articles/emmanuelle-alt-editor-in-chief-vogue-paris-interview/ ↩

16. https://study.com/articles/Careers_in_Fashion_Journalism_Job_Options_and_Requirements.html ↩

17. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/qv893w/is-gossip-interfering-with-the-fashion-industry ↩

18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOAaO9YH-ZE ↩

IN THE HISTORY OF Western dress, fashion has long been the predominant tool for creating ‘ideal’ bodily shapes by covering up, transcending and reshaping our ‘actual’ bodies.¹ In 2015, this practice is still very much alive – just think of the use of shapewear and push-up bras. Over the last century however, shape-shifting has moved from the cloth that covers the flesh to the flesh itself; we live in a ‘makeover culture’ where cosmetic surgery has become commonplace.²

Like fashion, the cosmetic surgery industry is fuelled by continuous change. What started out as mostly scalpel surgery has transformed into a wider practice that also includes the use of fillers to make more temporary adjustments to lips, cheeks, hips and bottoms. As cultural studies scholar Meredith Jones puts it, ‘It is the new affordable and impermanent nature of much contemporary cosmetic surgery that brings it into alignment, symbolically and practically, with fashion.’³

While this might be considered a technological success, discourses of cosmetic surgery are also tightly interwoven with ideas of failure. Both those who justify and those who critique the practice describe it in terms of failure, though their interpretations are poles apart. What sort of failure does cosmetic surgery instantiate? Who fails, and who or what fails them?

Cosmetic surgery is founded on the twin supposition that bodies, especially female bodies, must be beautiful, and that they regularly fail to be so. The medicalised beauty industry represents the female body as both falling short and deteriorating. Although in its ageist logic, every body will fail eventually, the first cosmetic surgeons focused on the exceptionally failed body. To justify their interventions, they relied heavily on categories of disease and deformity. To have drooping eyelids, uneven breasts or a receding chin was, in other words, deemed literally pathological. Such pathologies, surgeons argued, had deep psychological effects that could be ameliorated with physical repair.

But deformed, diseased bodies are by definition exceptional bodies, and a body no longer needs to be exceptional to demand intervention. The reigning idea now is that all bodies can – and perhaps even should – be enhanced. Only a few decades ago, cosmetic surgery was a rare and exclusive practice; it is now widespread. In the U.S. alone, there were fifteen million procedures in 2014 (roughly double from 2007), if one includes non-surgical practices such as laser peels and injections.

In a recent cover story for Time magazine, medical journalist Joel Stein argues that cosmetic procedures will soon become both ubiquitous and obligatory.⁴ He describes South Korea as heavily populated with surgically modified citizens, and sees Western countries following suit. Medical cosmetic technologies, he argues, will become merely another activity of maintenance, upkeep and self-responsibility within the competitive markets of labour, consumption and lifestyle. Cosmetic surgery will not only be a mode of fashioning a normatively ideal body, but also a performance of neoliberal citizenship.

Undergoing a cosmetic procedure may, however, involve capitulation. Writing in the second person (and constructing his reader as middle-class, Western and female), Stein argues that ‘you’ will give in eventually: ‘You’re going to have to do it. And not all that long from now. Not because you hate yourself, fear aging or are vain. You’re going to get a cosmetic procedure for the same reason you wear makeup: because every other woman is.’⁵

Stein invokes a decades-long debate in feminism. While some feminists have argued that cosmetic surgery is a more or less pragmatic negotiation of gender norms, others insist that the ‘need’ for cosmetic surgery represents psychic failures. In this view, cosmetic surgery patients hate their bodies, or experience a form of ‘false consciousness.’

The stereotype of the self-loathing cosmetic surgery patient can also be found in the annals of psychiatry. Lacking much in the way of critique of gender norms, the mid-twentieth century psychiatric discourse addressed women who underwent cosmetic surgery as neurotics, disordered personalities or otherwise pathological subjects. Contemporary discussions of Body Dysmorphic Disorder similarly scrutinise the female psyche as vulnerable to self-hatred and, in addition, claim that they are susceptible to addiction. Such discussions feed into the belief that women – vulnerable, self-loathing and easily addicted – are responsible for the recent upsurge of cosmetic surgeries, instead of the other way around. There are good reasons to be wary of identifying the ‘surgery junkie’ as a culprit of the cosmetic surgery boom. After all, this logic lays the burden of cosmetic surgery’s problems on the shoulders of individual, mostly female patients, and ignores the institutional forces that account for its vast expansion.⁶

Whether cosmetic surgery corrects a failed body or suggests a failed psyche is an irrelevant question; in my view, these assumptions are both flawed. Instead, the explosion of cosmetic surgery is a symptom of catastrophic structural failures. In the U.S. and globally, its mass expansion is part of a broader turn toward enhancement medicine, where the ‘maximisation of lifestyle, potential, health, and quality of life has become almost obligatory,’ as sociologist Nick Rose puts it.⁷

This maximisation, however, takes place in a context of deepening social and economic inequality, one in which there is unequal access to health care, medical technologies and life-saving drugs, as well as food and environmental security. On a global scale, these disparities are extreme, but even within the U.S. context, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy and other measures of health vary greatly by socioeconomic status, race and geographic location.⁸

Whether ‘you’ get cosmetic surgery in the future is not necessarily a measure of whether and how your body or psyche have failed you. It may depend more on your status in neoliberal capitalism. Cosmetic surgery and other forms of elective medicine are fostered by the profit-driven stratification of medicine. This system confers biomedical citizenship on those who can oblige demands for self-care, wellness and enhancement, while denying it to those who cannot. You are not failing, but our systems may be failing you.

This article was first published in Vestoj On Failure.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is a professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.

Cara Phillips is a Brooklyn-based photographer, curator, writer and lecturer.

1. A Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993 [orig. 1975] ↩

2. M Jones, ‘New Clothes, New Faces, New Bodies: Cosmetic Surgery and Fashion,’ in S Bruzzi and P Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routledge, New York, 2013, p.294 ↩

3. Ibid., p.289 ↩

4. J Stein, ‘Nip. Tuck. Or Else,’ Time, June 18 2015 ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. D Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge of Commercial Medicine, Rutgers Univerity Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2001 ↩

7. N Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006, p.25 ↩

8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ‘CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report – United States, 2013,’ Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 62, No. 3, 2013, pp.1-187 ↩