A strange stillness, save the occasional pedestrian and car, characterised the cobbled streets of New York’s SoHo last weekend, normally teeming with shoppers. One man had a camera, like me, and perhaps sought to document the neighbourhood’s transformation. For over two months it has resembled a plywood jungle. The upscale fashion boutiques housed within the area’s familiar nineteenth-century white cast-iron Italianate buildings, have boarded their windows. Some have painted the wood white, so to further camouflage it against the façades, an attempt at temporary invisibility.

At one point, a seemingly interminable row of police vans interrupted the scene, sirens blaring. I hear the familiar roar of a crowd, a Black Lives Matter protest taking place a few streets away on Broadway: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ With shops muted, others battle for ownership of public space through sonic and visual expression.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the recent killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have (once again) exposed the generalised racism embedded in our many societal structures. The fashion system, as a shaper and signifier of power and hierarchies of beauty, race and wealth, has found itself newly re-symbolised, its abandoned public spaces the ideal surfaces to communicate messages of injustice and protest. In Beverly Hills, stores have also clad their upscale metal, stone and glass façades in a protective plywood layer. Chanel’s now reads ‘Living in hell.’ There’s more: ‘Fuck the Police’ (Hermès), ‘Burn prisons’ (Fendi), ‘The revolution is coming’ (La Perla), ‘Can’t be silenced,’ ‘Eat the rich’ (Gucci), and ‘Make America pay for its crimes against black lives’ (Alexander McQueen). In New York, messages like ‘Redistribute the wealth/redistribute the power,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’ and ‘Rest in power George Floyd and the others,’ pepper the retail landscape, textual juxtapositions that work to shift the meaning of these elite fashion spaces.

Stores all across the retail spectrum have been vandalised, and images thereof disseminated globally through a photo-reportage lens, interspersed with scenes of clashes between police and protesters. Pictures of broken glass, mannequins and clothing strewn onto city streets, stands in stark contrast to the strand of twentieth-century photography that documented the pristine shop window, from Eugène Atget’s rows of carefully placed corsets on body forms; pictures by Walter Evans and Lee Friedlander that eerily tease out the animate qualities of mannequins; to mid-century glass reflections of urban action by Saul Leiter.

Shop windows appeared in greater numbers from the mid-nineteenth century, spurred by the intersection of building technologies, such as cast iron and plate glass, clothing production, and the growing sophistication of fashion industries, with the development of merchandising, sales techniques, and advertising. The nineteenth-century department store (a majority of which were located in present day SoHo), with the wide array of wares it peddled, was a product of this landscape. In visualising the merchandise inside, their windows hastened purchases, and kept the wheels of consumerism turning.

For fashion historian Elizabeth Wilson, the department store, and its replacement of shop window panes with plate glass, ‘testifies to the importance of looking in capitalist society.’¹ Because glass restricted onlookers’ haptic relationship to the goods, it placed focus on the visual, ‘transforming the already watching city person into a compulsive viewer,’ according to historian William R. Leach.² In their writings on fashion and everyday life, design historians Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark further assert that, ‘Well before the cinema became a widely popular pastime, the department store was educating people across the social spectrum to look and desire though glass, as window-shopping became a huge leisure pastime.³ The Victorian-era window sharpened onlookers’ gazes, and although copious technological advances in image-making have since expanded our modes of perception, this earlier training still mediates our collective relationships to city space.

These window displays have also served to crystallise, animate and narrate various meanings of fashion. They provide information on sartorial items, and demonstrate how to use them, all while training us to view fashion in relation to lifestyle. We learn to fantasise, and to aspire to certain ideals. Their presence asserts that fashion is life, and spectacle. As in the past, they instruct us on how to look, at fashion, and dressed bodies in the form of mannequins. Moreover, we project our own likenesses on to the spectacle, literally, via glass panes, merging our subjectivities with the images projected out to the street. How does their newfound lack of glass, without the capacity for reflected imagery, affect our lines of vision? Does it give passers-by some space for internal reflection, without the distraction of mirrored and brand imagery? Or does the new matte streetscape in all its flatness rob of us of our sense of urban alertness, our alacrity? Something is missing, and it results in a feeling of disconnect. I remember my own stroll through the SoHo streets, and how I looked at myself in car windows when I could. I was not reflected in the shops, and so I searched for myself elsewhere.

Just as fashion is a means to express our individual creativities in relation to the images the industry disseminates, it creates and propagates the racial inequalities we are still subject to. In the U.S., its history runs parallel to that of Black servitude and racism. As the scholar of Afro-Diasporic dress Jonathan Square has written, the development of the fashion system relied intrinsically on slave consumerism.⁴ Beyond that, it flourished largely through the exploitative labour and stylistic appropriation of minority populations. In viewing last week’s imagery of the vandalised storefronts of multinational fashion brands, the fashion and labour scholar Minh-Ha Pham commented on Instagram: ‘They deserve every bit of critique. Global fashion has enabled systemic mass corporate looting of people and places in and from the Global South under the guise of trade and labour deregulation, international intellectual property laws and logics, and supply chain subcontracting for far too long.’⁵ The writing on plywood walls testifies to the experience of the many who have been affected by the industry’s troubling history (and present).

Paradoxically, the shop window could also be seen to signal democratic modes of consumption, opening luxury spaces to the street, the symbol of the masses and, as the philosopher Henri Lefebvre theorised, of everyday life.⁶ The window is an interface between public street space and rarefied fashion space, but functions as a barrier to many of us. Noting the similarities between commercial fashion and art spaces, the art critic Hrag Vartanian writes how ‘insecurity is key to a thriving luxury industry,’ fostering an air of exclusivity around the products on offer while keeping certain people out.⁷ In addition to aloof staff and uniformed security personnel, this manifests physically, through an imposing door, lack of seating, low temperatures, and sparse interiors. Shop windows, in dividing public and private spaces, similarly serve as structural reminders of difference and exclusion.

This has been exacerbated during the lockdown, as many elite fashion spaces fortified themselves further, turning windows into walls and removing merchandise from their premises. This protection seems off-key and symbolic, as these physical spaces increasingly shed their economic relevance, with retail operating primarily online, and in many cases halting completely in the pandemic. It elicited immediate reaction from the community, who felt it created an aura of mistrust, ‘as if in anticipation of riots and civil disobedience.’⁸ The notion of walls has assumed heightened meaning during the Trump presidency, symbolising exclusory, anti-immigration and racial politics. This is being played out on numerous social fields, but perhaps none as brazen as in the luxury industries. Their walled protection of nothing serves to uphold the inequalities they traditionally perpetuate, as well as antiquated modes of policing – a concept so fraught in the current climate. The disparity between heavy security around product and retail space, and fashion brands’ diversity efforts at the level of representation, manufacture and staffing, as is being reported by commentators from @diet_prada to fashion academics such as Kimberly Jenkins, is jarring.

In contrast to the permanence of concrete, the plywood jungle is malleable and ephemeral, and constantly in flux. The artist Jason Naylor was commissioned to paint a scene of hearts, rainbows and butterflies on the plywood protecting Coach during lockdown, a clear act of branding; in contrast to the obvious fortifications, this one glosses over and hides the ugly reality. Or you may have noticed the murals decorating various Sephora flagships, with their Matisse-esque globular shapes. These are the work of Theresa Rivera, hired by various Business Improvement Districts of Manhattan (BIDS) to beautify the city, and in another sense perhaps reassure citizens and potential investors that all is well. In contrast, since the protests began, the plywood walls at Louis Vuitton in SoHo became larger, made of corrugated metal, and guarded by police officers.

These are contested spaces today, and should be considered in terms of the voices occupying them, and their diverse aims. Diversity is a defining feature of ‘Thank You,’ 123 photographs of the city’s essential workers, from health care officials to construction workers, posters that are pasted to many of the boarded shopfronts. It was conceived within the context of street artist and photographer JR’s ‘Inside Out Project,’ in which people contribute their portrait, a merger of personal identity and public art, and in the case of ‘Thank You,’ a juxtaposition of fashion spaces and diverse, everyday faces. Some are identified by their uniform, others not, but most are photographed masked. This has invited public engagement, adding voices and layers of meaning, in the form of graffiti or (masked) selfies. In one poster adorning the walled windows of the Gerard Darel boutique in SoHo, an image of a police officer now also includes the letters ‘FTP,’ whilst that of a soldier reads ‘murderer.’

In L.A. Abel Macias, with Lawson Fenning design shop, is now working with neighbouring design businesses, to invite local residents (through Arts Bridging the Gap and Inner-City Arts), to create murals on shopfronts in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Their messages – ‘Breathe with love,’ ‘Racism is the Real Virus’ – connect recent events to the country’s history of systemic racism. They are also affiliated with Natalie Patterson and Allison Kunath’s ‘A Love Language Project,’ which transforms boarded up shopfronts in L.A. (on the demand of the business or brand in question) into ‘protest messages’ that ‘amplify Black voices and encourage meaningful conversations around the liberation of Black lives.’ Many relay the powerful words of activists and writers such as Desmond Tutu, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Others are newer expressions, like one by Patterson on the façade of The Butcher’s Daughter that reads, ‘This is not a riot. This is a revolution. This is resistance. This is a fight for Black life.’

This weekend in mid-June, one week after I began this article, SoHo too looks different. There is colour, so much colour, and people, who have come to look. Not an inch of plywood on Wooster and Greene Streets is left untouched by muralists, or collagists. As in L.A., these also merge creative expression and protest, and include painted images of Colin Kaepernick kneeling by Nick C. Kirk and portraits of victims alongside ‘Say their names.’ Messages of world peace and brotherly love or words by MLK, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes juxtapose critical messages like ‘The Eyes of the World Are Watching’ and ‘Protect Black Women.’ Muralists’ messages chime with those of anonymous protest taggers, who voice their frustration and anger, on the themes of wealth disparity, representation, activism, and governing and policing bodies. Does this signal a turning point in anti-racism movements today, led by Black Lives Matter? That is, the emergence of more mainstream activism seems evident from a new repertoire of ideas and terminology communicated to and employed by a more diverse group of marchers and supporters.

As the title of the 2017 documentary on the 2014 killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson, Missouri protests suggests, ‘Whose Streets’ (dir. Sabaah Folayan), this movement seeks to reclaim space by and for the underrepresented. As such, its evokes the early years of graffiti art, so central to the shifting aesthetic of New York’s streetscapes, whereby Latino and Black youths tagged their names on walls in the 1980s to assert their presence, a creative act that was criminalised. Oppression materialises itself in different fields, from police forces to corporate fashion, and wields its power over space. SoHo’s ever changing streetscape attests to this. A local resident, the writer and photographer Tequila Minsky is documenting recent events under the hashtag ‘Make SoHo Art Again.’ During our conversation this weekend she expressed her praise for those who have decided to ‘take back the window’ and return SoHo rightfully to artists and activists, not elite ‘irrelevant’ global fashion brands. Plywood surfaces separate and exclude yes, but they also invite expression that helps us to see past the walls for new, more representative, reflections of each other and our space.

Dr. Alexis Romano, a historian of design and visual culture, is adjunct Assistant Professor at New York City College of Technology and Parsons, the New School for Design, and a co-founder of the Fashion Research Network. She will be the 2020-21 fellow at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1987 [1985]), p.152. ↩

2. William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p.63. ↩

3. Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p.73. ↩

4. Jonathan Square founded and runs ‘Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom,’ a curatorial platform that explores intersections between slavery and the fashion system, and is currently developing a book on the topic. https://www.fashioningtheself.com ↩

5. Minh-Ha T. Pham, personal Instagram @minh81, 30 May 2020. ↩

6. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 2002 [1961]), p.309. ↩

7. Hrag Vartanian, ‘As Black Lives Matter Protests Continue, Some NYC Art Galleries Board Up Storefronts,’ Hyperallergic, 4 June 2020. https://hyperallergic.com/568948/black-lives-matter-protests-nyc-art-galleries-board-up-storefronts/ ↩

8. Elizabeth Paton, ‘In the U.S., Luxury Brands Board Up the Store,’ New York Times, 27 March 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/style/coronavirus-boarded-up-luxury-stores.html ↩

‘All disgust is in origin disgust at touch,’ philosopher Walter Benjamin aphorised under the theme of ‘Gloves,’ locating the point our repellence towards animals begins.¹ Disgust of something is, first and foremost, a visceral response to the possibility of touching it. The sight of discarded gloves has become familiar to me during my walks in London, so too the guarded look of an oncoming runner nearing a corner at speed. Methods of demarcating bodies, like gloves, masks, and clothing, have gripped our collective attention in the world around us.

Being in physical contact reminds us where our selves and the other begin – the by-product is an experience of estrangement. If I am disgusted by an image, I am ‘touching’ whatever it is lodging in my psyche. Disgust, especially now, seems to be channelled through our hesitance in physical touch, but also in alienation against the status quo of the present. It moves beyond its use as an emotional reaction to tell us what kind of future we do or do not want.

For many of us, Covid-19 has wordlessly twisted the boundary of what can be touched or not, so much so that touch itself has turned into a vaguely clandestine act. Who or what we touch becomes political and the ramifications heightened – and therefore pleasure and disgust too. Worldwide cancellations of fashion weeks, catwalk shows, and the projection of an immense recession threatens to swallow a whole swathe of the fashion industry. But you know this.

Turning Benjamin’s aphorism on its head, it could be said that all pleasure is, in origin, the pleasure of touch. This twin drive emerges when we think about all the things it is possible to touch and the fact that all of us have been driven to this virtual space as the physical spaces we are accustomed to are no longer within reach. The disjuncture that has emerged in lockdowns worldwide between our physical realities and other realities – streams, in-game, video chat, and elsewhere – has meant that we have also spent an increasing amount of time simultaneously avoiding touch but being touching in other ways.

During the all-virtual Shanghai Cloud Fashion Week, the first fashion week to adapt to new prohibitions on mass gatherings, Angel Chen presented her A/W 2020 show via livestream.² The physical models still walked, but the environments varied: from pale pink snow fields to red neon text illuminations redolent of sci-fi movie aesthetics by making use of a green screen. The wait to physically handle the clothing was abbreviated: since it was hosted on an Alibaba-owned platform, users could immediately order looks they liked. Whereas in the current climate, going to a store to buy clothing is loaded, suddenly, digital catwalk shows are no longer a facsimile of the present.

The digitisation of the catwalk has been foretold many times over. Yet, in the last year or so, a new category, digital fashion, has been heralded as one means of transfiguring the present into the future. Clothes are created in 3D modelling software that allows the result to be rendered and distributed online. A purchaser turns their body into a green-screen, allowing the proportioned 3D models to be swapped on and off, giving the illusion of being dressed in the garment. Minimal waste is produced. It is in the vernacular of a new demographic who spends most of its time online. A certain magic emerges in the way that clothing is conjured from the immaterial and our attention cannot help but turn towards it.

Naturally, countless media outlets have documented the immense hype of the application of 3D technology to clothes. The physical limitations of a show, catwalk, model, or audience no longer applies; the physics of the real world are merely a point of reference. The cultural implications, however, are still grounded in the present moment. In 2019, The Fabricant, the ‘first digital fashion house’ sold a digital dress for $9,500 on the blockchain meaning the purchaser had exclusive rights to have the dress digitally fitted to her photographs.³ Digital clothes, then, are asynchronous. It is only possible to wear the clothing by seeing yourself wear them. Last year, iD magazine produced a documentary highlighting influencers who are excited by the inclusivity of digital clothes to fit body types usually excluded from the mainstream, but also stimulate more engagement more quickly from followers.⁴ For all the prowess that this powerful technology presents, it seems for now the actual use of it is limited to creating photographic representation to be circulated in search of social and cultural value.

It could be easy to dismiss digital clothing as a poor replication of physical clothing or, more strongly, as part of the alienating aspects of disgust. A future in which we must circulate primarily online, led principally by the caprices of corporate-owned platforms, would provoke a reaction of disgust in many of us. As our attention has already been commoditised on platforms, self-representation would too. If digital fashion is an industry predicated on technological determinism, alienation from voices who suggest an alternative outside the bounds of this world is nearly inevitable.

This potential for alienation is particularly visible when witnessing the formal constriction of clothing, only visible on a 2D plane in social networks in which influence is already commoditised. Does this originate in the elimination of the tactile qualities of cloth, of fabric, and the sensuous pleasure of seeing clothes move in time and over time? Digital clothes can remain new forever, but by bypassing the wear and tear of physical clothes, do digital ones elide something fundamental? By being unable to touch, to feel, to smell, to apprehend, digital clothes are largely a visual experience above all else, affixed to still photographs. If pleasure is no longer found, does disgust naturally enter? Perhaps not, but disgust may play a role not just in the apprehension of a garment but in the systems and assumptions it represents.

I feel more estranged from physical touch than ever before and yet, by slowly discerning its outline, I am compelled by my encounters in the nascent world of digital fashion. The anthropologist Michael Taussig explores the question of touch in his 1991 essay, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, by way of Walter Benjamin’s concept of optical tactility.⁵ In Benjamin’s eyes, Dada architecture ‘hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’⁶ Similarly, film was able to dissuade itself from replaying reality as it began to manipulate itself with new meaning-making techniques. Through extreme details, close ups, or juxtaposed cuts as its visual language, it transformed what it represented. What emerges is a certain way of touching; a visceral response to an image rather than a purely ocular one.

Though most offerings of digital fashion currently are worn via still photographs, the ultimate goal of most technologies purporting to recreate reality online is through motion and embodiment. Though virtual models may walk or pose as if on the catwalk, other endeavours attempt to remove physical references as a starting point altogether. Selfridges 2019 campaign with artist network, DIGI-GXL, embeds digital clothes within a custom 3D world on an enigmatic and faceless avatar.⁷ However, the full expression of the self is truncated. Animations rely on rigging models to predefined movements which work well for replicating the catwalk or advertising films. Improvisation of movement, of the kind that is possible when wearing physical clothing, eludes us for now. What can I make of this? I am removed from the texture of the garment but there is a feeling that I can apprehend the garment in other ways: the individual garment is part of a larger world that, unlike digital catwalk shows, is built without referent to the physical world.

For Taussig, the concept of ‘optical tactility’ is revelatory and explains exactly what kind of magic is being performed. By ‘rewiring seeing as tactility, and hence as habitual knowledge, a sort of technological or secular magic was brought into being and sustained.’⁸ Instead of the critic’s individual eye analysing a scene, we see together as a collective public whose everyday lives are increasingly constituted visually. During my walks in the past few weeks, I notice details less and contrast more often, reading my field of vision primarily by texture.

To our collective eye, digital fashion amplifies, shifts, distorts, and transfigures the physical cues of clothing. 3D artistry and animation creates a technological magic that is potent and discernible only at the surface. This magic operates on us as we go through the day, especially nowadays, distracted and hungry for touch. And what happens if seeing-as-touching induces both pleasure and disgust? Turning to the artist Frederik Heyman’s imagery, I see the enchanting aspects of technology and its propensity to overwhelm our sense of optical tactility.⁹ His work shows strikingly posed bodies, rendered in uncanny human flesh, against a backdrop of speculative machinery or animals. Heyman, who has collaborated with Y/Project, Gentle Monster, and most recently Arca, takes as a starting point our natural disposition towards simultaneous pleasure and disgust. Gazing on Heyman’s digital bodies, repulsion and curiosity immediately flood in and begin to synchronize. Soon it is clear that there is a technological mesmerism at play, rendering scenes that are uncanny somehow familiar. Here, it feels technological mesmerism is doing its work in transforming my eye into something that, above all, touches.

Optical tactility gives us the potential of both pleasure and disgust when considering digital fashion. In the current moment, touch seems to signify our own alienation as well as a hope in the future of new forms of sensory engagement borne out of necessity. The enchanting technologies behind all this give us the prospect of disgust and pleasure, but is only actualised in the everyday space that we find ourselves in online. It will be critical to understand and critique the shape the future takes in these spaces, allowing for both dislocation and accord. The absence and presence of touch is felt more strongly right now and, for digital fashion, it will continue to be at the centre of it.

Riana Patel trained as an anthropologist in Oxford, focusing on the political and cultural aspects of technology. She now works as a digital producer and researcher.

1. W Benjamin, One-way street. Harvard University Press, 2016. ↩

2. KALTBLUT Magazine. ‘ANGEL CHEN AW20: REALITY CHECK’ Youtube. April 29, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7Sb5QS09A ↩

3. https://www.thefabricant.com/iridescence ↩

4. i-D. ‘Will You Be Wearing Digital Fashion In The Near Future?’ Youtube. May 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44p44FnOKE8 ↩

5. M Taussig, ‘Tactility and distraction,’ Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (1991): pp 147-153. ↩

6. Ibid. p.150. ↩

7. https://www.selfridges.com/GB/en/features/articles/the-new-order/meet-the-artist-digi-gal/ ↩

8. M Taussig, ‘Tactility and distraction,’ Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (1991): p. 151. ↩

9. https://frederikheyman.com/ ↩

In the window of Louis Vuitton at the corner of London’s New Bond Street and Clifford Street, a Barbie-height alabaster mannequin has tripped and fallen. Sculpted in Nicolas Ghesquière’s Sixties sci-fi silhouette, she taps a mirror with her heel. Her back is turned, her face gazing up at a trompe-l’œil staircase. She has fallen into retrospection.

At Burberry the scene is one of an aloof petting zoo filled with glossy magnolia ostriches, gibbons and pelicans. At Chanel, like its indomitable high-collared creative director, the Eighties mannequins have gone. What is left is a collage shot on the fake rooftops of Paris built inside the Grand Palais. Two fluorescent bin-men sit on smooth stone benches, staring into tiny phones. Givenchy has plastered matte black vinyl to its shopfront. Two ornate metal garden chairs sit empty in the window of Michael Kors beside a weary lemon tree. I pressed my nose up against the haughty glass at Saint Laurent and looked into a void of cold marble and glossy chrome. Bulgari’s pink velvet boxes do not hold any treasure. Hermès quivers with charm, offering a Katy Perry pastel fantasy of architectural elements and amplified silver hardware – a playhouse that now only postmen and Uber drivers will see.

When lockdown was announced, the luxury stores seized their shoes, bags and belts. The high street left theirs in full view. Oxford Circus is now Xanadu, drained. The long stretches of abandoned storefronts remain dressed. Moored in a state with no purpose, the bi-weekly deliveries of new stock and quick-fire changeovers have been disrupted: the fast fashions linger with no warm bodies on which to be pulled. No parties to be twirled around at. No office desks to graze. No spills to suffer — no lives to lead. One-shoulder crimson dresses, single-button cream blazers and knock-off cornflower mules await their fate, scorched by the sun like carefree noses in June. Lurid screens still broadcast videos of nubile, tanned bodies locked in a summery dream. A man on a scooter bellows ‘Somebody To Love’ by the Boogie Pimps. Seagulls sip puddles. Tall pink flowers wither behind glass.

These shop windows have become a sombre Vanitas. They are allegories of the long erasure of fashion’s ceremony and purpose. Much of what we revere about fashion has nothing to do with what it has become. Filmmaker Reiner Holzemer’s poignant study of Martin Margiela, In His Own Words¹ captures the shifts that took hold after the designer sold a majority stake to the Italian entrepreneur Renzo Rosso in the early ‘00s. The term ‘Brand Management’ suddenly became the norm. A new marketing department drew up its own collection plans based on sales figures. Keywords like ‘sexy’ and ‘chic’ were introduced so they could be applied to different product categories with ease. Fashion stopped being about the clothes. ‘Even if with the new direction there was a lot of new and fresh energy, there was something very unpleasant going on for quite a while in the fashion system,’ Margiela says. ‘For me, it started when we had to go on the internet the same day as the show was shown. I like the energy that comes with surprise and this energy was completely lost. I felt more and more sad in a certain way. I thought, this is the start of a moment where there are different needs in the fashion world and I am not sure I can feed them.’ He walked away from the house the day of his twentieth anniversary show on 29^th September 2008. The merry-go round began to spin too fast and so, Martin Margiela got off.

Even before our lives felt like DVD extras from Safe, Todd Haynes’s 1995 melodrama about dry coughing and conspiracy theories, health fads and environmental disease, I had noticed how designers began to initiate critiques of consumerism with every season. At a talk hosted inside a pop-up shop in Berlin, the photographer and co-founder of the menswear label GmbH, Benjamin Alexander Huseby calmly said that ‘we need to end capitalism,’ whilst bundling us into his latest fleece jackets with curved seams. Everyone ate cheesecake. But now that clothes-shopping has been deemed inessential, I receive daily press releases from brands that commit to producing new garments in sustainable ways, PR offices eager to share their riff on loungewear and brands touting discount codes.

We’re all functioning with a new-fangled high-tech anxiety that worries about the self and the social order in chorus. Does the world need another dress, I wonder? A great fucking trouser? Where does Balenciaga’s check and houndstooth double-face wool-blend wrap coat fit into what’s happening right now? Where do Gucci’s GG Marmont metallic-leather block-heel sandals stand in all this?

Approaching Marble Arch, I thought about Lynn Hershman’s 25 Windows, a Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller.² In 1976, the artist took over all of the department store’s Fifth Avenue windows, installing a series of tableaux vivants that were part social commentary and part fashion parade. Street theatre: in one, a male mannequin aims a pistol at a love rival, further down a body is coyly turned away from us underneath a still shower. In another, a mannequin is posed with her hand crashing through the glass that passers-by reach out and hold. Hershman’s project encapsulates the grit, danger and glamour of 1970s New York (the windows are Guy Bourdin newsreels come to still-life) but also the social commentary that fashion delivers through fantasy. The endless gifs of Naomi Campbell toting a gun at Versace’s S/S 1998 menswear show whilst wearing a pink crystal mesh dress, or the sharing of Shalom Harlow as victim of two Pygmalion robots in Alexander McQueen’s S/S 1999 show attest to that. Fashion needs to be embodied, it needs to have something to say. Cathy Horyn said in her 2012 interview with Hershman that the artist, ‘believes there is still the opportunity for stores ‘to deal with the moral and political issues of today’ — although she suspects that most people are looking at their cellphones rather than at windows.³ The naked store window publicises Fashion’s vulnerability; the millions of garment workers, textile growers, stylists, photographers, magazine editors, store owners, button sewers, suddenly all left with no work to do. Left to find new ways of existing.

The word ‘unprecedented’ is the hook in the battle cry for political survival during these – unprecedented – times. Amongst the deaths, the sickness, the panic, the stockpiling, the zooming, the virtual gallery tours, the endless requests for Facetime, the handwashing, the dread, is a violent longing for wisdom. Each and every morning we wake to fresh podcasts, emails and PDFS, almost manic in their exhortations of what Fashion needs to learn. ‘It’s Time to Rewire the Fashion Industry’⁴ the Business of Fashion announces. In The Guardian, Tamsin Blanchard asks: ‘Can a greener, fairer fashion industry emerge from crisis?’⁵ suggesting that this unwelcome interruption is bringing ‘a new sense of connectedness, responsibility and empathy’ – if you know where to look for it.

At Dior, the white linen blinds are down. In self-isolated purgatory, we begin to question our need for material things. The theatre is closed, the system stalled. We consider this bloated trade that riffs off a manufactured, manicured need. We think about how much space we take up in the world, how much we miss each other. How much of what we knew will return to the empty window?

Dal Chodha is a writer and scholar and the editor of Archivist Editions. He lives in London.

1. Margiela: In His Own words, directed by Reiner Holzemer, 2019, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11284244/ ↩

2. Lynn Hershman Leeson, 25 Windows, a Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller, 1976, The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3996? ↩

3. Cathy Horyn, Bonnie the Mannequin’s Wild New York Adventure, The 6^th Floor Blog, The New York Times, 13 December 2012, https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/bonnie-the-mannequins-wild-new-york-adventure/ ↩

4. Imran Amed and Achim Berg, The State of Fashion 2020: Coronavirus Update — It’s Time to Rewire the Fashion Industry, The Business of Fashion, 8 April 2020, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/the-state-of-fashion-2020-coronavirus-update-bof-mckinsey-report-release-download ↩

5. Tamsin Blanchard, ‘Put Earth first’: can a greener, fairer fashion industry emerge from crisis?, The Guardian, 27 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/08/fashion-industry-reels-as-coronavirus-shuts-shops-and-cancels-orders ↩