Fashion is not a product.

Fashion is not a mirror of society.

Fashion is not the favourite child of capitalism.

Wearing fashion and thinking through fashion¹ are two practices I love – for their creativity, complexity and their potential. So much so I made them my profession. Of course, both have their frustrating, even despairing moments: the limits of fashion, physically and aesthetically, but more so its destructive impact. Yet, they both hold a universal creative potential. What fashion can do!

The act of dressing oneself, the touch of cloth, the stroke of air in the space between body and fabric, textiles and constructions to soften or strengthen one’s frame – fashion rests at the heart of each. Most importantly, fashion is a uniquely universal connective tissue. Everyone has fashion. Not in that we are all encouraged to be consumers of fashion, but in the sense that we all fashion ourselves. There are no un-decorated people in the world. Yes, what fashion can do!

This article then is about the complexity of fashion. It is about the ways fashion has come to be seen in relation to and because of capital. Fashion, or rather, the current fashion system favours financial and socio-cultural capital over human and natural capital. It privileges symbolic capital, the non-tangible. As such, fashion is mediated in reductive and glamourised ways: a ‘bright cellophane wrapper.’² In 1938 fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, in Fashion is Spinach, predicted that women, more precisely the American woman, would eventually look inside ‘the wrapper,’ question its contents and reject most of it. Today, on average, U.S-Americans purchase one item of clothing every week.³ However, while recent decades have seen a hundred-fold increase in fashion consumption rather than its informed rejection, they have also seen a significant rise in coverage, discussion and the study of fashion – of ‘looking inside the wrapper.’ Since the 1990s there has been a discursive explosion around the subject of fashion in different media and within both the popular and academic spheres. This rich landscape of commentary is a reaction to the explosion of fashion itself. Beginning in the 1960s and particularly since the 1980s fashion has surged in horizontal and vertical scope. It has exploded as a global industry and socio-cultural phenomenon. The principle of fashion, of permanent and accelerating change, governs much of contemporary global life and culture.

The proliferation of fashion has entailed a diversification of meaning – and its loss to some degree. Fashion, nowadays, not only refers to the principle of change, mostly of changing styles, but also to an industry, to a system and to objects, ideas and images. Yet, the way it is mediated stands in contrast to the richness of fashion, to its diverse impacts, its complexity and ambiguity.

I would argue that we have a disordered perception of fashion. This article, then, takes three pervasive claims often made in relation to fashion – both within popular and academic literature – and aims to counter them or, rather, complicate them. I thus seek a fuller understanding of fashion in relation to different forms of capital and aim for an ambiguity in the perception of fashion. The ability to love and hate fashion, to fault and praise it, to see its destructive and creative potential – all at once.

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Fashion is not a product.

‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire–like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’⁴

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1887

Why are the seams and labels of our garments placed on the inside? Why do we wear these traces of construction on our skin? Why do our clothes tend to be softer on the outside?⁵

Because fashion in our acutely visual and vision-centred culture emphasises the visual garment: what clothes look like rather than how they feel. And because fashion is not a product but a commodity, an abstraction that entices us to forget about the processes and people involved in its production.

‘Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshipped,’⁶ wrote the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in 1935 with reference to Karl Marx. The notion of commodity fetishism is central to Marx’s analysis of capitalist ‘modes of production’ in Capital published in 1848. It essentially refers to the objectification of human relationships.

Capitalism, according to Marx, is based on commodities: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.”’⁷ He refers to a commodity as ‘a mysterious thing’ and details: ‘simply because in it the social character of the men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. […] There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’⁸

The objectification of our relationships with one another and with nature under capitalism forms the basis of an abstraction of creative labour into ‘dead labour,’ of creative products into commodities. In relation to fashion, the notion of commodity fetishism ‘captures the gap between fashion’s appearance as a visual feast, from catwalk to high street, and its origins in, and continued existence through, socially productive labour.’⁹

Thus, fashion is discursively constructed as a constantly shifting series of style-building products. Fashion is constructed as ‘new’ through what is said and what is done¹⁰ – through words, images, how it is staged in shows and shops, the visual and verbal narratives. As such it epitomises post-truth. Fashion is fake news. Bright, cellophane wrappers. Everchanging, perfect and auratic products on display in shops, represented in magazines and increasingly on screens obscure their origins, ingredients and makers, their supply chain and impact – emphasising instead their sign value. Human capital and natural capital, the skills of most of its makers, their contributions and the world’s stock of natural assets are largely written out of the story fashion tells. This privileging of economic capital is emblematic of capitalism. The fact that we think of people and our planet in terms of capital, in terms of worth is inherent in our political and economic system.

The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu highlighted the importance of different forms of capital in his Distinction in 1979 and later explained the impact of the dominance of the economic paradigm. He argued that it was ‘impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognised by economic theory.’¹¹ Bourdieu criticises the reductive use of the notion of ‘capital’ which defines our age: ‘Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism; and by reducing the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange, which is objectively and subjectively oriented toward the maximisation of profit, i.e. (economically) self-interestedly, it has implicitly defined the other forms of exchange as noneconomic, and therefore disinterested.’¹² It is thus that fashion in its current system can get away with favouring economic capital over human and natural capital.

Bourdieu distinguishes between three fundamental forms of capital: economic, cultural and social,¹³ all of which are essential for fashion, which, is, however predominantly reduced to its economic dimension. As a result, the process of fashion is sidelined. Yet, when we buy a garment, we pay hundreds of people involved in global production processes. While the final retail price and its current shares devalue both, creative labour and the cost of nature, we still support and invest in existing and future supply chains. I would argue that fashion is one of the most unsustainable industries because of our disordered perception of fashion as product, because of the way it is discursively constructed as a commodity and how that affects our relationship with our garments. However, we can, as human geographer Louise Crewe suggests: ‘use our economic and cultural capital to resist the worst excesses of the free market.’¹⁴ What does that mean? And is it more easily written than lived? Yes and no. We can ask questions about the products we buy and all their forms of capital. We can educate ourselves about the processes and people involved and resist fashion being reduced to a product, a fetishised commodity. We can call into question the oxymoronic nature of sustainable fashion, call into question the promise that we can buy our way out of a crisis that has largely been created by buying stuff, by global mass consumerism, as Greta Thunberg is currently reminding us.¹⁵ Finally, we can question the premise of the current fashion system, which largely relegates us to the role of passive consumers rather than active makers¹⁶ and acknowledge fashion as process and creative human labour. It is us who fashion ourselves – not fashion.

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Fashion is not a mirror of society

‘Fashion reveals itself as the most reliable cultural mirror we own.’¹⁷

Norbert Stern, Mode und Kultur, 1914

‘I think fashion is a fantastic subject as it’s the most immediate, acute, and precise reflection of society.’¹⁸

Angelo Flaccavento, The Sartorialist, 2012

The reflective and anticipatory powers of clothing and fashion have been noted by numerous writers from Shakespeare and Honoré de Balzac to Oscar Wilde. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle remarked in 1833 that, ‘The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes […] – till they become transparent.’¹⁹ One hundred years later Walter Benjamin referred to fashion as a ‘measure of time.’²⁰ The ‘most reliable mirror’ according to dress historian Norbert Stern.

The common understanding of the mirror perceives it as a neutral reflective surface of ‘bare facts.’ Fashion as a representation of society, its ‘most precise reflection,’ as the fashion reporter Angelo Flaccavento put it when interviewed by the style blog The Sartorialist. Yet, specular reflections are optical illusions based on light and its energy. Standing in front of a mirror, we see not only a virtual image, but also a fundamentally distorted one. The mirror has a flattening affect, transforming us from three-dimensional physical beings into two-dimensional virtual and visual ones. It does not reverse us. Thus, caught between magical and objective knowledge a mirror is much more subjective and altering, much more of a virtual social presence – particularly in the act of getting dressed, which mostly takes place in front of it and essentially impoverishes our experience of dress.²¹

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

Moreover, underlying this metaphor seem to be two further prevalent perceptions of fashion: that fashion communicates accurately and that what we wear is indicative of who we are. This reading of fashion implies that if fashion were a mirror of society and its members, the mirror can be read. These two ideas are inherently connected and have been naturalised so thoroughly that their arbitrary nature, their constructedness appears remote.

To comment that fashion is a precise reflection of society implies that the commentator can read that reflection, which in turn, points towards a certain cultural capital on the part of the critic. How fashion communicates and how accurately it does so, has been the subject of much debate however. Rather than a ‘silent visual language,’²² the communicative properties of dress might be most usefully conceptualised as a ‘clothing code’²³ because dress cannot produce permanent symbolic solutions. Its symbols are too ephemeral, its ambivalence too deeply rooted. An excess meaning always escapes. Although the relationship between language and fashion is at best metaphoric and misleadingly metaphoric at that, the idea that fashion can be straightforwardly read stubbornly persists.

The second idea, that the self is immanent in appearance seems equally naturalised. In 1528 the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione wrote of the correlation between outward appearance and inner being.²⁴ He was writing at a moment when merchant capitalism was on the rise in Italy and against the backdrop of a burgeoning meritocratic society that placed greater emphasis on fashionable dress as a form of self-expression.²⁵ Since the nineteenth century industrial capitalism and secularisation have given further rise to the notion of personality and the belief that appearance is indicative of it. The developing dichotomy between the public and private realms in modernity is analysed by sociologist Richard Sennett in his seminal The Fall of Public Man. He addresses the modern belief that clothes communicate an ‘authentic’ self: ‘One is what one appears; therefore, people with different appearances are different persons. When one’s own appearances change, there is a change in the self.’²⁶ His account is based on a number of literary sources including Carlyle and Balzac, for whom ‘clothes are a favourite subject [as they] reveal the character of those they drape.’²⁷

Within contemporary consumer society fashion is said to be a central marker of identity²⁸ and the most important form of non-verbal communication.²⁹ Fashion is discursively constructed as a mirror that can be read, notwithstanding its deeply distortive qualities and the historical arbitrariness of the metaphor itself. This construction is also indicative of a naturalised correlation between fashion and capitalism.

*

Fashion is not the favourite child of capitalism

‘One need not fear being accused of exaggeration in asserting: Fashion is the favourite child of capitalism: fashion arose from its inner essence and expresses its character as do few other phenomena of our contemporary social life.’³⁰

Werner Sombart, ‘Economy and Fashion: A Theoretical Contribution on the Formation of Modern Consumer Demand,’ 1902

Werner Sombart’s predicament of fashion as ‘the favourite child of capitalism’ has taken on a life of its own. It has often been reiterated in popular and academic writings, yet, mostly without reference to its original source.³¹ Both Louise Crewe in The Geographies of Fashion and Tansy Hoskins in Stitched-Up include the metaphor as central arguments in their recent analyses of the fashion system.³² This conclusion to the early analysis of consumer demand in fashion by the German economist and sociologist has most prominently been restated by Elizabeth Wilson in her seminal Adorned in Dreams, one of the founding texts of contemporary fashion theory. She connects the origins of fashion to ‘the early capitalist city’³³ and its rise to ‘the development of mercantile capitalism.’³⁴ ‘Like any other aesthetic enterprise fashion may then be understood as ideological, its function to resolve formally, at the imaginary level, social contradictions that cannot be resolved. It has in fact been one site for the playing out of a contradiction between the secularity of capitalism and the asceticism of Judaeo-Christian culture […].’³⁵ Fashion, ‘the child of capitalism,’³⁶ as she terms it somewhat more neutrally, ‘speaks capitalism.’37

Wilson’s discussion, in turn, has repeatedly been taken up by fashion theorist Anthony Sullivan. In his different writings on Marx and fashion, he reiterates this metaphor and concluded in a recent article thus entitled that ‘[f]ashion remains, as the historian Elizabeth Wilson once put it, very much the child of capitalism.’38

More than a century after Sombart made the predicament, does it still hold? Capitalism remains fundamentally concerned with the maximisation of economic and financial capital. It thus thrives on newness, speed and consumption – the same principles that define fashion and its current system. Hyper fast fashion as the favourite child of deregulated global turbo capitalism?

The metaphor is alluring. It captures the inextricable and interdependent relationship between fashion and capitalism. Yet, it also suggests fashion to be infantile, innocent and Western. And fashion clearly is neither. A gendered reading of the metaphor might infer capitalism as the father of fashion, his favourite daughter – very much in the tradition of ‘men act and women appear.’³⁹ Infantilising fashion negates its impact, both positive and negative. It negates its simultaneously creative and destructive powers.

While Wilson terms fashion the child of capitalism, she is also critical of its ambiguity and effect which she likens to that of capitalism:

Fashion speaks capitalism. Capitalism maims, kills, appropriates, lays waste. It also creates wealth and beauty, together with a yearning for lives and opportunities that remain just beyond our reach. It manufactures dreams and images as well as things, and fashion is as much a part of the dream world of capitalism as of its economy.40

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

While the acknowledgement of the co-dependence of fashion and capital is essential for an understanding of either, the nature of their relationships remains somewhat obscure. Moreover, the historical role of fashion in the development of capitalism is so complex that it might even turn the existing metaphor on its head. Considering the central role of dress and fashion in the Industrial Revolution, the role of textile manufacturing in particular, fashion might be assigned the parental role, or at least that of a midwife, helping to give birth to capitalism. ‘As the Industrial Revolution progressed, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the fashion stimulated the mechanisation or the ability to produce the fashions by mechanisation created the fashion,’ writes costume historian Phyllis Tortora.⁴¹

Karl Marx was much more concerned with and critical of the connection. He took his coat and the material of linen as starting points for his explorations of the ‘Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities.’⁴² Marx held ‘the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion’⁴³ responsible, not just for inspiring the general principle of change behind capitalism, but also a very concrete production model. Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics, explains:

Not simply analogue to the rhythm of the capitalist mode of production, fashion ‘or clothing and its rapid turnover’ is, for Marx, the very generator of the industrial revolution, even prior to the emergence of the mass market for fashion. Marx begins Capital with an analysis of material, of linen, which he will analyse all through the first part of capital as a use value, an exchange value, a commodity, an abstract form and a concrete one. And from this scrap of material Marx derives the entire economic and social, and political and aesthetic system of capitalism, which surrounded him and into whose future his thoughts were directed. This system rests on material worked by humans into garments. The textile industry inaugurates the factory system of exploitation.⁴⁴

Thus, fashion, according to Marx, is far more than the child of capitalism, far more responsible, historically at least. While the principle of fashion continues to drive capitalism, so too does the principle of capitalism continue to drive fashion. Their relationship appears to approximate the chicken or egg causality dilemma. Fashion and capitalism are co-dependent, caught in an inextricable cycle, a relentless cycle, a relentlessly accelerating cycle.

*

What Fashion Is

Few concepts in our culture are as loaded, few have been so transformed both as to their meaning and materiality, their impact and interpretation, few carry such extremes of dismissal and pursuit, few concepts match the richness of ‘fashion.’

Fashion is much more and much less than it is typically made out to be. Fashion is product, process and creative labour. It is both a mirror and maker of our society, a reflection and a distortion. Fashion is child and parent of capitalism. Although said to favour economic capital, it thrives on and relies on all forms of capital. Fashion can be forcefully creative and destructive, perfect and imperfect, beautiful and ugly. Fashion is a basic human need and utterly superfluous. All at once. Whatever might approximate a truth about fashion lies in its many contradictions.

Our Western society is a society on flight from ambiguity.⁴⁵ It favours rational thinking, insists on categorisations, scientific proof and certainty. This flight from ambiguity manifests itself in binary ways of thinking: either/or. It manifests itself in binary language, such as right/wrong, left/right or woman/man – which in turn creates binary realities that are highly reductive and incredibly difficult to undo.

In relation to fashion, an enduring discourse which has currently regained momentum, divides it in good/bad. There are reports on good or bad fashions, ethical analyses of good or bad brands, or critiques of fashion that denigrate it as altogether bad. As I write these lines Extinction Rebellion (XR) are protesting at London Fashion Week. After previously calling for the event to be cancelled, very well curated and visually poignant protests in the form of ‘die-ins’ and a funeral procession are being staged outside fashion shows. They illustrate the perceived absurdity and obsolescence of this biannual construction of fashion based around a number of ten-minute spectacles, which completely obscure their substantial human, natural and economic resources – however creative the outcome may be. Some of the XR protesters are wearing T-shirts with the following words: Fashion, Beauty, Truth, Justice.

While I agree with Greta Thunberg that the climate crisis is a matter of black and white thinking,⁴⁶ that ‘there are no grey areas when it comes to survival,’⁴⁷ I don’t think fashion and truth are mutually exclusive, neither are beauty and justice. I would argue that at the core of climate action is beauty, a notion of beauty that has nothing to do with an industry, but a fundamental motivation and human need.

We live in society on flight from ambiguity that favours categorisations and rationality. Yet, fashion is hard to categorise. It can be irrational. It thus needs to be thought ambiguously. We can have ambiguous relationships to fashion. We can oscillate between love and hate, critique and praise. We can simultaneously acknowledge its creative force and destructive impact. And we can hold contradictory ideas about fashion in our minds and act on them without having to resolve them.

Dr Renate Stauss is an assistant professor at the American University in Paris and a guest lecturer the Universität der Künste Berlin where she teaches fashion theory and cultural and critical studies. Her favourite areas of research and teaching is sociology and the politics of dress.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. Thinking Through Fashion is the title of an edited volume by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik which introduces social and cultural theorists and their key ideas for a critical engagement with fashion. A Rocamora & A Smelik (eds.) Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016 ↩

2. E Hawes, Fashion is Spinach. New York: Random House, 1938, pp. 336. ↩

3. https://www.commonobjective.co/article/volume-and-consumption-how-much-does-the-world-buy. ↩

4. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.163 ↩

5. In relation to the hidden structure of garments, it is interesting to note that deconstructivist fashion makes a point of exposing the construction of garment. Originating in Japan, it derived from the aesthetic and philosophical approach of wabi-sabi, which centres around the notion of the beauty of imperfection. ↩

6. W Benjamin, The Arcades Project. London: Belknap Press, p. 894 ↩

7. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.27 ↩

8. Ibid., pp.47–8 ↩

9. A Sullivan, ‘Fashion: Capitalism’s Favourite Child’ in: Socialist Review. May, 2017. http://socialistreview.org.uk/424/fashion-capitalisms-favourite-child ↩

10. This understanding of discourse follows on from the work of French theorist Michel Foucault and his radical social deconstructivism, as outlined in: M Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. transl. Alan Sheridan, London & New York: Routledge, (1969) 2002 ↩

11. P Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in: Richardson, J. G. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, p.242 ↩

12. Ibid. ↩

13. Ibid., p.243. Here Bourdieu also reflects on his personal ‘discovery’ of the category of cultural capital: ‘The notion of cultural capital initially presented itself to me, in the course of research, as a theoretical hypothesis which made it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from the different social classes by relating academic success, i.e., the specific profits which children from the different classes and class fractions can obtain in the academic market, to the distribution of cultural capital between the classes and class fractions. This starting point implies a break with the presuppositions inherent both in the commonsense view, which sees academic success or failure as an effect of natural aptitudes, and in human capital theories.’ ↩

14. L Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, and Value. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, p.61 ↩

15. G Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books, 2019, p.42 ↩

16. K Fletcher, ‘User Maker’ in: Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. London: Earthscan, 2008, pp.185–200. ↩

17. Author’s translation of ‘In der Mode zeigt sich der zuverlässigste Kulturspiegel den wir besitzen’, N Stern, Mode und Kultur. Dresden: Expedition der Europäischen Modezeitung (Klemm&Weiß), 1914, p.9 ↩

18. Angelo Flaccavento’ in: anon. ‘Style Profile… Angelo Flaccavento’ in: The Sartorialist, 18 January 2012, http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/style-profile-angelo-flaccavento/ ↩

19. T Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833-4/1999, p.52 ↩

20. Author’s translation of: ‘die Mode das Zeitmaß‘ in: Benjamin, Walter (1983) Das Passagen-Werk. Zweiter Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, p.997  ↩

21. L Ruggerone & R Stauss ‘Lost in Reflection: Clothes, Mirrors and the Self’, conference paper, The Annual Conference of the Association for Art History, 2019 ↩

22. A Lurie, The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury, 1983 ↩

23. F Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 ↩

24. B Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Venice: Aldine Press, 1528 ↩

25. E Thiel, Die Geschichte des Kostüms: Die europäische Mode von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1982, p.152 ↩

26. R Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber and Faber, 1993 (1977), p.152 ↩

27. Ibid, p.159 ↩

28. It was heavily theorised as such, e.g. J Finkelstein, (1991) The Fashioned Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; J Finkelstein, After a Fashion. Carlton South, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1996; D Simmonds, ‘What’s next? Fashion, Foodies and the Illusion of Freedom’ in A Tomlinson, Allan (ed.) Consumption, Identity & Style: Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure. London & New York: Routledge, 1990, pp.121–38; E Wilson, ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’ in J Ash, & E Wilson, (eds.) Chic Thrills. London: Pandora,1992, pp.3–16 ↩

29. e.g. G P. Stone, ‘Appearance and the Self’ in R M. Arnold (ed.) Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962, pp.19–39; H-J Hoffmann, Kleidersprache: Eine Psychologie der Illusion in Kleidung, Mode und Maskerade. Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1985; F Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992; M Barnard, Fashion as Communication. London & New York: Routledge, 1996 ↩

30. W Sombart, ‘Economy and Fashion: A Theoretical Contribution on the Formation of Modern Consumer Demand’ (extract), 1902, transl. K Barry, in: D L. Purdy, (ed.) The Rise of Fashion: A Reader. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 316. ↩

31. The following two texts constitute exceptions to the unreferenced reiteration: A Briggs, ‘Capitalism’s Favourite Child: The Production of Fashion’ in: Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and analysis. London: Routledge, pp.186–99, 2013 & A Sullivan, ‘Why Fashion Matters’ online, 16 May, 2017 https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/clothing-fashion/item/2523-why-fashion-matters ↩

32. L Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, and Value. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017; T Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto, 2014 ↩

33. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago, 1985, p.9 ↩

34. Ibid., p.203 ↩

35. Ibid., p.9 ↩

36. Ibid., p.13  ↩

37. Ibid., p.14 ↩

38. A Sullivan, ‘Fashion: Capitalism’s Favourite Child’ in: Socialist Review. May, 2017 http://socialistreview.org.uk/424/fashion-capitalisms-favourite-child ↩

39. J Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972, p.47 ↩

40. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago, 1985, p.14 ↩

41. P G. Tortora, ‘The Central Role of Dress and Fashion in the Industrial Revolution (c.1800–1860)’ in: Dress, Fashion, and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, p.99 ↩

42. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.30 ↩

43. Ibid., p.315 ↩

44. E Leslie, ‘Review of Tansy Hoskin’s Stitched Up’ in: Reviews in History. July, Review No. 1788, 2015 https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1788 ↩

45. D N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays on Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985 ↩

46. G Thunberg, ‘Almost Everything is Black and White’ in: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books, 2019, pp.6–13 ↩

47. Ibid., p.8 ↩

What we learned in school about labour and capital: it begins with the project of modernity, a history of domination and colonisation, which lead to the rise of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. From craft to looms and machines of mechanisation, our history books teach us that the nineteenth century was marked by the birth, rise, and making of standardised, industrial products. Capital derived from ‘the economy of machines and manufacturers,’ what the philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage marveled as ‘the accumulation of and science which has been directed to diminish the difficulty of producing manufactured goods.’¹ He was fascinated by the Jacquard-loom, which could reduce the number of hand weavers and rid of the artistry in human error, to create intricately uniform details of leaves and flowers into the tapestry of fabric. Man and machine, Babbage wrote, lead to the economy of human time. Only a tool, a technology, could do the work of many and increase the number of things made. Soon, new divisions of labour would become possible, the breaking down of tasks of both the human hand and mind, where the constant repetition of the same process would produce in the worker ‘a degree of excellence and rapidity in his particular department’ which could never be skillfully carried out by any single person.²

Time was once an elastic measure, embedded in social relations, where the cycles of the sun had dictated the hours of the day and where the waning daylight of winters shortened the communal work of the harvest. By the mid 1800s, a new sense of time emerged from the textile mills, creating new rhythms that regulated industrial life. Time was now quantified and incremental, its economy dependent upon on the repetitious rhythms of the body’s same movements over and over again on the assembly.³ It had become abstract, a scarce commodity, and an indication of when one was free, or when one was not. The historian E.P. Thompson also observed how labour transformed our inner schema, or apprehension of time.⁴ People were now workers or employers who could not escape the anxieties of industrial time, as it appeared in every aspect of public life, from the church clock, clocks in town markets and squares, the grandfather clock inside the home, the pocket watch that hung from bodies. Industrial time even rang as sound, from the morning bell to curfew, the sound of the whistle and time stamp, the tick tock of hands that divided hours to minutes to seconds (today it glows through our iPhones). Work and life was neatly demarcated. Time had become the shackle of all workers.

On the assembly, industrial time subjugated worker’s movements, demanding a synchronicity that was anathema to the human body. Charlie Chaplin mocks this subjugation in workers’ movements, whose gestures were meticulously adjusted to working specific parts of the assembly. Chaplin mimics the fragmented movements – his tightening of screws carries out in stutters, hiccups, jolts and jerks, in staccato bits of movement.⁵ We can’t help but laugh when we see his inability to keep up, throwing chaos into the machinery and making it explode. Chaplin’s funny movements liberate the working body, reminding its audience of human capacity and experience. In the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the film, he argued that laughter was critical to bringing us back to our senses and out from of our numbed alienation in time, labour, and capital. Film and the moving image of the body on screen could powerfully mirror back to us human experience, counteracting the body’s systematic subjugation in labour through comedy.

Today, time is no longer just the wage clock and time stamp – in global capitalism, it is now a never-ending twenty-four hour global day in the ‘just in time economy.’ It’s synchronisation globally has produced a new world of coordinated logistics with automated ports, timed with the movement of ships, cranes, planes, and millions of dock workers, port workers, seafarers, warehouse workers, truckers and rail workers who ship as many as four hundred packages and fill six million containers at any given moment.⁶ The build out of ports in the 1980s lead to the rise of the transnational corporation, producing both a retail revolution in the U.S. and Western Europe and the world’s biggest factories in history in Asia. Inside the world’s global garment factories, the measurement of time on the assembly was further fragmented into some hundreds of tasks, where workers’ bodily movements were punctiliously measured as ‘standard allowed minutes.’ Detailing the number of operations, length of seams, fabric type and stitching accuracy of workers performance, these new metrics estimated the exact time and cost of making a garment, dehumanising labor to determine ‘factory capacity’ for global companies.

All this takes on new meanings and scales when it comes to Made in China. The U.S. and Europe’s largest retail companies manufacture in China’s newly built factories in special economic zones that attract foreign investment free of any regulation. This was part of the Open Door Policy by Deng Xiaoping that resulted in the privatisation of all state-enterprises and industries in China. By 2005, most everything Americans bought and wore — sneakers and sweaters, electronics, toys, Christmas decorations, and furniture — was marketed by four-lettered global companies such as NIKE, IKEA, APPLE, ZARA and manufactured in China. Of the 130 million migrant workers who toiled in these factories across the Pearl River Delta, from Guangzhou to Shanghai, 6.5 million were garment workers alone. Labour powered factories so large, that as many as 400,000 workers could be found working in one building alone.⁷ For the last three decades, these migrant workers left behind their villages to head for the city to service China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy. They also left behind their children with grandparents, along with their youth and vitality. Today, migrant workers still consistently work twenty-nine days for fifteen-hour days straight. They will take the four-day train ride to their homes, once a year, to celebrate one holiday – the New Year.⁸

I have learned that this is what Capital with a big C, through labour, can now do. For the last three decades in the U.S., Wal-Mart in partnership with Made in China allows Americans to Make America Great Again, as one can now feel wealthy by affording cheap food, clothing, things of all kinds despite one’s lack of healthcare, job security, a free education, housing and public transport. Nevertheless, this kind of capital can give us jeans that are rhinestoned, sandblasted, embroidered, sequined, silkscreened, tasseled and frayed. We can mine for tantalum, gold, tin and tungsten as far as Cerro Rico, Inner Mongolia, and the Congo for those irresistible metallic rose gold iPhones.⁹ We can order formula and diapers on JD.com and UPS.com and have them dropped off to us by drone in some rural town.¹⁰ We carry on Twitter culture wars and learn from YouTube videos, whose algorithms lead us to makeup tutorials and white supremacist fringe communities, all in one go. We have TikTok memes and musers entertaining 500 million monthly active users who boast of one billion downloads. According to philosophers, we’ve become the digital swarm that rages on, where each post, tap, click, swipe, zoom or like is a vote to be tracked and monetised.¹¹ The mature among us warn of our suspended senses and the general distraction that is now our daily affective condition. We tell our young that they have yet to wake up, though in the reality of this 24/7 cycle the young have not even gotten the chance to fall asleep.¹²

The protests in Hong Kong continue to swell because the young see in China a factory for the world.¹³ They understand that our fast-fashion, sneakers and metallic rose gold electronics have produced wealth for a few, and built only the backs of low-waged rural migrants without unions, a free press, or rule of law. In this city, the booksellers continue to mysteriously disappear. I’ve learned that if the protests had been in Shenzhen or Shanghai, it would have been another Tiananmen. In this hyper life of capital, the young and old alike seek out the meaning to all this – how to radically break down the barriers of work and life? How to re-enchant this social world, reactivate and recover our sense of collective agency, find meaning in the interstices of time? We are only human when our instinct tells us to seek escape from the homogenising processes of these modern times.

I think of all this as I pack up my belongings — all the stuff of my kids and family — from a rotting old house in the Hudson Valley to another one in the woods. I feel so far from the factory behemoths, of men and machines and industrial histories that I have spent my career learning about from textbooks. Here, I am reminded of a different kind of time in capital – the biological time that naturally resists it – where the crevices of days, one’s relationships with people and things, only heighten the awareness of mortality. Not men and machines, I think, but rather women and children in the kind of work that doesn’t seem to fit so neatly into the assembly or the measurements of some industrial clock or twenty-four-hour work day. This is an imperfect and preindustrial sense of time — of mothering and daughtering and preserving human life — which forces one to abandon any kind of synchronicity. The labourers were out in the fields, the factories and offices, or even out in the streets striking, but only because the women were at home, carrying out the invisible work taking care of the children and the elderly. Maintaining life is both hard labour and creative practice, as one in the same, continuing the next generation of workers while burying those who have perish after a lifetime of toil.

In the middle of my move, I pack boxes of things and throw other things away. So many things are thrown out. The opening up of closets, trunks, and boxes reminds me of the basement closet I hid in as a child, while my parents worked in the adjacent room painting cheap costume jewellery under fluorescent lights. The clothes smelled of mothballs and mildew, damp wool and old fur. Its rafters held my mother’s secret stash of cash and bills. The clothes in this closet — of dresses and jackets — were worn so long ago, pictured only in faded photos, worn on bodies before having children, when my mother was a different person, a young working woman in the city making money for only herself. Opening up of closets, like the one of my great aunt in her tiny West Village studio apartment, where she packed away a lifetime of small collected things that she never again revisited. After my great aunt passed, I found in her closet a pair of worn shoes – I can see them in a photo from when she was twelve. A small beaded purse wrapped in its dusty original tissue paper. An album of wedding photos in a six-week marriage I had never known about, with her husband cut out of every picture. Here is another photo of my great aunt in her in cap and gown. While the war raged on in her home country, while my fourteen-year old impoverished father was digging ditches to bury his family, her family’s wealth allowed her to escape to Paris and then to New York. On my gloomiest of days, I still walk by her old apartment thinking of my mother, my father, and her.

I am throwing out the clothing of my children, full of stains that make none of it worth saving, all evidence of their world of hard-play. Their clothes turned tattered from climbing, from throwing mud, getting snagged on trees and bushes, elbows and knees completely worn out. I ask my daughter to wash off the dust from her once shiny and new black boots – the black boots that the ninety-three year old horse lady who lives down the road from our new place told her was the most exciting thing for her to see and smell. ‘How many years does a horse live?’ I once asked the horse lady, only for her to quickly snap back, ‘but how many years for a human?’ making me think about this comment all summer long. On this hot summer day, I fish out from my closet my wedding dress only to find it with different coloured yellowed sweat stains on the bodice and deep black and grey mold mottled on the bottom. Though ruined, I save it not for my daughter but for the relief it brought for my mother, in hiding her shame for my six-month belly buried underneath these yards of lace. There’s a pile of old jeans and old bed sheets to wash too, though I know the bloodstains are permanent. This too reminds me of a different kind of time lived, which will soon enough arrive and be understood by my daughter. I am packing things up and throwing things away – this accumulation of obsolete things, used up, broken junk, which only I give my arbitrary value to. I think of Primo Levi in the camp, telling the story of survival from just a few key possessions — a spoon, a bowl, a piece of string, a button, a tin cup — which he also said put one at risk of getting killed.¹⁴

For some reason and at this age, I know these things — that these things made by others who have traded in lives and labour and that I have accumulated in one house — that sadly, none of this will even matter. That I have been in the houses of ninety-three olds — capsules of another time in beauty — with all those things now just rotting away, a burden for her children to clean out. When we stand in the horse lady’s house, my daughter only points out the birds’ nests in the rafters, a thing of beauty among the decay. I am moving out of my house so that my eighty-three-year old father will not hesitate to visit me — I bought a house without any steps — since, as he reminds me daily, I only have two more years with him yet. Eyes that can no longer thread a needle, ears hard of hearing, bodies that work to breathe and move forward. The horse lady will be gone. The terror that my parents will die soon, that I have just a few more years with my own children, before long they too will leave me for good. Will they remember how many times I dressed them, fed them, loved and cared for them? I have already forgotten this with my own parents. In the regulated and regimented hours of present day, I seek out a time and a place to understand these ungoverned thoughts.

Clothing and capital I have learned through grand structural histories of ‘the way things work,’ explained to me as men and machines and assemblies. And yet here I am, packing it up and throwing it away, thinking of the workers, my mother, my father, my children, my great aunt, what Primo Levi said about a spoon and a cup. These days, I can’t shake that ghostly photo of discarded clothes in dry arroyos abandoned by migrants in the Sonoma desert.¹⁵ I think of the images of garment workers’ daughters in cramped apartments in Chinatown.¹⁶ I’ve been consumed all summer by that photo of a baby held by a father, drowned in the Rio Grande — the very same river my mother-in-law was born next to — face down in the water.¹⁷ Only the black cloth of his own T-shirt prevented his baby daughter from washing away. Such anguish I feel these days, when thinking of clothing and capital. In between days, I crave something beyond formal histories and seek closets as interstices to history. These things I look at and pack up and throw away have me thinking of all these lives lived. There seems to be no economy to any of this. There is only survival, the maintenance and preservation of life, and the communal remembrance of it.

Dr. Christina Mooon is an anthropologist by training and an assistant professor of Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at the The New School for Design in New York.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. C Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. First published in 1832. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. E.P Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ in The Making of the English Working Class, London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd./Vintage Books, 1963. ↩

4. Ibid. ↩

5. W Benjamin, ‘The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’ (1935) trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. ↩

6. See A Madrigal, ‘Containers.’ Audio blog post. Episode 1: Welcome to Global Capitalism. Medium, 7 April 2017. Web. 28 July 2019. ↩

7. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. ↩

8. The Last Train Home. Directed by Lixin Fan, Zietgeist Films, 3 September 2010. ↩

9. B Merchant, The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone, New York: Bay Back Books, 2017; L Browning, ‘Where Apple Gets the Tantalum For Your iPhone.’ Newsweek Magazine, February 4 2015; R Mead, ‘The Semiotics of “Rose Gold,’ The New Yorker, September 14 2015.  ↩

10. J Fan, ‘How E-Commerce is Transforming Rural China,’ The New Yorker, July 18 2018. ↩

11. B Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, Untimely Meditations (Book 3), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. ↩

12. See J Crary, 24/7: Later Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, New York: Verso, 2013. ↩

13. A Weiwei, ‘Can Hong Kong’s Resistance Win?’ New York Times, July 12 2019. ↩

14. P Levi, Survival in Aushwitz: If This is a Man, Orion Press, 1959. ↩

15. R Barnes, ‘Debris Field Left By Migrants on U.S. Side of the Border, 2012.’ http://www.richardbarnes.net/state-of-exception. ↩

16. C Chang, ‘The Daughters of Garment Workers,’ USA, New York City. 1996. https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2K7O3RC16RC.html ↩

17. J LeDuc, Photo of the bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria, on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas, June 24 2019. The Associated Press, originally published in La Jornada. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/25/they-wanted-the-american-dream-reporter-reveals-story-behind-tragic-photo ↩