{"id":34662,"date":"2021-12-27T07:13:03","date_gmt":"2021-12-27T06:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=34662"},"modified":"2023-07-09T14:44:56","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T12:44:56","slug":"haute-couture-fashion-and-the-aestheticisation-of-social-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/haute-couture-fashion-and-the-aestheticisation-of-social-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Haute Couture Fashion and The Aestheticisation of Social Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The intersection of haute couture and social justice is inherently peculiar, even potentially disturbing; why would luxury fashion houses choose to be associated with subversive political potential? We know\u00a0<\/em>that these brands do not represent radical societal transformation, but in fact quite the opposite (given their enduring affiliation with inordinate wealth and prestige)\u2013so why the illusion?<\/p>\n

Leave us in peace to gawk at the new Margiela while the world burns!<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Nearing the end of the 20th<\/sup>century, the pristine and impermeable case of haute couture was shattered by the elevated status of popular culture and contemporary digitised media. Owing to an incremental osmosis of cultural references, the diffusion of fashion was not only a trickle-down process but one of trickle-up and trickle-across. Consequently, haute couturebecame more susceptible to imminent dialectical tensions between its aversion to and fetishization of grassroots cultures.To this day, accusations of cultural mis-appropriation, glamorisation of suffering and greenwashing are common-place. For the industry of high fashion any facet of culture is perceived as fair game to be adopted, dissolved of original meaning and re-envisioned into its purely aestheticised counterpart, its resemblance to the original source lies in appearance and nothing else.<\/p>\n

This complex may be partly attributed to the postmodern phenomenon of semiotic fragmentation; following what Derrida terms the \u2018radical indeterminacy of meaning\u2019, <\/em>signifiers no longer bear logical relation to their signified. For instance, modes of dress that used to correlate to particular class identities are now employed in haphazard, de-historicised ways by haute couture brands, as the cursory guiseof a Spring\/Summer collection; the aestheticisation of a tangible material reality. From designers like Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, who\u2019s punk hued ragged creationshave been criticised for ephemeralising poverty to the extremes of John Galliano\u2019s 2000 Dior collection that took directstyle inspiration from the homeless population of Paris, for the past two decades we have beheld fashion as the controversial vessel of hauntological bricolage.<\/p>\n

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Vivienne Westwood at 2016 Red Label show protests against shale gas fracking<\/p><\/div>\n

According to Mark Fisher, this flurry of referents, once disentangled from its original context, becomes promptly subsumed by the neoliberal matrix. Westwood prioritises climate activism in her work, yet whatever lofty aspirations a designer may espouse,\u00a0they are limited by their position as a brand ambassador whose ultimate purpose is to hock their wears to the next trendsetting denizen. The new \u2018ethical turn\u2019 in fashion integrates social critique as ethical capital wherein social hierarchies remain intact despite economic restructuring under the so-called banner of ecology or social justice. For example, Westwood and Fendi\u2019s involvement in the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative proclaimed \u2018female empowerment\u2019 for workers who came from marginalised communities in Africa. Yet as Elke Gaugele highlights \u2018the simple economic act of renumerating people acceptably for their labour is transformed into a performative act of class hierarchy.\u2019 The very rubric of activism becomes decontextualised, misrepresented and aestheticised. How can real social hierarchies be dismantled when the market commodifies all forms of dissent? Does all fashion activism devolve into political performativity?<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, we can expect very little radical impetus from fashion, specifically haute couture<\/i>labels,<\/i>whose prominent position lies in the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy. However, this gaping inconsistency is hard to ignore among the frequent collaborations between high fashion houses and the special social justice flavour of the day. The \u2018new luxury\u2019 is ethical and we live in an epoch where ethical capital attracts savvy consumers. Gen Z, a prominent cultural touchstone, are the most politically charged generation yet; according to research by the Institute of Economic Affairs, two thirds of young Britons want to live under a socialist system; being ideologically left is indeed perceived as cool. Yet, by aestheticizing subversive politics, are luxury brands simply paying lip service to activist spaces? Absolutely yes, and yet, perhaps therein lies the crux; fashion occupies a curious space in the cultural imaginary \u2018between the fictionality of performance and the effectiveness of performativity.\u2019 In their recent study, Kollnitz and Pecorari assert that fashion enacts both self-conscious acts (performance) and unconscious occurrences which precede the subject (performativity), it engenders both collective action and individual forms of self-representation<\/span>[1]<\/sup><\/a>KOLLNIZT, Andrea and PECORARI, Marco, Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion\u00a0<\/em>(Bloomsbury, 2021)<\/span><\/span>