I discovered I was pregnant in March last year. There were a lot of things I expected now that I was expecting: a baby shower, a plastic pile of baby toys, friends and family lining up to touch my stomach. I expected the loss of free time, the end of the years in which I could just pack a weekend bag and leave. I expected motherhood. I expected the most profound experience of my life.

I tried to fashion the idea of a mother in my mind. Do prospective mothers look like oversized Cecilie Bahnsen dresses, their gauze caressing taut stomachs? Do they look like swollen but manicured feet bursting out of Birkenstocks? And what was the chance that I would look like the pregnant supermodels I looked up on Google?

They certainly don’t look like the tight-waisted PVC-dress I wore to an art opening soon after I discovered the news. I was convinced that it was my last chance to dress in such juvenile attire, corseted but carefree, not having to worry about how its fabric would feel to anyone but myself. At home, I swept my fingers along the garments in my overfilled closets, playing out the same thought experiment with every piece I touched: Is this what a mother looks like?

I did not yet have many close friends who had had children, so I built an image of motherhood through a series of purchases. I shopped for organic prenatal vitamins, baby books, and sensible undergarments. After that, I’d start browsing maternity wear, cribs, strollers. Despite the fact that my stomach was still flat — or perhaps because of it — I used material to paint a vision of motherhood.

That image truly crystallised with my first ultrasound. On the screen, I watched a white blot float around space. I squeezed my eyes to see whether I could discern a face, one that resembled the Black-Asian babies whose photos I had studied. What did people do before this, I wondered. Just wait nine months to find out whether they were pregnant or bloated? I wanted to frame the picture the doctor gave me to remember a milestone not of the fetus but of my own: it was the first time I heard a second heartbeat emerge from my own body, the first time I saw what my future would hold. Within a span of minutes, I became a mother.

But at the next ultrasound, the doctor fell silent as she kept the wand in my vagina, twisting the buttons on the machine as if she was trying to focus a blurry lens. After a while, she told me she could no longer detect a heartbeat and recommended a dilation and curettage (D&C), a procedure that would scrape my uterus clean so that no ‘products’ would cling on and stay behind. Why wouldn’t I want it to cling on? I wanted to ask. But time folded into itself, and before I knew it, I woke up in a clinic with a two-star Yelp-rating, wailing in my hospital gown. Just like that, I was no longer a mother.

As my mind stumbled out of general anesthesia, it was still filled with images of doula-influencers and a pregnant Doutzen Kroes. Despite all my research, the possibility of miscarriage had never entered my imagination. I couldn’t conceive of the fact that a baby could be lost, that the trail to motherhood, with each of its stages marked with rituals and gifts, could suddenly hit a dead end. I knew what a mother looked like by then, but what about one who has just lost a baby? Laying in bed after the operation, my underwear lined with the thickest pads my partner could find at the pharmacy, I browsed pages and pages of summer sales. Does she look like the figure-hugging dress of blood-red lace I had added to my cart? Or the stretchy skirt that could help me imagine needing room to grow, once again? Does a woman who has lost a baby still go out, does she still need cocktail dresses?          

In the weeks after, I tried to explain my grief to friends and acquaintances. I told them that I missed the baby, that I replayed every minute of my pregnancy to understand whether there was something I could’ve done to prevent its loss, that my body felt too weak to withstand the weight of death. In turn, they told me that miscarriage is common, that I’d ‘move on’ and try again. I told a friend I felt like a wailing mother elephant who has just found the lifeless body of her baby, its tusks stripped by poachers. She responded by saying that at least I have a partner who wanted kids.

All the while, friends got pregnant, friends organised baby showers, friends exchanged hospital gossip with other pregnant friends, while me and my scraped-out uterus sat on the side. When a stranger bumped into me on the subway, I pictured how they would’ve given me their seat had I been visibly pregnant. I pictured pulling my pants down and showing him the blood and mucus dripping through my bruised cervix. And then I pictured my baby, its remains chucked, after the operation, into a biohazard bin.

Back home, I rushed to the computer to search for ‘miscarriage items,’ as if there were objects I could buy to fill the void left in my body. There were memorial bracelets on Etsy, there were pregnancy loss awareness pins, there were cards that aid, ‘There is no good card for this.’ I looked for books, movies, anything that made it clear that someone believed pregnancy loss was worth making art about. But there was surprisingly little I could find, and there was certainly nothing that would suit my purpose, which was to communicate to the world that I had once been a mother, and perhaps still am. I had long relied on consumerism for answers and comfort, but it seemed that even in a society in which every niche has been commercialised, miscarriage carries little capital.

A pregnancy protrudes. It heightens and widens and deepens to take up space. Miscarriage empties. The fetus leaves the body, the hormones flush out, whatever visions for an expanded family suddenly seem no longer perceptible. I wondered whether the problem of miscarriage was a lack of imagination. It couldn’t be dressed up, packaged, and sold. It couldn’t be glamorised with a nude Annie Leibovitz photo shoot in Vanity Fair. Whatever damage had been done occurs under the skin, out of sight. There was no scar that would make it clear how much I’d been hurt, no item I could wear to communicate that I was a person in grief. Even the English language does not provide a space for my experience: the word miscarriage suggests a wrong turn, a missed exit. I wasn’t even far enough in my pregnancy for my loss to be categorised as a stillbirth, a word that at least suggests that a life had been created.

After a while, I returned to the doctor for a follow up. She inspected the ultrasound, and let out a satisfactory yelp announcing that nothing was left behind. I kept staring at the screen of the machine, which now displayed only emptiness, a black hole.

After my miscarriage, expectation turned into hope, its less arrogant cousin. Each month, I counted off the days until ovulation. Each month, I thought about which sexual acts were useful and which just frivolous. Each month, I dissected the grainy signals of my own body. Was I cold, or was I pregnant? Was I constipated, or was I pregnant? Was I losing my mind, or was I pregnant? I bought tight clothes, convinced I would have a long time to wear them still, and then I bought loose ones again, once my optimism returned. I counted off the days until my period with a jittery dread, waiting for the first possible time to do a pregnancy test. And when the test was negative, I would do another one and then another, convinced that at some point, the single stripe would, like cell-division, split into two.

By December, I was pregnant again. I felt good, I felt bad. I was mostly incredulous that my body, after having survived months without rest, nurture, and serotonin, could still grow something. I rushed to the doctor to confirm the news since I had habituated my mind to no longer trust at-home pregnancy tests. And yes, I was expecting, again. I tried to keep a lid on my hope, resisting the urge to consult my pregnancy manuals. Yet I found myself stretching my clothes again every time I got dressed, just to visualise how many more months I would be able to fit in them. My conclusion was that I owned more stretchy clothes than I expected.

Two weeks later, blood splashed into my underwear. Another ultrasound, this time showing an ectopic pregnancy. The embryo had implanted itself in my right Fallopian tube. It wasn’t willing to empty, to let go of the flesh it had buried into. The doctor gave me a dose of methotrexate, a chemotherapy agent she said would target ‘rapidly dividing cells.’ It was injected into my ass cheek as if I was nothing more than a big baby myself, and when the needle hit my skin, I cried like one too. I didn’t understand why a difference of a few centimeters distinguished a baby from cancer, love from harm.

I’ve tried to undo my expectations. I know now that pregnancy is not just a healthy and joyous experience. I know now that pregnancy can lead to death instead of life. I know now that I can be devastated enough to punch a guy on the street for harassing me in front of my obstetrician’s office, as I shouted: ‘I’m having a miscarriage!’ And every time I passed that corner again, he’d come after me and yell across the whole block he wished I’d have another one. It’s only now that I realise that the incident manifested the nightmare version of what I wanted: for everyone around me to hear about the losses I had endured. Now that the pandemic has kept both of us off the streets, I tell that story to people as a joke-filled anecdote. It elicits their laughter rather than their bewilderment, camouflaging how my sadness literally spilled out of my body’s bounds.

Where did my initial, naive expectations come from anyway? Was it from the ads of glowing women in maternity wear that kept popping up in my browser, even by the time I had entered more searches for ‘miscarriage’ than ‘pregnancy’? Was it from the books that portrayed gestation as an advent-calendar, with each chapter revealing the next stage of fetal development along various fruit-sizes? Or was it from the doctor, who, after the heartbeat was first detected, told me to start thinking of baby names?

Perhaps it was to be expected that my expectations would be such. I was born in China during the one-child-policy. Having children was not a matter of personal choice, as the country conducted mass campaigns of forced sterilisation and abortion to enforce a low birth-rate (which continue for the Uighur population today). If miscarriage did have the opportunity to occur, it might have just hastened a fate that the government would have coerced anyway. My mother had had two abortions, one before my arrival and one after. She pictured she’d be able to have more children after we left China for the Netherlands, though when we eventually did, she and my father separated. Miscarriage was never mentioned as a possibility when I was growing up. Pregnancy loss wasn’t caused by individual conditions but societal ones, the obstacle between my mother and more children situated outside of her body.

I now live in the United States, a country that has one of the most advanced medical industries but also one of the highest infant mortality rates among wealthy industrialised nations.¹ It’s a country where a child can only be brought into being through a series of consumerist choices, where ‘having’ a baby depends on the health insurance one is able to afford and the amount of reproductive technologies one has access to. And even in states where women have ‘ownership’ over their bodies to a certain extent — through access to abortion and birth control — it’s clear that not every body possesses the same value. Black newborns die at twice as high a rate than their white counterparts², while black women die at three to five times the rate of white women from pregnancy-related causes³ In the country I now live in, having a child is a privilege, even though it shouldn’t be.

In the years since I left China, my own privilege has grown. I now visit clinics where white doctors talk to me about my ‘pregnancy preparedness’ and my ‘fertility journey,’ hiding the possibility of death under their glistening surfaces and sanitised language. I’m part of a pregnancy loss support group with middle-class white women. I feel at home among the one ectopic pregnancy, two stillbirths, and five miscarriages we share among us. But as we discuss IVF-cycles, ovulation monitoring, and the best fertility doctors, even amidst a pandemic and a social uprising against racial violence, I wondered what expectations — of care, of access, of support — we still hold onto, despite all the traumas we’ve experienced.

It’s been a year since my first miscarriage, and the summer sales have returned. I buy a loose kaftan, I buy a pin-tucked denim dress, I buy cotton shorts with an elastic waistband, I buy skin-tight hotpants. There’s no coherence in the silhouette or materiality of this selection of garments, no vision of what I want to be. The pandemic rages on, and in the convergence of societal crises it has caused, I find myself escaping into consumerism again, despite the ways it has failed me. My vision of how my life will unfold is no longer progressive or linear, I don’t assume it will just heighten and widen and deepen.

I think about how the condition of the world now reflects the inner turmoil I’ve experienced in recent times. Almost everyone around me lives in uncertainty and waiting, not knowing whether their bodies will be able to withstand the traumas lurking around the corner. But I also think about my mother again. When my parents and I moved from the North of China to the wealthy South in the early 1990s, our sort was seen as uncivilised, speaking with clipped tongues and smelling of garlic. My mother and I would stroll through the first shopping malls that had been erected in the city of Guangzhou, handing over cash for whatever the salesperson said was French. We fashioned our new identities in the mass-market stores we were slowly getting to know, and did the same when we moved to the Netherlands. We believed we could force the arrival of our Dutch identities by dressing like the strange foreigners we were suddenly surrounded by. Perhaps my habit of using material to fashion a new future started long before motherhood entered my mind. And perhaps it’s something that has helped me survive previous upheavals, too.

As I’m writing, I keep going back and forth between my text editor and the browser windows of summer sales I have opened. I scroll through rows and rows of garments, hopeful that one of them will evoke a better future. I am not pregnant, but inside me, the image of motherhood I’ve conceived continues to grow.

Mary Wang is a Chinese-Dutch writer, now living in New York. She is a senior editor at Guernica.

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

1. https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2018-annual-report/findings-international-comparison. ↩

2. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db316.html. ↩

3. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0905-racial-ethnic-disparities-pregnancy-deaths.html. ↩

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. ↩

TEXAS HATTERS IN LOCKHART, Texas, is located just off Highway 183 to Austin, and staffed by a fourth-generation of hat makers; starting with Marvin Sr., the Gammages have made hats for all from Willie Nelson to Hank Williams, Ronald Reagan and Prince Charles. Joella Gammage, her son Joel and husband David today ensure that Texas Hatters is full to the brim with cowboy hats in every colour and style, and that each customer is welcomed with banter, smiles and expertise in abundance.

***

Joel Aaron Gammage: My friend has a hat that is in between a top hat and a bowler. He wears that hat so much, people call him Country Slash. He’ll even wear it to the swimming pool! He’s an I.T. guy during the day, and a base player at night. I think the right hat has the tendency to bring out the inner character of a person. Your attitude changes. Cock your hat to the right a little, and all of a sudden you’re ready for a fist fight or a poker game. You know, guys don’t have as many facets of articles of clothing as women. You have your cowboy boots, belt buckle, and hat – whatever style.

There’s a historical side to the cowboy, the vaquero, which dates back to Mexican history. In its origin, hats were sombreros. We adapted them to a Western-European style. If we go back to traditional cowboys, your work was signalled by your hat. Depending on what your place was on the ranch, your brim was shorter or longer. It’s very similar to English culture. A tall hat was a symbol of stature.

In my grandfather’s day, hats were black or brown and that was it. There was only one way to wear a hat. My grandfather changed that. Today, hats are becoming more statement pieces. The functionality changed quite a lot. In the actual ranching community, it’s to protect yourself from the sun. But we wear it a lot still because it’s so ingrained. When you walk into a grocery store in a hat, you’ll grab people’s attention. You kind of just want to call that person ‘Sir,’ and treat them differently.

Joella Gammage Torres: I’m third generation. My dad and my grandfather worked together. My father proposed to my mother with a hat and a poem. It was a ladies high roller, with a telescoped crown, and the poem was something to the effect of: ‘Texas crown for the queen of my heart.’ How could she turn him down, right?

We’re in Lockhart, Texas. Prior to that we were in Buda, and before that we were in Austin. When we moved here, people who thought we went out of business thirty years ago in Austin found us because Highway 183 was their favourite road to take to Houston. There is a cattle auction down the road. When cattle prices are good… ‘Sold my cattle, I’ll buy a hat!’ But we get everyone: from what people call hipsters, to politicians and businessmen, fashionable ladies, everything.

The anatomy of a hat? First of all, the important lesson, would have to be that the crown is the part that sits on your head, and the brim is the part that sticks out. A lot of people get that reversed, which I don’t understand. Hats are made from straw or felt, or both. Leather hats exist, but we never made them. For the creases in the hat, there are some styles that can be done with a preformed block. We have quite a few of those, that are seventy-five to one-hundred-and-fifty years old. But primarily we soften the material and then we use our hands to do the creasing.

To make a hat, we have about a two-week waiting period, but if we had to walk one through, it takes a full day. Everything is by hand. We don’t start with something round on the top and flat on the brim and then put a crease in it. We make the hat from scratch, we do all the finishing and sewing here, we don’t use glue, all the ribbon trim is by hand. My dad said, quality is like buying oats. If you want good clean oats, you need to pay a fair price. If you want oats already run through the horse, that’s a little cheaper. We make every hat as though we make it for the most important person in our lives.

Our most popular hats hail all the way back to my dad’s time in the business. He made hats for Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ronnie Van Zant and Donnie Van Sant. There’s fans all around the world that want their hats just like them. The Ronnie Van Zant is similar to what I have on right now, only it’s a solid felt, with a rattlesnake belt on it. There’s a Stevie Ray Vaughan on that stand right there, with the ‘Do Not Touch’ sign. Both styles actually have an oval telescope crown. It’s creased inward and then comes back up, which is why we call it a telescope. And then the Stevie has a flat, bolero-type brim, and the Ronnie has the opposite: a pencil-rolled edge on the brim and then kinda rolled up cowboy-style.

The Gus hat is also very popular, it’s another one my dad created. If you’re familiar with Lonesome Dove, my dad created the styles for that mini-series. The Gus has a centre crease that runs from the front to the back, so it’s lower in the front, and two creases on either side of that so it looks like three fingers ran down the centre of the crown. It has curls on the side of the brim, as though you grabbed it with both hands. We call that a cowboy curl. The most iconic hat that came out before the Gus was probably the one James Dean wears in Giant.

Cowboy hat styles do evolve. Wider brims were really popular in the Forties, then in the Fifties they went a little bit shorter. I think part of it was people got cars. In the Seventies, all the crowns were really tall, like six inches, and really short brims. Today it is completely the opposite. Right now short crowns are really popular with a small dent, as if it fell off, and a really wide brim, barely curled on the side. Most of the colours are basic: black, silver buckle, straw coloured. But a lot of the guys and gals are going for brighter coloured brims now. They say, ‘I want you to notice that I have a style of my own.’ So they’ll put red, purple, or turquoise ribbons on the edges. As well as rhinestones now and then.

Each style also evolves according to who’s creasing it. There’s a design behind you called the horse shoe, it looks like a horse stepped on it. My grandfather would say that looks more like a mule shoe, because that’s how he did it. Everybody has their own hand. It’s like trying to copy some of the master painters, you can’t get the stroke exactly the same. [My husband] David has his style, I have mine. Often, when someone orders a hat from David or [my son] Joel, they have to be the ones that finish it up for them. And vice versa, the customer will recognise – that’s not how Joella did my last hat.

Joel is actually the most experimental. He went through this long phase of… particularly ladies that were interested in getting hats from him. And he’ll tell you, it drove me crazy! I like to think symmetrical, and everything he did was asymmetrical, kind of the Picasso of hat making. Technically they were still cowboy hats, but they were definitely a blend of Western fashion and high fashion.

Joel: In Austin you can pull anything off. You can walk down the street with butterfly wings, pink sunglasses and a miniskirt, and it would be fine. But if you would go to West Texas, and more traditional communities, you might get looked at a little funny. There’s still some traditional farmers and ranchers out there, but they are getting rarer, because you get a cultural shift where people want the modern standard that they see on TV, they want to live past the means they grew up with. For my family’s business, there was a need for somebody – after my grandfather died – to adapt to a variety of different cultures that come from the Austin community. You don’t notice it right now, but my accent will definitely change when I speak to other people. Before I got married, I went out dancing all the time, and I would wear a lot of hats, and sell a lot of hats. Now I do car shows and festivals and events and stuff. I was in the music scene already, so I wanted to bring that scene to Lockhart.

My personal favourite hat is a modified high-roller. If you’re familiar with the Ronnie Van Zant 38, it’s a telescoped crown, with a cylindrical shape and a curled brim. That’s one of the signature hats that I used to wear a lot. I called it my lucky hat. Whenever I wore it, people talked to me.

David A. Torres: I’ve seen wills being written up about hats. People come in here with their dad’s hat, which [my wife] Joella’s grandfather made, and they want it fitted to their size. Sometimes we’ll write down – made for so-and-so, passed on to so-and-so. In the twenty-nine years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen a hat pass on to the third generation once. Once I saved a family from not talking to each other, because two grandsons were fighting and both thought they had right to the hat. They didn’t want the money or the land, because the hat was a status symbol of an elder. They asked me to make another one just like it. I made an exact copy. I put them side by side, I knew which one was the original one, but then they got shuffled and I couldn’t tell which one was the real one. They both came and both offered money to me to let them know what the real hat was, but I honestly couldn’t tell them. They both have his hat over the mantelpiece.

Joella: There used to be drugstore cowboys, or urban cowboys. Someone who doesn’t actually work with cows, or on a farmer ranch, but dresses the part to attract women or men. Real cowboys looked down on them, but not so much now. We have a new generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings that do the rodeos. They raise their animals as children, and take them to shows. They’re real cowboys, but I’m always surprised when they come in here because they wear jeans other than Levi’s or Wranglers. They’re not wearing the traditional Western-style shirts. They’re wearing belts with fur and rhinestones, and headbands with rhinestones. But they’re not pretend, they’re the real thing, but their new style really surprises me. And they’re straight.

As a woman – not as a hatter – when I see a man in a cowboy hat, provided that he looks like a cowboy, not in shorts and flip-flops, I think: ‘That is a real man.’ I don’t know if it’s cultural, bred into us, but my mind goes to – he probably rides a horse, and deals with cattle, all those little-girl fantasies.

Joel: When I think about what a cowboy is, defining it in the traditional sense is almost impossible. There’s fewer and fewer ranches and farms. I’m one of the few people in my generation that actually decided to stay involved in my family’s business. And if you do manage to find a traditional cowboy, in certain communities, they might close their doors to you just because they’re afraid someone might want to come develop on their land. It’s gotten that serious; development has changed so much, there’s cotton fields and oil fields all over Lockhart, polluting all these areas. Places that have been cotton fields for a hundred years are now bought and sold for mass-housing production, so they’ll just become sub-divisions. And for whatever reasons, maybe that family needed the money, but it’s all changing everywhere.

To me, the definition of a cowboy is carrying on the heritage of, ‘When you say something you mean it. When something’s broke you fix it. When something ain’t broke you don’t mess with it. You preserve it.’ What a cowboy is to me, it’s maintaining integrity, and being able to stand behind what you say.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder. 

What you’re about to read is a compendium of prose poems and short stories in the costume of dictionary entries, that employs fashion as device and motif. These particular excerpts centre around the figure of the designer and/or the artist, and the cult status that surrounds them.

Button: Originally merely decorative, buttons have, over time, become functional, mere means of opening and closing garments, akin to zips and other fasteners. As a result of which, buttons function like the edges of the body – the lips, the enclosure of the teeth, the rim of the anus, an opening, a mouth. The decline of the button as a sign of high ornament has made these sartorial trinkets appear from afar, as moth-eaten or charred holes. The surrealist fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, however, often made her buttons out of peanuts, padlocks, and typewriter keys. Her black hat in the form of an inverted high-heeled shoe worn with a cocktail suit with pocket edges appliquéd in the shape of lips, along with her buttons, which in her own words were ‘anything but buttons’ brought to the surface of the fabric a hidden carnival humour and as a result, often repressed the body and brought clothing to the fore as a kind of symbolic language. Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, perhaps Schiaparelli saw the body as the ‘unconscious’ of clothing.

Cuffs and Collars: A fold or band serving as a trimming or finish for the bottom of a sleeve. Initially, like the collars of a shirt – ornamental collars in the mediaeval period in Europe were worn as a form of jewellery and prior to that in the 12th century served as neck-protecting armour – cuffs were detachable. Now, attached, they appear – much like collars – as beautiful remains. There is something beautifully masculine about large collars and cuffs. Egon Schiele used to vigorously wash his collars and cuffs every evening, and, when there was not enough water, used to make his cuffs and collars, himself, out of chart paper.

Emphasis: Christian Dior, in his Little Dictionary of Fashion maintains that ‘if you have a particularly outstanding feature it is always a good thing to emphasise it. In fact the whole of fashion rests largely on emphasis.’ Perhaps the whole purpose of fashion is to emphasise the body. The purpose of collars, Dior contends, is to provide a frame(work) for the face, and if you have beautiful hands – as I do – the cuffs of my sleeves often emphasise my hands, provided they are of the right length. Necklaces emphasise necks that are already beautiful and anklets give emphasis to beautiful feet. The slightly roundish spectacles I wear emphasise my aquiline face. This took me years to understand, for all the shops selling eyewear in the city I live in sold primarily rectangular-shaped glasses that naturally hid my face, or rather made my face appear too angular and hard, nearing a cubist painting.

Frock: Originally, a frock was a loose, long garment with wide, full sleeves. It often had a belt and was worn primarily by monks and priests. Hence, the origin of the term defrock or unfrock, meaning ‘to eject from the priesthood.’ Today, a frock may designate a woman’s or girl’s, or child’s dress or light overdress. In her diary, in the spring of 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote ‘people have any number of states of consciousness and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness’, which functions somewhat like an open secret and refers to those dresses (frocks) one wears to conceal and reveal oneself simultaneously at parties, parties one often visits begrudgingly.

Jama: During the Mogul reign in India, the coat or Jama most in vogue was a long tunic with an overlapping collar fastened by means of a binding on both sides, and gathered at the waist by a cloth belt or sash tied artistically into a knot, conferring to the garment the appearance of a full skirt with heavy falling lines. The Urdu poet, Mir Taqi Mir, was exceedingly fond of wearing pointed shoes and coats whose circumference measured fifty full yards, but with the decline of the Mogul empire, this sartorial extravagance began to be perceived as burlesque. In 1780, when Mir, forced by circumstances to leave Delhi, arrived in Lucknow in the already outmoded attire as described above, he made himself the laughingstock of the town. Fashion had moved towards the general trend of shortening dresses, signs of a declining empire.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Prussian fox who left the city situated at the banks of the Elbe for Paris, and became immediately a star. Although he loved modern art, he did not hang paintings on the wall; instead he surrounded himself with books and paper. Karl loved paper and reading was his truest joy. His protestant work ethic helped him shine in the fashion industry. He was known to have said that he is a fashion nymphomaniac who never gets an orgasm. In some ways, a futurist, he criticised his friend, colleague and rival, Yves St. Laurent for being so attached to the past and the use of memory in his collections – Yves St. Laurent was obsessed with Proust. Very few people remember what Lagerfeld looked like as a young man; it is as if he arrived in his prime in old age with his snow-white ponytail, and dark glasses that hid his sympathetic eyes. A teetotaller himself, he did, however, prefer the company of people who liked to get high and slowly destroy themselves. During his later years, he stuck to a strict diet and exercise regimen – drinking diet coke from morning to night, he only drank drinks that were served cold – allowing him to remain as light as a feather, much like the models he dressed-up – he often referred to himself as a coat-hanger. Although many a fancy-clad population surfaced for his funeral, Lagerfeld was known on many occasions to say that when it is done, it’s done, all over. This Prussian fox would have preferred the death of a wild animal, left to die in the heart of a forest.

Mannequin:  Contrary to what is understood under this term, a mannequin is not a mere (wooden) doll upon which garments are hung, as if on a hanger. Mannequins are those bodies that by virtue of their splendour and animation breathe life into cloth. It was Charles Frederick Worth, the grand couturier, who replaced the wooden doll with a human model. Often, however, these human models conduct themselves as if they were mere wooden or plastic dolls, without life or intelligence.

Metamorphosis: Fashion’s seduction must rely on its powers to immediately transform, something we are already familiar with as children. The wolf – who is in fact a paedophile – disguises himself as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother by virtue of his dress, and the story of Cinderella does not merely express the dreamscape of the persecuted. The fairy, by a mere stroke of a magic wand, changes Cinderella’s clothes immediately; what society considered to be a pestilence, a servant girl lying in the ashes is now all of a sudden by virtue of a flux in attire, adored. There is nothing as transformative as putting on, or for that matter removing, clothes. Elsa Schiaparelli knew she was unconventionally attractive and always felt the transformative magic of a dress, a dress that could change her from ugly duckling to swan. ‘Nobody knew how I would appear. Sometimes I lead fashion. At other times, wearing my ordinary clothes, I appeared like my own ugly sister.’

Scarf: A piece of fabric worn around the neck or head for warmth, sun protection, cleanliness, fashion, or religious reasons or used to show the support for a sports club or team. A scarf can be made in a variety of different materials such as wool, linen, silk, or cotton. On September 14, 1927, the dancer Isadora Duncan chokes to death in Nice, France, when the enormous silk scarf she is wearing gets tangled in the rear hubcaps of her open car. To this, adds the writer Gertrude Stein, ‘Affectations can be dangerous.’

Skirt: A piece of clothing that is largely worn by women and girls and that hangs down from the waist. Often its perimeter is so large that it results in rendering a clear demarcation between the person wearing the skirt and the world around her. In France, after the demise of Louis XIV, women began to ‘loosen’ up by wearing clothes with flowing lines. One such curious feature of that era was the return of hoops. Instead of putting emphasis on height, they had their skirts distended sideways, sometimes so much as fifteen feet, making it difficult for two women to enter a doorway side by side or share a seat on the same couch. The width of this skirt affected even architecture, such as the curved balusters of 18th century staircases in France. Although I have never worn anything that resembles a skirt, I have spent much of my life skirting around opportune moments, promises of happiness, and the perimeters of what lies at the heart of life.

Uniform: Distinctive clothing worn by members of the same organisation or body or by children attending certain schools. In Robert Walser’s novel about a mysterious boarding school, Jakob von Gunten, Jakob likes to wear uniforms because even though they make the students look alike and essentially bound, unfree, the uniforms themselves are beautiful and Jakob likes to slip inside them. At any rate, Jakob contends, it is far better than having no uniform and being compelled to wear shabby, torn clothes; Jakob also never really knows what to wear and wearing a uniform frees him of that burden. Hermann Broch, in his Die Schlafwandler contended that ‘A uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments and the uncertainty of life.’

Vair: Fur, typically bluish-gray, obtained from a variety of squirrels, used in the 13th and 14th centuries as a trimming or lining for garments, but more importantly the material used to make the inner sole of Cinderella’s lost shoe, for were it really made of glass, her soft feet would have never been able to remember whether the shoe truly belonged to her.

Veil: When she was low and felt that the world was being inordinately unkind to her, she would look around for the emergence of new, fresh retail: shopping malls, minor arcana. Her husband, the late navab, had left her with as much money as few friends. Cloistered and sheltered in an ancestral home ridden with portraits of her ancestors, her friends would always try to guess what kind of family resemblances there may be. The old begum sahiba, who grew up in the palace walls of a crumbling empire, was now safely settled in a luxurious but nonetheless civilian home in a posh part of town. For months, she had been listening to rumours of the construction of a new mall, one that was not only intended to be large but also well designed – suitable for young children in order to play – the latter of which the begum did not care about. Being childless, she filled and measured her life in shopping bags, whenever she felt lonely and sad, buying clothes ranging from Zara to Alaïa. Even though she was not particularly fond of sweets, she bought baklava, kaju katli, pain au chocolat for her neighbours, friends who never knew how to return these kindnesses. The Begum Sahiba indulged their appetites. She made it a point to invite to her house – something which developed in some respect to a kind of obsession – obese and by and large unhealthy people; she insisted to present them with lavish meals, as a sort of tease. The Begum Sahiba was not particularly attractive but she never failed to understand the transformative power of a dress, and had lately even indulged in plastic surgery: She enlarged her lips, lifted her cheekbones and got a successful nose job – what more could a mere face handle? She, however, was content with her small breasts and rear, both of which were always anyway covered by an abhaya. With the help of just the right eyeliner, lipstick and rouge, the perfect veil, she would stroll the avenues of the newly built mall barely recognised.

Zipper: A fastener that initially was camouflaged in clothing until Elsa Schiaparelli incorporated them on sportswear in 1930, and introduced exceedingly large ornate zippers into her collection of evening dresses in 1935. Although Schiaparelli could alter visual phenomena with much ease and grace – she believed in magic – and render radical transformations that nevertheless expressed themselves subtly – who else could have made a shoe sit on a head as comfortably and naturally as a hat – she still worked within a human frame(work), unlike many designers today. By introducing the conspicuous zipper, she understood that hidden things can, in fact, be removed from their hiding places, like a wound that has been stitched-up by a zipper, a mechanical scar that by virtue of a kind of surgery closes what was once open.

Gaurav Monga is a writer and teacher from New Delhi. His most recent book, Raju & Kishore, was published by Raphus Press in 2022. He is currently teaching a course called Fashion in Fiction at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Gandhinagar.

Genuine excitement. Apprehensive self-consciousness. Venues so big you feel small. People lining up who won’t get in but stay there anyway. A bustle at the entrance. Overhearing: ‘But I’m on the list!’ Saying: ‘But I’m on the list!’ Exchanging smiles with a security guard who tells you Ah il fait bien d’avoir un petit chaleur humaine. A woman wearing a dunce’s cap on the second row, blocking the view for those on the third. That woman from the TV in mirrored aviators and turquoise hair. Once more a plethora of Asian faces in the audience, despite a shortage on the catwalk. Spotting, in the audience at Undercover, a man in a jacket that spells out ‘Fighting for Freedom’ on the back in the Latin alphabet, and also in Cyrillic: which side is he referring to – you want to ask but never do. Avoiding eye contact with those you’ve already greeted and have nothing left to say to. A complete inconsistency in terms of how people dress: some as if it is a regular day at the tax office, others as if it’s the grandest costume ball of the year; some as if it’s the height of summer, others as if it’s still winter (which it is). More applause than usual. Less applause than usual. Exactly the average amount of applause. A curious mix of expressions on people’s faces: ‘This is my umpteenth show and I just want to go home’ versus ‘Oh my gosh pinch me I can’t believe I’m finally here!’ As soon as the last clap dies down, a throng at the door: hurry hurry hurry or else you’ll miss the next show! People typing furiously on their phones. VIPs and VICs lining up to get backstage: there’s champagne to be drunk, and cheeks to be kissed. Men in make-up. Men in skirts. Men in sequins. Acting cooler than you feel. Sunglasses everywhere, though there’s no sun in sight. Sunglasses indoors, infallibly. Beautiful people, on the catwalk and off. Good bone structure. Good skin. Good hair. Purple hair, green hair, blue hair, pink hair. Influencers and first-timers lingering around after the show taking selfies. The familiar faces. Everybody looking at each other while pretending not to. Bra top and suit jacket combos. A man in a white dress shirt and nothing on his bottom half, except a prosthetic vulva: who is he? A generic-looking old white man with a Germanic accent regaling the crowd with stories about his multiple homes and pools: later you find out it’s the painter Anselm Kiefer. Michèle Lamy conducting herself like Madame de Pompadour, surrounded by adoring acolytes. A throbbing base that makes your heart quiver. Models in perspex heels so high it’s a miracle no one trips and falls. Blacked-out pupils and long trains on skirts and coats on the Rick Owens catwalk. Towering head-dresses at Comme des Garçons. Nicolas Ghesquière showing long knitted scarves at Louis Vuitton, a crowd-pleaser. Peacocking: ridiculous, beautiful, moving. No coats, even in sub zero temperatures. A lot of belly buttons on display. Crowds moving in unison, phones held aloft to catch a glimpse of a celebrity you’ve never heard of. Stern-looking men in dark suits surrounding beautiful young women with perfectly applied make-up and professional hair. Bumping into people you never see, except at fashion shows. Waving to friends across the catwalk, then losing them in the crowd. A swarm of shiny black cars with tinted windows blocking the street. Bored-looking drivers lining the sidewalk while smoking and drinking coffee from paper cups. Monogrammed handbags. Logos, though not as many as last season. Someone who looks like Madonna, but isn’t. Off-duty model style, flawless. Making as if you don’t notice the street style photographers, even when they’re right in your face. Arriving too late after having stressed like crazy, and missing the show. Arriving too early and having to wait outside in the rain without an umbrella. Not getting the ticket you really really wanted. Mind boggling sets intended to awe you into submission, which works, almost. Watching a street style photographer trying to capture an influencer crossing the street as if no one is watching. That same influencer crossing the street multiple times, back and forth back and forth, so everyone gets their shot. Avoiding becoming the figure cropped out behind said street style star. The PRs looking anxious behind clipboards and iPads. The most important members of the audience always arriving last. No visibly handicapped people, ever. A congregation of photographers at the end of the catwalk competing to take the exact same photograph. Always at least one orange knitted hat worn by a man in the audience. Tim Blanks on every front row. Bare breasts on the catwalk for no good reason. Relief that the PR clocked you meaning you’ll get a ticket to next season’s show too (hopefully). Wishing the week was over. Wishing the week would never end. Loving it hating it but loving it more.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

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. ↩

In the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic the world of luxury fashion intensified its doubt about one of the governing rules of the fashion system: the premise of acceleration. In previous decades it was often young or rather avant-gardist designers who challenged the workings of the fashion system as they operated within the wider process of the intellectualisation of luxury fashion.¹  The fast pace of fashion production and consumption and the harm such rhythm causes to clothing makers, clothing wearers and the planet they inhabit featured prominently in the critiques of such vanguard designers who, like Walter Van Beirendonck, question ‘the Kleenex mentality’ in fashion where ‘[s]omething is used for one or two seasons and then thrown away.’² Yet it seemed that only in 2020, prompted by the worldwide Covid-19 crisis, the world of high-fashion set on fire the idea that fashion equals acceleration.

Now more established fashion houses, such as Armani and Gucci, jumped on the bandwagon, and for the first time an industry-wide mobilisation around the urge to slow down took shape. The platform #rewiringfashion, founded by ‘a growing group of independent designers, CEOs and retail executives from around the world who have come together in this challenging time to rethink how the fashion industry could — and should — work’ proposed the deceleration of the fashion calendar to maximum two collections a year, because the current fashion system ‘ultimately serves the interests of nobody: not designers, not retailers, not customers — and not even our planet.’³

The internal gaze of the fashion system thus focalised on the suffocating speed of the fashion carrousel. Several lifestyle and fashion media featured prominent high-fashion players who called for a shift from race to leisurely stroll in the tempo of fashion production and consumption, initiated by the ‘quarantine of our consumption’ from which trend watcher Li Edelkoort believed would follow ‘a blank page for a new beginning.’⁴

Other industry professionals expanded on this desire for a fresh start. In Women’s Wear Daily, Giorgio Armani published an open letter condemning the ways in which luxury fashion mimics the production rate of fast fashion retailers. ‘Luxury cannot and must not be fast,’ which will ‘ultimately bring the customers to the understanding of the value of fashion and its collections.’⁵ Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, likewise announced on Instagram that he will ‘abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence.’⁶ This model of seasonless collections, ironically still shown twice a year, constitutes ‘a radical new fashion model’ according to British Vogue.⁷ ‘Welcome to the start of the brave new fashion world,’ tweeted fashion journalist Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times, after Michele published his statement. As a result of the doubt circulating in luxury fashion, the system would hit the brakes. Moreover, this deceleration was presented as a clear break, a rupture with the temporal build-up of the fashion system.

In this essay we explore the type of doubt that currently circulates most in the high-fashion industry, and term it ‘little doubts.’ We consider the fashion system’s investment in ‘little doubts’ in relation to the more game-changing variant of ‘radical doubt’ through the lens of the philosophy and history of science, while also drawing on insights from system’s theory, as formulated by environmental scientist Donella H. Meadows in Thinking in Systems.⁸

The notion of ‘paradigm,’⁹ or ‘[t]he shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, [that] constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works,’¹⁰ runs through these conceptualisations as a common thread. The ‘paradigm’ concept enables us to develop how merely correcting the existing system, or engaging in ‘little doubts,’ will not open up a system’s horizon to newness, in the way philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the new, i.e. as an interruption of continuity and not just as ‘novelty – the interruption that figures within continuity and thus does not figure as an interruption as such.’¹¹

By asking the question what or who is being served by the little doubts now oozing through the cracks of the luxury fashion system, we explore the ways in which the current concerns about the temporalisation of high-fashion do not offer the game-changing narrative they claim to do. From the comparison between the field of fashion and science production offered in this essay, we expect to find such ‘interruption of continuity’ to be initiated at the periphery of the fashion system.

The Shame, the Shame

All high-fashion pleas for the deceleration of the temporality of fashion ask for a return to twice-yearly fashion change based on the natural seasons (spring and autumn). This rhythm might seem unseen before given that the interval between collections has seriously decreased over the past decades. Yet gradually and successfully built throughout the 18th and 19th century, the natural season model constitutes the foundation of the temporal architecture of fashion on which the system developed into a commercial powerhouse.

This architecture came about through a rationalisation of beforehand fickle and unpredictable fashion trends by techniques that orchestrate the temporal experience of fashion.¹² At the court of Louis XIV a ‘natural’ autumn/winter and spring/summer fashion season was first introduced. Before, one could not predict the trends that would follow, making it difficult for clothing makers to anticipate the wearers’ demand. Moreover, it was often the wearers who influenced which styles or ornaments were in fashion, not the industry. Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance decided that the press was a convenient instrument for this process of rationalisation. The court journal Le Mercure Galant began to announce in the early spring and autumn what people were expected to wear at court. By timing the reports following the model of twice yearly fashion change the press evoked negative emotions about current outfits and prompted courtiers to invest in new attire. Of course, older sources also mention the shame surrounding clothes that are deemed old-fashioned by others, who hereby demonstrate their fashionability. This occurs for instance in the 13th century novel Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, where a group of fashionably dressed ladies and knights meet a group of hunters in ugly coats ‘which were not new this year.’¹³ Yet the later 17th century first witnessed a systemic integration of the fashion concept’s temporal dismissive logic of advancedness and backwardness which tends to shame individuals and groups who ‘lag behind’ to convince them to keep up with the times by buying into the aesthetics and lifestyles of the advanced.

Since its budding days, the fashion press has played an important role in the system’s rule of shaming people about their ‘old’ clothes (and other lifestyle choices). One of the authors experienced the effect of this controlling strategy when, after ticking most boxes in an ‘interior bingo’ editorial in the weekly magazine of a Belgian high-quality newspaper,¹⁴ she looked at her home through the eyes of others. Seeing the many plants, the white walls, the grey sofa and the white Danish kitchen with black countertops, made her feel out of place. She viewed her home as a lifestyle choice, felt out of joint with the times, and began to contemplate if she should buy a can of dusty pink paint for the white-coloured ceilings (one of the more up-to-date changes to be made according to the interior bingo). All definitions of shame agree on the principle described above; because the ashamed individual is afraid not to belong, he accepts the lead of the ones who set him aside,¹⁵ or at least he contemplates accepting the lead.

High and Slow, Fast and Low

The doubt that has been swelling in the field of luxury fashion wants the interval between en vogue and passé to increase, calling for a return to the foundational state of the system’s temporality. Drawing on system’s theory, we expect that such interventions will not lead to massive changes to the set-up of the fashion system.
Donella Meadows compares the basic arrangement of a system to a bath tub filling up by a flow of water that can be controlled by a faucet. She argues that changes to ‘the size of the flow are dead last on my list of powerful interventions’¹⁶ in a system. After all, whether several collections or merely two fill up fashion’s tub, ‘if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system behaviour isn’t going to change much.’¹⁷ In light of our exploration where to look for game changers, it is interesting that interventions on the size of the flow in systems are particularly appealing to ‘the individual who’s standing directly in the flow.’¹⁸ He or she has difficulty to look beyond this parameter to the rules or even to the paradigm of the system. Too much of an insider perspective might blind people to the larger leverage points for system change.

Meadows concludes that ‘if the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it.’¹⁹ The discourse of the high-fashion stances against the fast pace of current fashion testifies to this status quo. The various proposals do not challenge the governing temporal dynamic of fashion. The shaming and its logic of advancedness and backwardness is not addressed. Rather this logic is employed to create or reinforce the social boundaries of luxury fashion, and to delineate who belongs and who does not.

For instance, Armani pits his view on the ‘timeless elegance’ of high-fashion, ‘which is not only a precise aesthetic code, but also an approach to the design and making of garments that suggests a way of buying them: to make them last,’²⁰ against fast fashion. The designer finds that the wearers of a trend-driven, fast-paced consumption pattern, who often stem from lower socioeconomic background and lack the taste for timeless clothing and buying ‘quality over quantity’ in which upper and upper-middle class women are socialised, operate in immoral ways.²¹ This turns the groups who have been found already to experience more negative emotions around dressing fashionably into lesser human beings, in a moral, aesthetic and temporal way.²² ‘[M]odern man considers his clothing as the expression of personal identity.’ Therefore, “[i]f slow becomes the new fashionable thing and you can only afford fast fashion, not only is your outfit out of joint, but it feels like you as a human being belong to the past.’²³ Armani sustained the primate of advancedness and backwardness with a language of fast and slow that seeks to re-install the heavily blurred boundary between low-end and high-end in the current fashion landscape. In the end, by making clear that fashion is as much an aesthetic economy as a moral one, Armani hopes to witness a future fashion landscape where only those may participate who possess the refined taste to appreciate timelessness.

The way in which Armani and other high-fashion professionals question the speed of the fashion cycle does not lead to disruptive newness, but to a proposition for a novelty way to continue the power of the ones who took up these positions in the first place. From the heart of the fashion system now come ‘little doubts,’ which carry a sense of threat to an important pillar of the fashion system, i.e. acceleration. However, these little doubts have been quickly recuperated by the ruling logic of fashion: casting slowness in a language of fashionability. Ultimately, it renders these doubts harmless as they now serve the commercial and moral project of luxury fashion. The paradigm of fashion was never challenged. But where might we expect to find such radical doubt? Comparing the fashion world to the field of science production, its history and philosophical ramifications, assists in an exploration of this question.

Benchmarks and Outsiders

Doubt serves a useful purpose: it allows us to question the world around us, forcing us to find patterns in chaos which might lead to new inventions. At first sight scientists look like a professional group who particularly value doubt. Yet given the prominence of ‘advanced insights’ in the development of scientific thought, suggesting the prevalence of novelty in continuity over disruptive newness, we wonder if and to what extent scientists are open to new information as it comes along?²⁴

A scientist needs to achieve credibility for his or her discoveries to stand. In science, just as in fashion, social status matters. Scientists communicate their findings to peers through diverse channels. During this contact a community develops something of a benchmark for what a reasonable scientist should doubt and criticise. If adopted by enough scientists, the benchmark becomes the measure of both the scientific community in general and of the status and belonging of the individuals who maneuver the field.

Self‐affirming reasoning then lurks around the corner and may well be woven into the field’s standard practice.²⁵ Warnings of possible errors are typically not taken seriously by peer-scientists, do not result in peer-reviewed publications and do not help to shape the benchmark. This is how alternative models and even long‐standing objections can get suppressed from a discipline’s collective toolkit and memory. Moreover, expert over‐confidence or the tendency for experts to treat their own model as necessary is a well‐established empirical fact. For instance, in mainstream economics it became difficult to discern credit bubbles, because the efficient market hypothesis (understood in terms of random walks and arbitrage‐free environments)²⁶ makes no conceptual space for it. Eugene Fama, the economist who actively promoted efficient market-theory, replied to The New Yorker in 2010 when asked if ‘the inefficiency was primarily in the credit markets, not the stock market — that there was a credit bubble that inflated and ultimately burst’: ‘I don’t even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means.’²⁷ Of course we all know what it meant as we were confronted with the real life consequences of ‘the credit bubble,’ but Fama’s paradigm did not allow him to see.

What happens to the rare scientists who ask questions that challenge the reasonable benchmarks? They are set aside, their careers often stopped in their tracks. Gregor Mendel’s work on genetic inheritance was ignored during his life, despite the numerous attempts he made to contact to renowned scientists in his time. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a correlation between hygiene and death rates in hospitals. Yet when sharing these thoughts with his fellows, he was disregarded and scolded. Two decades later, Semmelweis was proven right by Louis Pasteur. Alfred Wegener proposed that continents moved over time and used to form one primal continent. His theory was rejected during his lifetime but is now part of mainstream science. Finally, the theory of Joseph Lister, who argued that pus was a sign of infection, was rejected by the majority of the surgeons in the 19th century, who took Lister for a whipster and in no position to defy the medical establishment. Radical doubt or paradigm-challenging doubt is more often than not pushed outside the field of science production. Such doubt is allocated to the sphere of the irrational, as it does not pay tribute to the current reasonable benchmarks.

This is not to say, however, that the system of science production does not allow doubt, because it does. But much like the fashion world, the science system tolerates only little doubts to circulate because it can translate those doubts back into its governing structures. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse termed such process ‘repressive tolerance’ or the ways in which the dominant system (of fashion and science) permits a sense of deviancy as long as the constitutive norms are not challenged to the extent that the system cannot bring the deviancy to resonate with its own premises.²⁸ Interestingly, today a discussion of speed also takes centre stage in the little doubts going round in the scientific field. The previous decades’ academia developed a ‘publish or perish’ mentality. This pressure to publish led to an irrational overproduction and decreased the quality of peer review. Moreover, because the scientific field was taken over by a financial logic, intellectual gatekeepers were enabled to sustain dominant paradigms. An increasing number of researchers, grouped in the slow science movement, doubt this culture of acceleration, though of course they too need to abide by the suffocating publishing logic in order to be heard and not manoeuvred outside the field.

Looking at the history of science, we cannot deny that paradigms change and are still changing. Who then takes on and succeeds in such a task and from what position are the individuals operating who set in motion such disruption? A brief historical case-study illustrates that often outsiders are able to debunk paradigms.

Already in early modern Europe a close connection between social status and epistemological credibility was in place.²⁹ In the 16th century strict boundaries between the different disciplines persisted.³⁰ Natural philosophers and theologians had obtained the scientific right to make claims about reality, mathematicians and astronomers had not. This is why when astronomer and mathematician Copernicus presented ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’ in which he explains the heliocentric hypothesis only mild controversy followed. After all, an astronomer cannot give a true account of the workings of the heavens.

Also Galileo Galilei was lacking the necessary social status as a mathematician to legitimate his findings which were based on Copernicus’ heliocentrism. But by refashioning himself into a new type of philosopher at the Court of the Medici, Galileo found a way out. Because philosophers perceived Galileo’s claims as an invasion into their own domain, they employed the tactic of delegitimisation and presented Galileo’s hypothesis as coming from a lower discipline. Yet because this hierarchy of the disciplines was embedded in the universities and not at court, Galileo’s move to the court life permitted him to be more than a university mathematician. He became a court philosopher, using his outsider position to claim the right to challenge the dominant geocentric paradigm. As a court philosopher he published several works in which physical theories are based on heliocentrism as a reality, not as a mathematical instrument.³¹ ‘The great book of nature,’ Galileo noted in his 1623 essay ‘The Assayer,’ ‘is written in mathematical language.’ Yet the Catholic Church tried to put the genie back in the bottle: Galileo was forbidden to teach, publish or defend heliocentrism in 1616, leading up to house arrest in 1633, because in fact Galileo did not stop publishing and discussing his ideas. One of the greatest scientists of all times thus started out as an outsider with little social credibility to make claims about reality. Yet by creating a new identity as a court philosopher, he shook the tree of geocentrism and could pave the way for Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Traps and Opportunities

This much is clear: in both the fields of science and fashion a bias against the disruptive newness stemming from radical doubt is flourishing, which is why game-changing insights often take so long to enter or even do not make it into the annals of scientific or fashion history. The hierarchical organisation of both fields plays an important role in this dynamic. Recent studies have shown that such hierarchical structure discourages new people from joining and presenting possible unconventional ideas.³² Much is lost because of it. Refusing to set things on fire does not generate a richer soil – it merely allows to grow plants from the same family. So what can be done? Below we propose an explorative and humble way forward.³³

Meadows discusses several traps in a system that might turn into opportunities for system change when addressed appropriately. In general we believe that the fashion system has a bad reputation when it comes to moral standards. This might lead to the trap of ‘drift to low performance.’³⁴ Moral standards are performative in the sense that low standards become the benchmark for future choices. Deviations from the lower standard are then considered smaller trespasses than if this behaviour were measured against higher moral standards. Clearly the performativity is rooted in the expectations people have of the system’s behaviour, which immediately opens up an escape route.

Much like the way in which the robust finding of the ‘Pygmalion effect’ in educational science demonstrates how teachers’ positive expectations of the performance of a student impacts the learning process (because of an upwards cycle in which the student senses the expected high standards, in turn encouraging self-esteem and confidence which leads to more time and energy invested in school),³⁵ we should ‘[k]eep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst.’³⁶ In diverse segments of the fashion industry, we may find examples of fashion professionals and organisations that set the bar high. We need to teach those examples to future generations of fashion professionals. Likewise we need to ask ourselves if the higher moral standard that proposals such as #rewiringfashion undoubtedly aim for, reaches high enough when the good of designers, retailers, costumers and the planet are kept in mind, but not the good of the people who make much of the clothes circulating in the fashion system (#rewiringfashion fails to mention them). Turning this system trap into an opportunity requires much attention to the system’s goals. These goals erode easily when all people are presented with to form their expectations on are alienating experiences of fashion that lead one to paint ceilings pink, to head out to buy yet another new dress out of fear that others might notice that you have worn the ones hanging in your wardrobe several times, or to scapegoat groups who cannot afford luxury fashion.

Thinking through the goals and performance standards of the fashion system, begs the question for what kind of doubt we are educating the next generation of fashion professionals: little doubts or radical doubt? Do we want them to be aware of the current paradigm they are expected to work within or not? Do we also seek to offer them tools for cultivating paradigms that we have not been able to articulate so far, to envision and to shape? We agree with critical fashion practitioner Femke de Vries that we ‘have to make sure that fashion isn’t educated through the industry and its media outlets.’³⁷ Triggering an imagination of the type that Flemish philosopher Kris Pint calls ‘resistance of imagination’ (‘verbeeldingsverzet’ in Dutch) and that dares to resist the status quo rather than tinkering at the margins is key. Pint describes how this type of imagination begins with the sensation ‘I do not feel at home here,’ which ‘opens the empty space in the self where suddenly one can experiment with hitherto unthinkable practices and ideas.’³⁸

One way in which fashion education – and all types of education – can tend to this resistance of imagination is paying close attention to and debating with students the words, language and discourse of fashion as a cultural phenomenon and industry. Meadows describes how interventions in the language used in systems offer a strong leverage point for system change, if the language ‘is as concrete, meaningful and truthful as possible’ and if one can ‘enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understandings of systems.’³⁹ Speaking from classroom experience and not from empirically gathered data, we noticed that an increasing number of fashion students finds it hard to present themselves with the f-word, rather seeking shelter in expressions such as ‘I make clothes.’ In addition, some fashion professionals working in the periphery of the fashion system, like Dutch designers Elisa van Joolen and Anouk Beckers and the fashion collective Painted Series, refer to the people they design for not as ‘consumers’ but as ‘clothing wearers’ or ‘wearers.’

Both the current proposals for slowing down fashion change stemming from the heart of the fashion industry, which we believe originate from the intention of setting higher moral standards (but not high enough), and these language experiments of people who are still in-training or deliberately placing themselves outside or at the margins of the system illustrate the increasing pressure on the current paradigm of fashion. It signals that a growing number of people who somehow align themselves with the creation of fashion seek to carve out for themselves a space to feel at home in the designs they create and the clothes they wear.

Yet we concur with Meadows that in the long run the alternative fashion worlds imagined by interventions on the discourses of fashion might spark bigger changes in the system because of the well-established performativity of language. ‘Words are not innocent. They sway from deeds to imagination,’ noted novelist Stefan Hertmans.⁴⁰ When taking into account that with repeated phrases like ‘the more stitches, the less riches’ characters in the novel Brave New World are taught to consume, and that in psychological experiments ‘the subtle use of the world ‘consumer’ seems to suffice to stir up mistrust and to let people pass on responsibility,’⁴¹ looking at the flip side of the coin reveals an opening to a genuine new fashion world where the use of a more concrete language – we are all clothing wearers – stirs us away from triggering the rugged side of human nature, and towards a new paradigm.

Blind Spots

At best education presents a necessary platform to cultivate an openness to be aware of and to be able to question a system’s paradigm. Yet the question what such openness towards paradigm change offers both fashion and science remains unanswered.

Paradigmatic awareness leads to identifying biases in scientific thinking patterns. Standpoint theories illustrate how one should not trust blindly the rational capacities of science. For instance, research in DNA-based medicine still views people of European ancestry as the dominant standard for all of humanity. Human diversity is disregarded, which is why a lot of individuals (everyone who is not white and not male) could be left behind in this new branch of medicine. Also, people of Latin-American background do not react as well to the common anti-asthmatic inhalers as white individuals, and people of Asian descent have a higher chance of severe or even fatal side effects when taking certain anti-seizure drugs than white individuals. Women as a group need to accept higher risk of depression, blood clots, and cervical cancer, when taking hormonal contraception. Wider society would never accept these risk rates in White males. Hence, we know far less about the ways in which our paradigms disfigure reality than we believe we do. Blind spots are everywhere.

Therefore we need citizens who are aware of the paradigms that govern the systems in which they operate and who are handed the tools to be critical enough to detect the flaws circulating within a system. We need individuals, groups, organisations and institutions who in the process of uncovering a system’s blind spots dare to resist the current paradigm by imagining alternative mirror images to identify with. For the fashion system this entails that the imagination deemed crucial to the system’s operations (the proposal #rewiringfashion for instance dreams of ‘the beauty, imagination and craft that remain at the core of this business’ to return)⁴² does not serve the goal of eroding the system to an industry capitalising on alienation. And we need citizens who constantly perform a risk analysis of their own basic assumptions about (social) reality so that they understand ‘at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realisation as devastatingly funny.’⁴³

Nobel Prize winner Max Planck summarised the changing of paradigms as follows: ‘[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’⁴⁴ Bringing up this citation in a fashion theory class we built on the research for this essay, one of the students confronted us with a blind spot of our own: we do not have the time to wait for opponents to die and a new generation to take over.

Dr. Aurélie Van de Peer is a fashion scholar, writer and lecturer, affiliated with Ghent University and the Master Fashion Strategy program of ArtEZ University of the Arts.

Dr. Merel Lefevere is a philosopher of science who specialises in theories of unification and feminist social epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University.

1. The process of the intellectualisation of high-fashion was initiated in the late 1980s and 1990s by more avant-gardist Japanese, Belgian and British designers who showed their collections in Paris and London. Their design practice was characterised by both external reflections (i.e. on wider societal developments) and internal reflections (i.e. on the fashion system). In the review practice of the connoisseur fashion press the view on the nature of luxury fashion as an intellectual endeavour was sustained to the extent that by the turn of the 21st century all designers, also more commercially-oriented fashion houses, were expected to operate within this intellectual frame of reference. See also: A Van de Peer, Re-artification in a World of De-artification: Materiality and Intellectualization in Fashion Media Discourse (1949–2010). Cultural Sociology 8(4): 443-461, 2014.  ↩

2. W Van Beirendonck, Walter Wordwide News – ‘Fashion is Dead!’. First published in 1990, consulted at http://ensembles.org/items/walter-van-beirendonck-fashion-is-dead-summer-1990?locale=en, [accessed October 7 2020].  ↩

3. No author, #rewiringfashion, consulted at https://www.rewiringfashion.org/ [accessed August 29 2020].  ↩

4. M Fairs, Coronavirus offers “a blank page for a new beginning” says Li Edelkoort. Dezeen, March 9 2020, consulted at https://www.dezeen.com/2020/03/09/li-edelkoort-coronavirus-reset/, [accessed August 24 2020] ↩

5. F Romano Riggio, Armani’s open letter to fashion. Man in Town, April 9 2020, consulted at https://manintown.com/giorgio-armanis-open-letter-to-fashion/2020/04/09/?lang=en, [accessed August 25 2020]. ↩

6. No author, Gucci Will Go ‘Season-less,’ According to Creative Director Alessandro Michele. The Fashion Law, May 24 2020, consulted at https://www.thefashionlaw.com/gucci-will-go-season-less-according-to-creative-director-alessandro-michele/, [accessed August 24 2020]. ↩

7. A C Madsen, ‘A More Inventive Product’: Alessandro Michele Outlines Gucci’s Radical New Fashion Model. Vogue UK, May 25 2020, consulted at https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/gucci-alessandro-michele-seasonless-show-model, [accessed August 25 2020].  ↩

8. D H Meadows, Thinking in Systems. London: Earthscan Publishing for a sustainable future, 2008. ↩

9. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn describes a paradigm as ‘some accepted examples of actual scientific practice – examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together – provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.’ T Kuhn, Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 10, 1960. ↩

10. Meadows, Thinking in Systems, p. 163.  ↩

11. A Benjamin, Style and Time. Essays on the Politics of Appearance. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, p. xvi, 2006.  ↩

12. For further development of this temporal architecture of the fashion system, see for instance: A Van de Peer, The Temporal Architecture of Fashion. Its seasons and weeks. In: C Evans and A Vaccari, Time in Fashion. Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.  ↩

13. The original text reads ‘qui ne furent noeves oan.’ In this forest scene in Le Roman de la Rose (1210-1212 or 1127-1228) the narrator uses positive adjectives for the fashionably dressed characters and contrasts those qualities with the old-fashioned attire of the hunters, hereby illustrating the use of the temporal dismissive logic of the fashion concept. S G Heller, Fashion in Medieval France. Oxford: D.S. Brewer, 2007, p. 69, authors’ emphasis. ↩

14. A Bogaerts, (Ge)Woonbingo. De Standaard Magazine, January 12 2019.  ↩

15. H Terwijn, Een emotietheoretische benadering van schaamte. PhD Thesis, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, 1993. ↩

16. Meadows, 2008, p. 148.  ↩

17. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

18. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

19. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

20. Romano Riggio, Man in Town, April 9 2020.  ↩

21. K Rafferty, Class-based emotions and the allure of fashion consumption. Journal of Consumption Culture, 11(2), pp. 239-260, 2011.  ↩

22. Ibid, 2011. In Rafferty’s research women from lower socio-economic backgrounds describe more often than upper-middle class women the fear of not being dressed fashionably, concerns about being viewed in public wearing the same dress, and shame when feeling like they are dressed in old-fashioned styles. More than women socialised in higher socioeconomic milieus, they tend to experience fashion as a way to concur a position in a competitive social world, which results from a lack of class-based self-confidence rooted in the belief that one’s aesthetic and cultural choices shape the benchmark for others.  ↩

23. A Van de Peer, That Future Boom Boom Boom: Circulariteit in de mode. Metropolis M, August/September, MODE/S, pp. 68-70, 2020.  ↩

24. This section is partly inspired by M Lefevere and E Schliesser, Private epistemic virtue, public vices: moral responsibility in the policy sciences. In C. Martini & M. Boumans (Eds.), Experts and consensus in social science, 50, pp. 275–296, Springer, 2014. ↩

25. Meadows (2008, p. 155) considers the occurrence of self-affirming reasoning as a trap of the system, as it forms a ‘reinforcing feedback loop’ that rewards the winner of a competition (the scientist whose work appears in a peer-reviewed publication) with the means (social status within the scientific community) to win further competitions. This results in fewer and fewer competitors entering or staying in the game who might challenge the assumptions that underlie the published findings. A system made up of reinforcing feedback loops thus makes it harder to maintain the openness that allows questions about the system’s own governing rules and underlying paradigm.  ↩

26. The efficient market hypothesis claims that markets are very efficient in representing all the available public and private information in individual stock prices and in the stock market as a whole. Therefore stock are always traded at their fair value. An efficient market cannot be beaten by analysis to predict future prices. Since investors act instantaneously on unpredictable and random information, stock prices also change unpredictably. Price charts seem to follow ‘a random walk.’  ↩

27. J Cassidy, Interview with Eugene Fama. The New Yorker, January 13, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/interview-with-eugene-fama , [accessed September 2nd 2020].  ↩

28. H Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1964.  ↩

29. M Biagioli, Galileo Courtier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ↩

30. R Westman, The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study. History of Science, 18: 105, 1980.  ↩

31. He published works such as ‘Sidereus Nuncius’ (1610), ‘Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems’ (1616), ‘Discourse on the Tides’ (1632). ↩

32. See for instance: J Wang, R Veugelers and P Stephan, ‘Bias against novelty in science: A cautionary tale for users of bibliometric indicators,’ Research Policy, 46(8), pp. 1416-1436, 2017; P Azoulay, C Fons-Rosen and JS Graff Zivin, ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?,’ American Economic Review, 109(8), pp. 2889-2920, 2019. ↩

33. We offer our views on the leverage points for system change as a first exploration of this process and hope to join forces with other scholars and practitioners to proceed in studying what the next phases of this process of paradigm change might look like and might lead to. ↩

34. Meadows, 2008, p. 191.  ↩

35. R Rosenthal and L Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom. The Urban Review, 3, pp. 16-20, 1968.  ↩

36. Meadows, 2008, p. 192.  ↩

37. F de Vries, fashion in times of the Coronacrisis, and post-crisis, June 14, 2020, https://fashionprofessorship.artez.nl/activity/fashion-in-times-of-the-coronacrisis-and-post-crisis-a-letter-by-femke/, [accessed September 5 2020].  ↩

38. K Pint, De wilde tuin van de verbeelding, Amsterdam: Boom, 2017, p. 72, translation by the authors.  ↩

39. Meadows, 2008, p. 175. ↩

40. P Verbeken, In de woorden van extreemrechts hoor je de rancune van de grootvaders. De Standaard der Letteren, Saturday September 26, pp. 4-7 (p. 6), translation by the authors.  ↩

41. M Vansteenkiste and B Soenens. Vitamines voor Groei. Ontwikkeling voeden vanuit de Zelf-Determinatie Theorie. Gent: Acco, p. 402, translation by the authors. For this argument Vansteenkiste and Soenens refer to the study of M A Bauer et al. Cuing consumerism: Situational materialism undermines personal and social well-being. Psychological Science, 23, pp. 517-523, 2012.  ↩

42. Romano Riggio, Man in Town, 2020, authors’ emphasis.  ↩

43. Meadows, 2008, p. 164.  ↩

44. M K Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.  ↩

I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.

Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.

But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head fumed in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.

“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.

“Come out into the yard,” I say.

Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.

Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.

I used to think she hated Maggie too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away, like dimwits, at just the moment we seemed about to understand.

Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask my why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.

I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs anymore. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?”

She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.

When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her fault-finding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.

When she comes I will meet … but there they are!

Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here, ” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.

It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”

Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.

“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.

“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and snaps off picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead.

Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.

“Well,” I say. “Dee.”

“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”

“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.

“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.”

“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.

“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.

“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.

“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”

“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.

“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?”

He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.

“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.

“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call you.”

“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.

“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”

Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask.

“You must belong to those beef cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd, the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.

Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.” They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.

We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.

“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.

“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”

“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.

Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.

“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”

“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”

When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.

After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.

“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?”

I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.

“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.”

“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.”

“That’ll make them last better,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them.

“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.

“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.

“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.”

She gasped like a bee had stung her.

“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were old-fashioned, out of style.

“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”

“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”

“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”

“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.

Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.

“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”

I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.

When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.

“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.

But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.

“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.

“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.

“Your heritage,” she said, And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”

She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and chin.

Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.

Alice Walker is an American fiction writer and a poet. Everyday Use was first published in 1973 as part of the short story collection In Love and Trouble.

‘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 ↩