Tansy E. Hoskins

Stitched Up delves into the exclusive and alluring world of fashion, to expose class division, gender stereotyping and wasteful consumption. Tansy Hoskins illuminates the political and sociological dimensions of an industry which promotes and supports the dominant values of our age: image, glamour, money and sex. Hoskins also provides a fascinating historical narrative, showing that the clothes we wear are as indicative of who we are as they were during the reign of Louis XIV. She tackles key contemporary issues, such as the controversy over 'size zero' and the impact of fashion in depleting the world's natural resources. In a provocative move, Stitched Up argues that fashion controls our aspirations and self worth through a set of impossible beauty standards. At a time when high spending on clothes persists despite economic recession, Stitched Up provides a unique critical examination of fashion in relation to contemporary culture and the distorting priorities of capitalism.

The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

Stitched Up

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Neoliberalism drives down wages and pits workers in different countries and companies against each other in the so-called race to the bottom. To fill the spending gaps produced by falling wages, neoliberalism pushes personal credit – an issue particularly pertinent to fashion. Neoliberalism has gone hand in hand with globalisation (‘a polite term for big companies setting up in places free from environmental restrictions or pesky unions’) and fiscal reform (‘tax cuts for the rich balanced for the sake of fairness with welfare cuts for the poor’). As a result, we live in a global society where malnutrition causes a third of all child deaths, yet world-wide, sales of luxury goods stand at approximately $150 billion, 60 per cent of this $150 billion goes to just 35 brands, most of which are owned by just a few conglomerates.

H&M clothes are made in factories from Tunisia to China. They are mass-produced, using valuable water and crop resources and cause appalling pollution. The company produces up to 50 collections every year and advertises them using faked photographs of perfect bodies. In 2010 21 Bangladeshi factory workers were killed in a fire whilst making H&M clothes. It seems that nothing could link the peaceful lanes of Linkenholt with this globalised chaos, but it does. Both are part of a business plan, devised within a capitalist system that allows vast resources to be concentrated in the hands of one person. This concentration of wealth and power recurs throughout the fashion world.

When the Nazis occupied France, their plan was to move the entire Parisian fashion industry to Berlin or Vienna. Although they decided against this, they did almost completely destroy the ready-to-wear sector, which had been a largely Jewish industry. The loss of French exports had given manufactures in New York a window to establish themselves as an alternative centre for fashion creation. For much of the fashion industry, the war’s levelling of both the creation and wearing of fashion was disastrous. Where was the money in fashions that could not quickly be made unfashionable? How were the rich to be superior if egalitarianism eclipsed exclusivity? The economic importance of the Paris fashion industry was summed up by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, an advisor to Louis XIV, who said: ‘Fashion is to Paris what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain.’ Determined to keep their goldmine open, in 1945 the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne organised a tour of the latest Paris-designed fashions through Copenhagen, Barcelona, London and New York entitled Le Théâtre de la Mode. To avoid causing offence to war-ravaged cities by showing off the luxurious designs, they were sold as a form of resistance – beautiful clothes made ‘with frozen f ingers in their famished city’.16 The endeavours of Paris to regain its dominance were embodied by a man who had spent the war designing clothes for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators – Christian Dior. He now turned his talent towards reinserting rigid hierarchies into fashion. In February 1947, Dior presented a collection which the media dubbed the ‘New Look’. In Dior’s words: ‘We were emerging from a period of war, of uniforms, of women soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, flowering busts, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla.’ Essentially, the New Look replaced ease of movement and physical strength with an ultra-conservative vision of femininity complete with corsets. The look matched the political agenda of returning women to home and hearth, the style’s forward thrust of the hips a sign that women were designed for childbearing. As 1.25 million women left industry, the message was clear: women no longer needed work wear. Dozens of books and articles have been written on how this was what women wanted and how ultimately the women of the world chose to adopt the New Look. But to claim this is to ignore both the political climate of the era and the role of the powerful fashion system. In the tradition of fashion promotion, the styles received heavy coverage through a sophisticated network of media, including magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Seventeen and Women’s Wear Daily. The New Look had its own newspaper advertisements, publicists sent free clothes to influential women to wear and be  photographed in, and department stores and shops promoted the style to encourage women to buy entire new wardrobes.

While Cristóbal Balenciaga refused to allow his name to be put on licensed goods, Christian Dior licensed everything from handbags to hats. Perfume remains a heavily licensed, mass-produced commodity without which the luxury sector would not survive. Most perfumes are not created by design houses but by licensed multinational corporations like Procter & Gamble and Coty. There are huge profits to be made from perfume. Laboratories sell the liquid for two and a half times more than the cost to the licensee, who retails it for between two and four times the cost again, making a 30−40 per cent profit.

Along with bags, designer companies market items like belts, key rings, scarves and wallets to women and men who dream of buying ‘luxury’. For the TV series Secrets of the Superbrands the BBC visited the Luxatica sunglasses factory in Italy where 55 million pairs of sunglasses are made each year for brands like Chanel, Prada, Bulgari, Ralph Lauren and Paul Smith. Not only are the ‘designer’ sunglasses made in this factory, but many are also designed there too. A pair of sunglasses from one of these brands retails for several hundred pounds, yet they are trifles light as air, nothing more than a few grams of plastic and glass shrouded in an illusion of luxury.

Unhealthy concentrations of ownership leave industries vulnerable to the failure of big firms, market fluctuations and unfair domination by a single corporation. Whilst monopolies in other sectors can cause prices to rise and standards to drop, what happens when our received ideas, culture and information are dominated by just a few companies?

The lack of criticism is compounded by fashion being the only creative field that bans the media for misbehaving. Whilst a film critic can simply buy a cinema ticket, or a restaurant critic can don a false moustache and dine incognito, a fashion critic must receive a personal invitation to a performance that will occur only once.

Our ability to shop, discard and replace has become the prime indicator of our social standing and personal success.

As Engels pointed out in 1844, economic circumstance cannot be offset by a willingness to work, thrift, perseverance – or being well dressed. Without class there would be no fashion industry as we know it. Clothing is a key way for the rich to signal and reproduce their power. Once the masses gain access to elite fashions (or close approximations of them) the rich move on in order to leave everyone else behind. 

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes: ‘World trade turns almost entirely around the needs, not of individual consumption, but of production.’ Corporations must produce fashion in order to make money. If everyone bought only the clothes they needed it would spell disaster for corporations, so instead ‘false needs’ are created to keep me and everyone else shopping. These needs are false because they are the manufacturers’ needs not the consumers’.

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