I’m on the Champs Elysées somewhere and oh my god, my heel hurts. I’ve stopped being able to walk like a normal person; instead I sort of shuffle along, lifting my left heel by scrunching my toes up and putting all my weight on the front of the foot to avoid rubbing what must surely by now be raw flesh bonding with my sock. I’m afraid to take my boots off to look.

A Nike swoosh rises like a mirage on the other side of the road and I almost yelp with joy: I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a big box store. I cross the street and hobble to the sneaker section which is huge and utterly confusing. There’s a boy folding T-shirts nearby, young enough to be my son in another life; with pimples on his chin and in head-to-toe Nike. Of course. I ask for help.

Excuse-moi, est-ce vous pouvez m’aider? J’ai besoin de baskets…  Quelque chose de simple?

I must have been a teenager the last time I wore a pair of trainers outside the gym: navy blue Adidas Gazelles with white stripes, the same kind Damon Albarn wore. As a grown-up, all that conspicuous branding seems puerile, mug-ish, too many logos an anathema to good taste. Though like any self-respecting fashion scholar I’ve read enough Bourdieu to know that ‘good taste’ is a cultural construct. Plus, they are comfortable.

I’ve got a minor tower of trainers in front of me now, size 40 in every imaginable colourway. I try a few on, but lose heart pretty fast. All I want is something cheap, unobtrusive. Something to wear while I limp home. I spot a pair that fit the bill: pretty plain, €85, black with white laces and a swoosh. Well four swooshes actually, swooshes all over, white on black, there’s no way you’ll miss them. They’ll do.

When I get home, I put my new shoes at the back of my wardrobe and proceed to forget all about them. They stay there for quite a while in fact, while other shoes, other concerns, life, takes over. And then one day I’m looking for something I don’t remember what, and instead stumble on those Nikes again. They still look – and smell – immaculate, box fresh: a pair of comfortable everyday, nothing special trainers, one of millions made in a factory far away.

I wear them that day to the gym, because why not, and then continue wearing them: to the supermarket, running errands, to see friends and colleagues, on travels, to fashion shows. And just as they wheedled their way into my wardrobe, they slip into my everyday life – and when I start travelling every month from my home in Paris to Homerton Hospital in London, I wear them too.

* * *

I was talking to my friend Abdul recently; he’s a self-confessed sneakerhead with thousands of shoes in his collection, so many shoes that they’ve taken over every wardrobe in his house, the bookshelves in his front room, his entire office and his mom’s garage.  He told me about falling in love with sneakers as a boy in Sierra Leone. As a kid he played soccer and ran track so they were useful, but then one day he got to see a bootleg VHS tape someone had brought back from America: Police Academy 4. There’s a scene in the movie where a pack of kids skateboard through a mall, then end up being chased by the cops – and every one of them is wearing Air Jordan 1’s. Young Abdul was mesmerised.

What we wear can so easily become a stand-in for yearnings, aspirations, nostalgia. Because clothes always reflect our histories; they can be powerful and transformative, mythical and magical, and full of both symbolic and immaterial value. In my work as a fashion researcher and writer I often return to how full of mystery our relationship to clothes can be, think of a ‘lucky shirt,’ or a piece of jewellery that seems charmed, or an object so connected to aspirations or fortune that it transforms into a sort of talisman, a fetish.

I think of Abdul and his friends nerding out, swapping tips on message boards or WhatsApp threads about where to get the latest iteration of the Air Force 1 or the Adidas Superstar, or the Chuck Taylor, and about how the humble sneaker has become something to stay awake all night for, camp outside a store for, obsess about, fetishise, go bankrupt for. There’s a lovely scene in the movie ‘Just for Kicks’ – a documentary that locates the rise of sneaker culture in the influence of hip hop in New York in the 1970s and 80s: B-Boys, graffiti artists and MCs appropriating shoes worn by basketball players because they were the most comfortable to dance in, stay up all night in, run from the cops in. And because these kids had no money but of course still had to look fly, they cared for their sneakers, they made them last. How? Well by cleaning them, with a toothbrush if necessary, by filling the stripes in with a felt-tip pen, by washing and ironing their shoe laces.

* * *

I’m sure you know as well as I do, what a bad reputation fashion has. It doesn’t seem to matter how successful a phenomenon it is socially or commercially, it’s still thought of as the very apex of superficiality, frivolity, vanity. Intellectuals who write about it mostly seem to do so only in order to denounce it, or else contemplate it with a sort of wry and distanced amusement. Fashion is the part of culture we love to hate. And yet, though clothing is the perhaps most fraught entity of the material world, laden as it is with paradox and ambiguity, is there any object more closely linked with the human body and the human life cycle than the clothes that we wear? There’s a line in the fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson’s book ‘Adorned in Dreams,’ that describes the intimate relationship we have to our clothes better than anything else I’ve come across: ‘garments are objects so close to our bodies so as to articulate the soul.’

Fashion matters because of it. In getting dressed we construct the self as image, simultaneously exhibiting and concealing who we are to the world. Clothing is our armour, but it can also be a failed disguise, much easier to see through than we imagine. We use clothes as marks of our distinction and authenticity, but also as a way to connect with each other and with the past, real or imagined. By virtue of wheedling their way into our everyday lives, clothes transform into material memories that ensure the past is always carried with us into the future.

The philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that ‘the narratives of the world are numberless.’ ‘Narrative,’ he said, ‘is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’ The narratives we weave around ourselves through the clothes that we wear have always fascinated me. Garments tell stories, and in their subtle communication we find both language and psychology. Unwanted garments can appear dejected and doleful; it’s through use that we give these inanimate objects a soul.

* * *

That’s why my Nikes are so special to me. As I look at them, lying now at the bottom of a pile of shoes by our front door, worn-out and grubby, a pair of nondescript sneakers that sustained me for a year while I visited doctors, being prodded and poked, legs in the air and feet in stirrups, learning to inject myself until my belly and ass were both bruised and painful, messing up right at the end and having to do it all over again, hoping wishing yearning for a baby. It’s a highly intimate story, out of sight mostly, the one about becoming a mother through artificial means. Being fertile is to be productive, abundant, creative – being barren feels shameful. You need comfort, tenderness, compassion, so you look for it wherever you can: in people, in your environment, in the objects that surround you and hold you. My sneakers did their part by letting me forget that I was wearing anything at all on my feet, one less thing to worry about.

See me as I run to catch the Eurostar, wait for the number 30 bus, walk across a bleak East London housing estate to the clinic, stand on a street corner gulping down coffee from a Styrofoam cup, tap my feet in the waiting room trying to focus on the latest Kim Kardashian adventure in some oil-stained issue of Closer magazine. Notice how all the women here look down at each other’s shoes, how careful we are not to meet each other’s anxious eyes. My sneakers are a suitable companion: they just are, and they let me be too – another anonymous woman bearing the Nike swoosh. What would they say if they could talk? Maybe they would nudge the boots to my right, gently ask how they’re doing. Or help me figure out why the Mary Janes to my left seem so relaxed; what do they know that we don’t? Or perhaps they could convince the nurse’s sensible Crocs to stop for a minute, and get their no-nonsense user to instead step into my shoes for a moment. Because I’m falling over here, and I’m scared.

* * *

How many miles of endless asphalt haven’t I covered in these shoes, and in how many cities? Taking shortcuts where there are none, relying on the familiarity of certain routes and city streets, focusing on little changes – a trashcan overturned by the wind, a single glove placed respectfully on the steps of an estate, a network of chewing gum in different shades of grey on the pavement, the jitteriness of traffic on this particular day – to avoid thinking about whether life is growing in me, or not. There is a kind of voluptuous, almost perverse pleasure in forcing my thoughts where they don’t want to go.

This is the stuff that our intimate lives are made of.

I’ve thought a lot lately about these types of commonplace, ordinary objects that are part of our everyday life, the non-fashionable, mass-produced stuff that form the backbone of material culture. A pair of shoes made in Indonesia, one of millions created by anonymous hands, touched by countless others on their way to a big-box store in a tourist trap neighbourhood in my beautiful Paris. These shoes that were gentle with me when I needed relief from pain and that I’ve cared for in return, swapping laces, avoiding puddles, brushing stains away. These shoes that have moulded after my feet; bunions denting the sides, soles worn down by my particular way of walking.

You probably have something like it in your wardrobe too, a pair of shoes or a piece of clothing acquired in an almost off-hand way, without much thought and without the impulse to impress anyone, something inexpensive meant to fade into the background. How much of our lives isn’t made up of these routine purchases, worn day in, day out, memories accumulating, sticking to the fabric almost despite itself. There is so much humanity to be found here, so much of us in the accumulation of these small things. These are objects that we shape and adjust to fit the routine of our daily grind, that we wear for comfort and to ease everyday existence. Our relationship to them is mostly unconscious, though in repetitive habits intimacy is born, and tenderness too.

* * *

And so, one winter morning in early March I wake up. It’s dark outside, so dark. I look at my phone; it’s 4am, and something feels off. My baby girl is moving around, she’s restless. A little elbow pokes at me from inside, or maybe a tiny foot. I get up to go to the bathroom, and oh my god I feel it – wet trickles down my leg. Just a little, and then a bit more. It’s my water, it’s broken; she’s coming she’s coming. What am I supposed to do now, I can’t think straight. There are no contractions yet, I can’t feel anything is that okay? I wake David up, we google. I call the hospital. It’s okay it’s okay. Everything is going to be just fine. The nurse on the line reassures me, ‘Your contractions will start any minute now,’ she tells me. ‘Come to the hospital as soon as you can.’ I’m strangely calm now, though my adrenaline is pumping. I take a warm shower, pack my hospital bag with books, toothpaste, fresh underwear, my phone charger. We have some leftover stale croissants for breakfast, and coffee. Lots of coffee. I get dressed, in soft pants and my warmest jumper. My big military coat, and a woolly hat. David helps me put my socks and shoes on. My feet are swollen so the only shoes that fit now are my sneakers. I’ve been wearing them every day; they’re just by the door.

It’s 5h30am now and time to go. I move laboriously, deliberately, down the stairs and into the street. I lean on David. My belly is huge and so heavy; I put my hands by my hipbones to support it and I feel the little one – she’s ready. The métro has just opened so we take it. Four stops: Gare du Nord. It’s already filling up with workers on their way to offices on the other side of town, and we let the escalator carry us up and into the street. It’s started snowing, millions of tiny flakes that melt as soon as they land on your skin. It’s still dark, but the sky is full of them now. They land on people rushing to get to work, on smokers pulling on their last drag, on junkies rolling up their sleeping bags, on cars lining the side of the road, on brasserie canopies, on benches and streetlights and trashcans. My shoes are damp but we’ll be there soon.

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

This essay was originally written for Extra Extra magazine’s podcast series ‘Protagonist of the Erotic.’ You can listen to it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Tyranny of the Status Quo’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Lin, loc. cit. ↩

7. Bourdieu, P., op. cit., p. 77 ↩

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

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

10. Ibid. ↩

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

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

13. Buck, loc. cit. ↩

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

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

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

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

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

IN SEPTEMBER 2015, A New York Times article traced the rapid demise of the erstwhile popular fashion label Band of Outsiders, despite its having become ‘a darling of store buyers, fashion editors and Hollywood cool kids like Michelle Williams, Greta Gerwig and Jason Schwartzman.’ The reporter quotes fashion executive Nina Garduno: ‘Look, fashion wants to kill you… Fashion wants you to die so it can have a new birth. It’s vicious. It’s relentless.’¹

Garduno’s comments capture a basic, essential fact about fashion: it is a perpetual process of elimination as well as discovery. Since fashion by definition is a rate of change, variations in its content ultimately express nothing other than this cadence. Things that can’t go out of fashion cannot ever be fashionable, and ephemerality is the terms of success for any particular style. A particular fashion succeeds only when its eventual failure can be readily imagined, when the next iteration that will stem from it and invalidate it is already discernible.

Success in fashion is a matter of impelling a fashion cycle; it is a matter of sustaining change in and of itself. Creativity in fashion depends on figuring out how to assure change, if not accelerate it. Capturing an audience or a market with a particular design or idea is ultimately less important to the industry than making an audience reliably distractible, reliably discontent. Failed fashion prompts permanent attachments.

The inevitable failures of various designs and firms constitute the health of the fashion business overall; the financial failure of a particular company like Band of Outsiders testifies to the success of fashion more broadly as an economic force, demonstrating the industry’s overriding willingness to sacrifice individual designs and firms on the altar of innovation. Garduno’s description of fashion mirrors economist Joseph Schumpeter’s claim that ‘the process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.’² Echoing Marx and Engels’ declaration in the Communist Manifesto that ‘constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,’³ Schumpeter argued that capitalism, itself also a vicious and relentless force, ‘is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.’⁴New ways of making profit come at the expense of established old ways, without necessarily producing any material improvement for consumers or society, only change.

If fashion ‘wants to kill’ its practitioners, that’s because it epitomises capitalist innovation at its bare essence, consisting of the sort of change that is only for the sake of the system’s survival. Fashion is what is left when all pretence to consumer utility or social improvement is stripped away. The sacrifice of perfectly useful goods to the ever-shifting demands of fashion is a kind of corrective purge, an obliteration of what the philosopher and writer Georges Bataille called ‘the accursed share,’ clearing the field so that capitalism’s competitive mechanisms and requirements for endless growth can continue to function.⁵

Fashion, then, systematises this necessary destruction and wastefulness and allows us to experience it as pleasurable, generative. It enchants the experience of capitalism’s disruptive forces, turning them into a celebratory rolling potlatch. Within fashion, the impersonal, economically driven upheaval appears bounded and controlled, directed by individuals’ desires for novelty and creative self-display. Such desires require a vibrant fashion industry to even be conceived, however; their inducement provokes expanded possibilities for anxiety about and satisfaction in one’s identity. As fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson points out, ‘although many individuals experience fashion as a form of bondage, as a punitive, compulsory way of falsely expressing an individuality that by its very gesture (in copying others) cancels itself out, the final twist to the contradiction that is fashion is that it often does successfully express the individual.’⁶

The fashion industry is premised on the ability to make money by managing the volatility of fashion cycles, and thereby assuaging its consumers’ incipient fears and desires regarding novelty and self-expression. It must methodically manufacture and evacuate ‘value’ from its products. Since the nineteenth century, this has typically been a matter of the industry’s releasing new goods on a seasonal schedule and guiding those with money to spend it in concert. This creates the illusion of what sociologist Herbert Blumer calls ‘collective taste,’ which in his view has the power to coordinate the behaviour of society into a recognisable Zeitgeist: ‘By establishing suitable models which carry the stamp of propriety and compel adherence, fashion narrowly limits the range of variability and so fosters uniformity and order, even though it be passing uniformity and order.’⁷

To sustain this appearance of order, industry experts manage the flow of fashion innovation by certifying only certain styles at certain times and disseminating this information through the media channels it sanctions. While some styles emerge from consumer innovations, the imprimatur of the system is necessary to convert them from local or subcultural idiosyncrasies into fashion proper – into a recognisable ‘collective taste’ ready for broader dissemination. The industry’s ability to certify fashionability – to create a cogent and persuasive field in which consumers can feel as though they are operating independently yet safely – depends on access control. Mechanisms of controlling the value of a design sometimes involve qualitative measures of cut, fabric, stitching and so on, but more often than not branding is pivotal. Branding is a reification of the cultural capital the fashion industry relies on in lieu of an explicit system of valuation.

Part of the utility of a system of cultural capital, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, rests in cultural capital’s obscured origins.⁸ Fashion depends on a level of mystification to derive its value; if it could be deduced directly from social conditions or some other set of principles, it would become predictable and thus disqualified from providing the jolt of change that fashion exists to supply. Instead, fashion experts draw on their immersion in the milieus from which fashion emerges – on their unreplicable habitus, Bourdieu’s term for ‘the internalised form of class condition and of the conditionings it entails’ – to make confident and compelling pronouncements on eminently replicable styles as though they were self-evident.⁹ Tastemakers draw on an authority that they can never articulate as generalisable principles but only as immediate and concrete judgments. This authority is compelling to the extent that it comes across as intuitive and indubitable, a natural product of an unteachable fashion instinct. Consumers are free to believe that they too possess or have developed this instinct, even though it is conditioned by the industry and cannot exist independent of it. That is one of the benefits the industry affords; it facilitates fashion competence in consumers that they can enjoy directly as a form of mastery, even when it differs little from obedience in practice.

The lack of a clear logic for fashion judgments allows such judgments to be modified or reversed as necessary, while protecting the status of those who make them. Part of the surprise of seeing a line like Band of Outsiders suddenly disappear is the apparent vaporisation of this ineffable cultural capital. But in fact the mismanagement of financial capital serves as an alibi for the inscrutable persistence of the underlying cultural capital. And no one appears to doubt that designer Scott Sternberg will re-emerge somewhere else in the industry. That’s not to say that specific fashion insiders are indispensable. Brands named for designers can concretise the cultural capital of those they are named for and render the people themselves expendable.¹⁰ Their names have become directly monetisable as investment properties, so their judgment becomes superfluous to the process. The brand is able to confer value and relevance by virtue of its prominence regardless of the identity of the tastemakers operating in its name.

Fast fashion too has made industry experts less relevant; instead the industry promulgates a less differentiated mass of goods embodying contradictory or confusing meanings. In order to stabilise these meanings for themselves, individuals have to spend money. Their choices consolidate the cultural capital dispersed among them in the sales data the companies are able to collect.

The nature of cultural capital makes the specific factors that drive fashion’s evolution necessarily vague. In seeming respect for that obfuscation, social scientists have argued that the evolution of fashion is basically arbitrary, motivated not by exogenous social forces but by intrinsic and impersonal mechanisms internal to the system itself. According to the 2004 paper ‘Random Drift and Culture Change,’ fashion cycles are a matter of ‘random copying,’ and fashion choices have no particular significance whatsoever.¹¹ Here fashion is a language in which all the words mean nothing forever. As sociologist Stanley Lieberson maintains somewhat tautologically in A Matter of Taste, ‘some changes have no meaning other than that they are changes in fashion.’¹²

This offers a model of fashion that replaces aesthetic and historical development – the aspects that directly affect how individuals experience and understand their place in time – with seemingly value-neutral epidemiology. From this point of view, there are no good or bad fashions, no successes or failures in aesthetic or ethical terms that aren’t reducible to sheer fortune. Fashion is a self-sustaining process that can’t be stopped, and periods of fashion are only superficially different – it’s a matter of little concern to this perspective that some periods and cultures promote, say, androgynous garments while others promote female foot-binding.

This view also proposes that fashion is not complicit with any particular economic arrangement. Lieberson, for instance, balks at ascribing fashion’s otherwise meaningless series of changes to capitalism’s requirements for survival, calling it a ‘big mistake’ to assume that ‘organisations with an economic interest in getting us to change – designers, manufacturers, retailers, and advertisers’ are in fact responsible for making change happen. ‘Rather, they take advantage of the fact that a certain subset of the population wants something new simply because it is new, or because the old has become boring or merely commonplace.’¹³ In other words, Lieberson believes that the human demand for novelty drives fashion, and that capitalism (along with its metonym, fashion) has merely emerged, finally, after centuries of darkness and frustration, to accommodate that intrinsic human demand.

It seems far more likely that the human demand for novel commodities emerged with the conditions that made it possible to supply them. That is, fashion as we experience it is an epiphenomenon of capitalism and manifests its imperatives. Historian Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, makes the widely cited claim that ‘one cannot really talk of fashion becoming all-powerful before about 1700.’¹⁴ It rose to prominence with the development of mass consumer markets and the erosion of feudal social hierarchies. ‘Fashionability’ marks out a conceptual space in which consumer demand can be infinitely expanded, creating the endless opportunity for profit in the instability and continual churning of needs. Fashion is a form of institutionalised insecurity. At the same time, fashion channels capitalism’s demand for novelty and turns it into a compensatory creativity, playfulness. As Elizabeth Wilson writes, ‘Capitalism maims, kills, appropriates, lays waste. It also creates great wealth and beauty, together with a yearning for lives and opportunities that remain just beyond our reach.’¹⁵

If fashion is a matter of capitalist expansion, then a successful fashion innovator is not one who comes up with popular designs in fields already subject to profitable change. In fact, designs must cease to be desirable on a fairly predictable schedule to suit fashion’s requirements; going out of style betokens not a weakness in a design but its culminating achievement. The best innovators instigate otherwise meaningless change in new areas of experience that hadn’t been subject to it before, giving ersatz expressiveness to goods that were once semiotically inert. The systemic subjection of more and more aspects of everyday life to the whims of fashion is the price of capitalist prosperity.

Critic Roland Barthes’ assessment of fashion’s fecundity in the foreword to his 1967 book The Fashion System seems more plausible than the accounts of Lieberson and other like-minded social scientists. Barthes does not regard what clothing communicates as an essentially irrelevant and dismissible variable; instead he asks, ‘Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning? The reason is, of course an economic one. Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don’t calculate; if clothing’s producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation.’¹⁶

This need for instigated obsolescence was recognised early in the history of capitalism: Braudel cites pioneering speculator Nicholas Barbon, who in 1690 wrote in A Discourse of Trade that ‘fashion or the alteration of dress, is a great promoter of trade, because it occasions the expense of clothes, before the old ones are worn out: it is the spirit and life of trade; it makes a circulation, and gives a value by turns, to all sorts of commodities; keeps the great body of trade in motion.’¹⁷

These statements suggest that fashion’s communicative richness is not generated by a pre-existing popular demand for a more elaborate means of personal expression but out of the economic need to make possible limitless consumer demand. Capitalism orients consumers away from practicality and toward expressiveness. As Barthes explains, ‘In order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object – a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings.’¹⁸ Fashion allows consumers to communicate more thoroughly with clothes, insisting on user creativity to propel itself. When we seize on fashion’s creative potential, we veil ourselves in the logic of capital. We imagine our tastes and desires can grow and expand without limitation, and that we would die if we couldn’t continually want more.

The alchemy of fashion translates the upheaval necessary to sustain capitalism into something understood as socially desirable, something that can be assimilated by individuals as a matter of personal choice. As sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky argues in The Empire of Fashion, fashion allows the chaos of creative destruction to appear as expressive potential, in part because the industry limits the field and gives it coherent, easily apprehensible form. The language of fashion became, as Lipovetsky notes, ‘the first major mechanism for the consistent social production of personality’ – that is, our first reflexive sense of self, an identity not foisted upon us by birth and tradition but one for which we must hold ourselves personally responsible.¹⁹

Styles of dress once expressed a more static identity, but the increased potential for social mobility that capitalism brought threw those styles into increasing disarray. This prompted sociologists Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel in the early twentieth century to argue that status anxiety and the desire for distinction drove changes in fashion. As the lower classes adopted fashions of the higher classes, the higher classes would find something new to wear. By this logic, nothing truly fashionable could ever be universally popular. Successful fashion is that which permits class discrimination, not free communication. A style that is widely adopted is, by these terms, a failure.

In the status-driven model of fashion, fashion change is propelled by those it threatens and is fundamentally conservative. It posits that the innovative energy released by fashion is automatically contained within pre-existing hierarchies, dissipated in a fruitless chase for prestige. ‘It is peculiarly characteristic of fashion that it renders possible a social obedience, which at the same time is a form of individual differentiation,’ Simmel writes.²⁰ One of fashion’s (and capitalism’s) great psychological coups is that it allows us to be creative conformists. Conformity itself appears creative.

But conformity need not be a matter of feudal servility toward the upper classes. By this ideology of fashion, the only significant motive is to climb an existing social ladder; it is incapable of expressing a wish for a different sort of society. The aristocratic elite’s passively inherited privilege is transmuted, by this fashion ideology, into something that is flatteringly dynamic. They appear to be innovators simply by being born. That may be reason enough to suspect this ideology, which may say less about fashion than it does about a certain nostalgia for a more overtly structured social hierarchy.

Lipovetsky, by contrast, emphasises the expressive over the emulative aspect of fashion. The incentives fashion supplies are not a matter of copying the rich but of being able to express a seemingly unique self. Rather than put a spirit of classdriven aspiration into broader play, fashion, he argues, democratises the latitude in personal expression and the taste for novelty that the rich have always enjoyed. According to Lipovetsky, ‘the fashion economy has engendered a social agent in its own image: the fashion person who has no deep attachments, a mobile individual with a fluctuating personality and tastes.’²¹

In other words, fashion systematically produces a person in a permanent state of identity crisis (or a permanent state of personal ‘growth’). Their ‘individuality’ becomes something dynamic and disposable, in need of continual reassertion in the terms the fashion industry supplies. The success of the industry rests precisely in convincing people to express themselves in its ever-fluctuating terms over and over again, saying nothing new or genuinely risky about themselves. This can be a relief for many, a haven of safety within a regime of perpetual change. This is not so different from Simmel’s view that ‘fashion furnishes an ideal field for individuals with dependent natures, whose self-consciousness, however, requires a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity.’²² Fashion’s primary achievement is muddling subservience with assertiveness, so that imitation of class-inflected role models can appear to fashion adopters to be an autonomous choice expressing their independence, or as a manifestation of their liberated curiosity and inherent demand for novelty.

The success of fashion then is contingent on a specific failure on the part of consumers to recognise their dependency on it. The most successful practitioners of fashion are able to secure allegiance that feels unearned, voluntary. The fashion cycle is propelled by this mystification, the need to make designers appear subservient to consumers even as they continue to lead them. Fashion allows people to feel creative without having to venture beyond an already rigidly structured field of possibility. But this is not a curtailment of consumer liberty. This structured form of personal expression likely affords us more creativity than we would experience without it.

This article was first published in Vestoj On Failure.

Rob Horning is an editor at The New Inquiry.

1. S Kurutz, ‘Band of Outsiders: Fast Rise, Faster Fall,’ New York Times, September 3rd, 2015, D1 ↩

2. J Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 [orig. 1942], p.83 ↩

3. K Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 ↩

4. J Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 [orig. 1942], p.83 ↩

5. For a discussion of Bataille and fashion, see ‘The Conquest of Fashion,’ notes from an Auckland University of Technology workshop, selfpassage.org/CoF/CoF.htm ↩

6. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, University of California Press, Oakland, 1987, p.12 ↩

7. H Blumer, ‘Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection,’ The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1969, pp.275–291 ↩

8. P Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp.70–73 ↩

9. Ibid, p.101 ↩

10. For a recent example, see J D Stern, ‘How Simon Spurr, One of the World’s Top Designers Lost His Name,’ Esquire, August 27th, 2015 ↩

11. R A Bentley, M W Hahn and S J Shennan, ‘Random Drift and Culture Change,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 271, 2004, pp.1443-1450 ↩

12. 12 S Lieberson, A Matter of Taste, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p.31 ↩

13. Ibid, p.92 ↩

14. F Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, p.316 ↩

15. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, University of California Press, Oakland, 1987, p.14 ↩

16. R Barthes, The Fashion System, University of California Press, Oakland, 1990, p. xi  ↩

17. Cited in F Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, p. 324 ↩

18. G Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002, p.29 ↩

19. Ibid, p.149 ↩

20. G Simmel, ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly Vol. 10, 1904, p.142 ↩

21. G Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002, p.149 ↩

22. G Simmel, ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly Vol. 10, 1904, p.140 ↩