Is fashion political?
“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” The famous Lenin quote is acutely resonant in 2020, amid a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and ongoing protests sparked by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Borders are closed, millions are unemployed, and whole industries have been decimated. Meanwhile the strangest and perhaps most consequential presidential election in American history is upon us.
“What you make, how you make it, how you speak about what you’ve made – for me, everything is politics”
What does any of this have to do with fashion? Everything, it turns out. Fashion is a planet-spanning US$2.5 trillion business that employed more than 3.384 billion people globally. Its touch extends from the starry realm of the red carpet to sweatshops as far-flung as Bangladesh and as near as Sydney. By some estimates, the industry is responsible for as much as 10 per cent of annual global carbon emissions. Fashion also conjures society’s dreams, challenges its norms, and reflects back what it believes about itself. And yet the question persists: Can fashion be political? To which the proper reply must be, wasn’t it always? In the Middle Ages, sumptuary laws prohibited commoners from dressing above their station; during the French Revolution, sans-culottes wore hardy trousers as a badge of working-class pride. Nearer our own era, the Black Panthers used clothing both to seize power and to resist it, adopting a uniform of leather jackets and berets to signify their deputisation as a counter–police force, the ‘Greed is good’ 1980s, power suits and pouf skirts sublimated Reaganite corporate triumphalism – while in Australia the ‘Free the Flag’ campaign, to release the design of the Aboriginal flag from its copyright holders, is playing out prominently on T-shirts bearing those words from Aboriginal-owned label Clothing the Gap. There are countless examples of this kind of intertwining.
“Fashion functions as a mirror to our times, so it is inherently political,” notes Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s been used to express patriotic, nationalistic and propagandistic tendencies as well as complex issues related to class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.” What’s radical today, Bolton goes on to point out, is the way social consciousness and environmental concerns are informing fashion: designers worldwide, whether indie start-ups
