The powers of fashion are beyond consumerism, through fashion as an expanded practice, we can help its users to share capabilities and engage in more open processes of mutual acknowledgement and discovery. To shy from fashion intersecting with various forms of injustices that can be used to play a part in processes of exclusion and bullying. So how to do this?
In terms of fashion on a sustainability level, we also need to entangle it into the natural environment, the social environment, and into our mental environment to help us see where these injustices lie, for example the double standards the West. We don't apply the same model across the world or to other populations. We have, for example, environmental regulations. Trying to limit extraction and pollution and so on in the environmental ecology here in the West. But then, we outsource the labour and the production overseas to countries where, then, there will be extraction, pollution, and other types of labour injustices and so on. And of course, the mass extinction of animals, etc.
But as long as it doesn't happen here, it's OK if it happens there. So that's a typical type of injustice in which fashion is very much entangled these days. But we also have the social dimensions of fashion, the second ecology. A similar thing happening where a dominant group in society sets the standard of judgement across the whole population.
We tend to be lead by group that is already in society, well-educated, with fancy high earning jobs set a beauty standard (which can incoporate the desired/accepted skin colour, and race) and market it through media and by using a language that is deemed eloquent. They set they latest fashion and explicitly disregard other populations and the struggles of the populations are having to catch up, in that sense. So that's another type of injustice where you have a double standard at work within the social ecology.
Mental ecologies, meaning that if my self-esteem and my sense of self-worth and my desires are actually entangled into what other groups coming from richer backgrounds or from positions of privilege. If they set the standard for my sense of self-worth, well then, there's again an injustice happening. And of course, we have the same kind of setting within the fashion system where this also happens across all three ecologies.
The social, environmental, and mental ecologies of daily life. interactions from childhood in settings all around, school, work, daily life, public and private life or even online. for example how you are treated on the school playground. or excluded from night clubs with a dress policy, like a code word to keep poor people or people of colour out.
Clothing is used as an excuse to actually sort people and exclude people in much more everyday ways than perhaps what we usually think. And of course, we can take the example of bullying, too. Of how bullying, in many cases, clothing is actually the excuse that is used when the cool kids are rejecting the losers on the playground. That they are saying, oh, we don't like that colour or whatever - think Mean girls, "on Wednesdays we wear pink" don't come and sit with us, you're not the cool guy and they say something about clothing. Because we all know that we shouldn't judge people by the surface. But this is what happens.
fashion is also so deeply entangled in our mental lives, for example lying about clothes-- "I got it in the "sales", "I just threw it on" "I don't really care about clothes"
To wear clothes means that we put ourselves out there for others to look at and to see. There is no unmediated way of appearing before others where I can just transfer my inner mind into yours and it's all fine. You will see me and judge me. And this is, unfortunately, the way that social interaction works. But this is, of course, in that realm that fashion operates and can be so successful, but also can be so deeply unjust.
So the question here becomes, why do you lie? Why is it so uncomfortable to sometimes actually acknowledge that, well, I actually wish I was looking a little bit more sophisticated or interesting. through dressing we can exercise a sense of control, a sense of self-authorship. We choose what we buy and wear, how we style and accessorise it, we choose when we wear it, the occasion. There's something extremely powerful in that.
So the BIG question for sustainability, the issues around injustice is, how do we make this fantastic possibility of self-authorship available to as many people as possible? At the same time, so we don't sacrifice the planet and create conflicts and undermine people's self-esteem and make them addicted to this medium.
But can you use it as a tool to develop a self-knowledge and take oneself on a journey to become what one really wishes to be in the world?
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