Fashion, Fully Exposed
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Fashion brands are struggling to engage in meaningful and authentic conversations around the Covid-19 pandemic, the environment and the Black Lives Matter movement. Even with the best of intentions, written statements in the form of press releases and social media posts, lack authenticity. In many cases, their words and images are performative, void of any true action. In other cases, they expose white, patriarchal privilege, inherent bias and a past full of mismanagement, inequity and even racism.
Fashion brands find themselves in a particularly precarious position as an industry that is both an artistic expression and a consumer product. It is both form and function. This tension has always existed, but not so tenuously as in this moment; ironically, fashion is now fully exposed.
Luxury fashion brands are especially fraught, their refined designs, and the rarefied worlds created around them, are meant only for an exclusive few. It’s this exclusivity that drives up prices, exponentially over the years. And as consumers are demanding more transparency from fashion brands, they are also realizing the extent to which they are paying to create this world of exclusivity. Quality, being as subjective as it is, is particularly out-of-balance when it comes to luxury products, as the cost of goods is so drastically different than the retail price. With this in mind then, what genuine bonafides do these brands even have to speak about social issues at all? Wobbly at best.
And yet, this shouldn’t, nor can it be, an excuse. Fashion after all is not inherently evil, it is merely a manifestation of our social values at any given time; the zeitgeist. And since these values are changing, right now in cataclysmic ways, so must fashion. This means seismic shifts in how fashion does business—a categorical house cleaning from the cotton fields to stores and to the landfills, that rethinks sustainability from an environmental and human perspective.
This will take an immense amount of time and effort. So, instead of spending energy on empty promises, crying in guilt, or being defensive…look inward and start systematically rebuilding a new fashion industry. There is a whole generation that is ready to embrace a more diverse, more just, more inclusive fashion industry.