The Global Runway: Dialectical Insights into Transnational Fashion's Potential

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries & Critical Political Science
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: CPS: Contesting Capitalism: Agency and Social Change

Abstract

The global fast fashion industry wreaks havoc on both the environment and the lives of its workers. Despite its abuses being highlighted through news and other media, the fashion industry has largely ignored the negative impacts it has on our lives. Instead, even throughout a pandemic, the consumeristic desire that fast fashion and retail sparks was hardly diminished. If anything, a new technological age of online shopping, more expansive and responsive than before, is under way. As we become increasingly more reliant on digital technologies to connect ourselves to the world, fashion’s transnational power is ever more politically important to investigate. It is on these increasing possibilities and avenues for critical and democratic intervention into fashion and its effects that this paper seeks to draw focus.

Building on previous research analyzing the distinction between fashion as a capitalist system and fashion as a complex dialectical force for emancipatory aims, this paper will investigate the ways this dialectical quality is evident on a global scale. A central starting point here is that fashion is complex, personal, but also communal and creative when utilized for non-capitalist/exploitative purposes. Its dialectical features have not been sufficiently articulated or theorized for politically emancipatory and egalitarian goals. This paper seeks to analyze the methods of disenfranchisement (especially among indigenous communities) and exploitation that occur on a global scale – particularly in the Global South – and how small pockets of resistance to these dominant norms of fashion consumption are being challenged.

While resistance and truly democratic intentions for fashion exist, as Horkheimer and Adorno remark in “The Culture Industry,” capitalist co-optation is persistent and often stifles these ideas by re-branding them with anti-democratic processes. This paper will conclude by the ways these negative trends operate as a symptom that fashion can also help us address. The global nature of fashion necessarily lends itself to a potential emancipatory politics because radical future change needs to be systemic and fashion as a language translates effectively. The paper will also explore questions of cultural appropriation in an age of global consumption and what idea-sharing and democratic processes on the creation of a new egalitarian fashion system would need to address for future success.

Author

• Maylin Hernandez, UMass Amherst | University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley