FASHION: FASHION AND SOCIETY, how fashion exploits

how could fashion  enable agency, collaboration, dignity and distinction, while recognising our shared territory and diverse identities ?

 Does fashion’s contribution to societies need rethinking? How is the dominant fashion system perpetuating injustice and exploitation? What does equity in fashion mean to you?

Fashion is about connectivity. It connects us to ourselves at personal and professional levels, helps us to connect across communities where we live and work. It connects us in place both geographically and in political terms. It also connects us to our histories, our families, our cultures, and really importantly as well, it connects us to the future.

So what we do now in relation to fashion leaves a legacy to those who come after us. It literally tells who we are both morally, ethically, and philosophically. For those involved in fashion as a creative endeavour, whether on a professional or a personal level, we do well to consider the words of Ai Weiwei 艾未未.  

"There is no beauty, no aesthetic judgement that is not related to morals and how we look at the world"

[Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights].

 

Fashion is powerful. It's not only enabling exploitation, it's exhibiting exploitation as something to be applauded. 

The dominant fashion system perpetuates this idea of injustice and exploitation through the volume and speed of production, through the pressure on price, through this notion of the margin being the most important thing. This imbalance of power means that all involved are actually being exploited one way or another.

But this exploitation is imbalanced. It's very well documented. And whilst experienced differently at different points of the system, labour exploitation involves the work of many millions of people, mainly women, in forced labour, very often linked to sexual harassment and abuse. Modern day slavery is prevalent across the fashion system. It's been known about for a very long time. Now we absolutely have to find ways to stop it.

Ability, whether it's across race, class, gender, or age, is not seen equally. There are systems of oppression that make up the majority of what fashion looks like. Fashion creativity takes place across all parts of the world, all kinds of people. The representation of the human identity is about being creative, but the diversity of that in fashion is not fully visible.

It's better than it was, but it hasn't ceased. Fashion exploits people across the world in a way that is applauded on catwalks, in campaigns, in range meetings, in buy negotiations, and what is bought and worn. So, in what ways can fashion's social and legal licence to exploit be changed - what we can do, what we can expect others to do, and what we can stand up against.

Achieving equity in fashion means everybody having the opportunity to take part. It sounds quite simple. But for everybody to be recognised for their contribution means that we have to undo the social constructs of inequality.

It means there needs to be an equal chance for everyone to have access to livelihoods across fashion's activities. It means ensuring that what we do in one place doesn't adversely affect people in another. That's in different places or different times. If we think about intersectionality and intergenerational access to being, we need to consider not only the effects on people in other places right now, but also the effects of what we're doing now for future societies. Ultimately, we need to both decolonize and decarbonize fashion.

Can we hope to achieve this by creating and encouraging a new ethic to emerge in fashion practise.? How can we take the steps towards achieving it?

Society has been developed to allow exploration of how fashion can paradoxically be a force for societal good, creating agency, collaboration, dignity and distinction between people, whilst also establishing and perpetuating injustice and exploitation.

As individuals, communities and societies we can experience and bear witness to life-changing injustices, ranging from micro-aggressions to situations of conflict. So how we can use fashion to challenge injustices in the world around us? What alternative activities and behaviours in response to the question: ‘How to use fashion activism to challenge social injustice?’