Name: Stitched Up
ISBN: 9781783710072

Tansy E. Hoskins

The Anti-capitalist Book of Fashion

Stitched Up

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

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’.

Shopping is continually proffered as the way out of emotional pain. Yet shopping to repair the emotional pain of a broken heart, a lost job or boredom is like trying to fill a hole with air – the black hole of wanting does not go away no matter how many clothes you buy. The unfulfilled nature of modern society means that a lot of shopping gets done, and a lot of commodities fruitlessly consumed. Schor has called this ‘the materiality paradox’. In modern society, the times when your need for non-material meaning is greatest are the times when you are mostly likely to maximise your consumption of material resources.

Whilst fashion can provide an outlet for aesthetic creativity and enjoyment, this is subject to the demands of the markets that control fashion production. The human need for clothing and creativity has been commodified into the production of fashion for profit.

The radical Evelyn Reed explained in 1954 that there is a difference between criticising people for enjoying buying and wearing fashion and criticising capitalism for compelling people constantly to buy new clothes. The freedom to wear and enjoy fashionable clothes must also be accompanied by the freedom not to do so.

When accused of increasing pollution and poverty, advertising agencies argue that they merely redistribute existing desires rather than increase people’s desire for ‘stuff’. This premise is extremely important to cigarette advertisers, who argue that they do not cause more people to smoke, they just steal existing smokers from other brands. Similarly, fashion corporations claim that they are simply responding to human needs and use advertising to compete for existing markets – relieving them of responsibility for the millions of tonnes of textiles found in landfill.

Engels observed that under capitalism, competition and private property ‘isolates everyone in their own crude solitariness’. In a marketised society people are judged by their material worth. A designer handbag gives its owner status by signifying the amount spent. Under capitalism people are locked into a mindset where having is more important than being. We learn to value things only when we directly possess them rather than looking for happiness in ourselves, in labour, in society or in nature.

Shopping is routinely proffered as a cure for everything from heartbreak to low self-esteem. Zygmunt Bauman describes how: ‘From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives.’ In reality, a new dress cannot mend a broken heart, a new bag can only metaphorically and not literally satisfy hunger. Because we live in a marketised society, it is little wonder that the ‘visible divinities’ of money and commodities are purported to cure heartache. Our real needs are ignored and what we experience instead are the artificial needs created by capitalist society. In this way we lose out twice.

Survivors were trapped in a living grave. One young woman, Rogina Faidul, described lying buried in rubble for three days, her arm trapped under a sewing machine. When rescuers located her she had to amputate her own arm to escape. The official death toll of Rana Plaza was 1,133, making it the deadliest garment factory disaster in history. Another 2,500 people were injured, many disabled permanently. Retailers who have admitted to using the Rana Plaza factory include Benetton, Bon Marché, Mango, Matalan, Primark and Walmart, but hundreds more companies use low-cost Bangladeshi factories, including upscale brands like Armani, Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors and Hugo Boss.

If this sounds familiar it is because this is the pattern that has characterised the garment industry ever since. The apparel industry is the site of a perpetual struggle between labour and capital. Subcontracting complicates this conflict because, unlike in other industries, fashion retailers do not own the factories that produce their stock. Retailers hire manufacturers, who hire contractors, who hire subcontractors, who hire garment workers. This chain allows retailers to claim that they are not responsible for garment workers. In fact, retailers exercise almost total control over the pay and conditions of garment workers by forcing factories to accept rock-bottom prices.

It is indisputable that people in developing countries want jobs in factories, since they are indeed better than some other forms of subsistence. But what pro-sweatshop arguments tend to ignore is that the poverty that drives people into sweatshops is a recent phenomenon caused by colonial and neoliberal strategies. Poverty wages were used by colonial powers to create mass destitution that forced people to take any work that was going at whatever cost to themselves. Neoliberalism has followed this pattern, with the IMF and World Bank pushing structural adjustment programmes that have destroyed local industries such as fishing and small-scale farming. This has created the hordes of people forced to migrate to cities in search of work. Couple this need for work with the loss of protective trade tariffs and labour laws and it becomes clear why companies like Nike or Primark rush to exploit the situation in the third world. Under capitalism there is a mass of unemployed, semi-employed, casually or precariously employed people. Marx called them the ‘reserve army of labour’. Anyone who has read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath will recall this mass as the means by which capitalist landowners are able to pit starving workers against each other to drive wages down and down. Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the reserve army of labour has become a global phenomenon. This army is purposefully maintained to allow capitalists to play a global game of ‘race to the bottom’. Thus sweatshop jobs have systemic causes. These jobs might be in demand, but this does not mean they do not shackle people into poverty and abuse or that they are not the result of a destructive system. There are very few women over the age of 40 to be found in China’s export factories − ‘spent and discarded the women move on’.

There is nothing ‘natural’ about a single one of these environmental catastrophes. They are all the result of the workings of the fashion industry under capitalism. Earth, air, animals, water and human health, all are subject to fashion’s bitter harvest. The draining of the Aral Sea is due to its waters having been appropriated to irrigate Uzbekistan’s 1.47 million hectares of cotton. This practice began under Soviet rule and has continued under the current dictatorship. Cotton is hugely water-intensive: a single cotton bud uses 3.4 litres of water, and a single cotton t-shirt consumes 2,000 litres. Uzbekistan is now the world’s fourth largest exporter of cotton, with most of its 800,000 tonnes being exported annually to Europe. Every Autumn, schools are closed and students and teachers forced to harvest cotton. Head teachers are given cotton-picking quotas and students face punishment and even expulsion for non-compliance.

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.

Stitched Up The Anti-capitalist Book of Fashion

Reviews

Highlights