Trump, the Unwitting Sustainability Warrior

Fashion

Take a deep breath, and suspend your justified knee-jerk reaction at mentioning Trump before you read on, as I had to do in order to write this article.

There is much debate about the economic damage of Trump’s harsh tariff policies. Even though most tariffs have been suspended for 90 days, let’s go ahead with the scenario in which they go into effect. Many outcomes are still hazy, but one thing is clear, they will likely decrease consumption, especially in America. And in the world of overconsumption, isn’t that what so many of us who are concerned with sustainability want? The developed world, and the US especially, groans under the weight of cheap stuff that the current world economy, especially in Asia, overproduces, and that ends up in landfills. The cycle of planned obsolescence has sped up across the board, but especially in fashion, where we no longer talk about fast fashion from the likes of H&M, but about ultra-fast-fashion from the likes of the Chinese giant Shein.

StyleZeitgeist Podcast: NEMESIS with Emily Segal

Fashion

On this episode we speak with Emily Segal, the founder of the brand strategy agency Nemesis, publishing house Deluge, and the author of the novel Mercury Retrograde. Emily came to fame in the 2010s as the co-founder of the collective K-Hole, which coined the term “normcore.” She went on to work with everyone from Prada…

What Karl Marx Can Teach Us About the Current State of Fashion

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

There’s something rotten in the state of fashion. The kingdom of dreams seems to no longer be capable of producing them. Instead it has swamped its subjects in the sea of overpriced premium mediocre stuff, causing fatigue and boredom. What does an umpteenth collab or a logoed tee mean today? Nothing.

But what does Marx’s theory have to do with fashion? It helps to unpack one of central concepts of Das Kapital, exchange value versus use value. Marx’s basic position is this: in the pre-capitalist economy, most things, including clothing, were produced by highly skilled artisans who were capable of crafting an object, let’s say a coat, from start to finish, and were also likely to sell the product of their labor directly; which means that they fully identified with their labor and were invested into everything they made. By nature of their production, they could not make very much, and many things they made was quite expensive, which in turn limited the consumer’s purchasing power. And so when the consumer did acquire an object, say the aforementioned coat, they would value it for its essential properties, such as protecting him from the elements, keeping him warm, and making him look presentable. Marx called this use value, the stuff that gave a coat its coatness, making that object real and concrete.