to change the fashion industry to a more sustainable one we need a shift from ‘ego’ to ‘eco’. the current fashion system is based on ‘ego’, today’s society is focused on consumption as a way for people to ‘become’ something or someone. Consumption is a continuous quest to build one’s identity, or ego. Can fashion move beyond the ego, are we ready to change gear and think about fashion’s role in socio-cultural, environmental and political developments?
If you look at fashion as a social and cultural phenomenon, it is closely related to identity. we often ‘read’ people’s identities based on what they wear Or categorize people into social groups based on appearance.
Bodies and identities are continuously ‘fashioned’ with layers of meaning. bodies and identities are ‘“dressed” by social conventions’, fashion scholar Joanne Entwistle argues this in her book‘The Fashioned Body’. in order to fully understand the fashion system, it is important to see fashion as a dynamics of change, this means that fashion in itself constantly changes, what is in fashion, and what is out of fashion constantly changes. over the last decades there has been a rapid increase in new trends, with new collections all the time, fashion is a continuous dynamics of change in which a desire for ‘the new’ is constantly cultivated.
as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky argues, "fashion continuously produces the idea of ‘the new and better than ever before’.
This also applies to the ways in which new identities are continuously sold in advertising or in fashion photography. And at the same time, you could say that the fashion system generally thinks in terms of idealized identities and outer appearances. The body then becomes a mere surface, identity is reduced to outer appearance, the fashion system runs on the principle that the Ego of consumers is constructed through buying products in a ‘supermarket of identities’, this is what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book ‘Liquid Modernity’.
Yet, something becomes lost in this system of Ego-Fashion. While fashion is a self-sustaining system, it is unsustainable in an environmental, social, cultural, ethical and material sense - think of all the labour conditions of the workers in the factories, the inhumane production of fashion, the destructive environmental impact of mass production. There are many societal crises and challenges for which fashion is responsible. And at the same time, the fashion system generally prefers to focus on the spectacle of the runway, glamour, star designers, constructed desire and seduction, money, an abundance of visual images and an excess of consumer products. This often denies the actual subjective dimension, the actual lived experiences of the human beings who wear and make clothes.
So today, there is an increased awareness that we, in western culture and society, have lost connection to fashion’s materiality. That we have lost touch with how clothing is made,and where the textiles, yarns and fibres come from.
As the famous trend watcher Lidewij Edelkoort stated in her Anti-Fashion Manifesto in 2015: "Fashion finds itself in an identity crisis". She clearly demonstrated that the established fashion system is outdated. And the death of more than a thousand garment workers in the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 (Bangladesh) And documentaries like The True Cost offered wake-up calls. Yet even though the Rana Plaza collapse was considered the worst garment factory disaster in history, little progress has been made to improve labour conditions for garment workers. So this demonstrates that fashion needs to open up moreto the urgent socio-cultural, political and environmental crises around it. Fashion needs to take responsibility instead of continuing to feed its narcissistic Ego. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/style/survivors-of-rana-plaza-disaster.html
it's clear that the fashion system is untenable today. We have generally lost touch with the human dimension of fashion and with the blood, sweat and tears that go into making clothes. We are facing a ‘systemic crisis' that forces us to think about the more fundamental values of clothing', as fashion scholar José Teunissen has argued.
fashion fundamentally is about human relations and about social interaction. It is about the desire to belong and the desire to be different at the same time. It is about how we live and interact with each other. And this is why it is so important to move beyond the Ego-construction of fashion, to move beyond selling identities in that ‘supermarket’ of identity. And this is why it is important to open up a renewed way of engaging with each other, and with the material resources of the earth. So currently, there is a problematic human-centered focus in the fashion system where the human is privileged over ecosystems in nature. And where human beings, human subjects, have power over nature, often at the expense of or exhaustion of nature and natural resources. this is an anthropocentric understanding ,that privileges human beings as the center of the universe; where humans are separate from and superior to nature.And this is why it is so important to move beyond the ego, in order to draw more attention to ecosystems in nature, and to explore what we can learn from ecosystems in nature, for a more equal relationship between human beings and ecosystems.
So what we have seen is that the current fashion system is all about the Ego, continuously trying to sell idealized identities, while human beings are exploited as dehumanized instruments to mass produce fashion. Even though fashion is partly responsible for some of the current social and environmental problems, it needs to take more action to improve its current way of doing business. If we actually want fashion to make a positive impact, we need to leave behind the human-centric worldview of fashion, and move towards an ecosystems perspective.
Yet at the same time, should we really move from the ego to the eco? Or should we rather think in terms of a continuum of ecosystems, with the human subject being part of these ecosystems? Perhaps we should think more in terms of an equal relationship between human beings and ecosystems instead of ‘having power over…’?
how does the ego relate to the eco in fashion?
the major driver for the continuous dynamics of change and the desire for 'the new' in the fashion industry is the idea that identity can be constructed, and continuously reconstructed through consumption. This idea is spread widely by fashion photography and advertising that continuously sells new identities, introducing new trends at an increasingly rapid pace.
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