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.
The effects and the superficial causes of this sad state of affairs are widely discussed, but deep, underlying ones are not. Perhaps that’s because fashion by its nature is preoccupied with the surface. But there are theories that can help us see beyond the facade. I already described one, of conspicuous consumption, developed by Thorstein Veblen in 1899. But we can go back even further in time, thirty years before Veblen, to Karl Marx and his magnum opus, Das Kapital. Marx may seem like an unlikely candidate for describing the current state of fashion, but bear with me (there is a reason why I assign his theory at the StyleZeitgeist Academy).
In the past thirty years Marx has suffered a curious fate, especially in the neoliberal America, where he is seen not as a serious philosopher, but as a fiendish revolutionary devil whose writings cause instant communist brain damage. This view, mostly propagated by those who have never read Marx, has been so successful that Marx is virtually absent even from American so-called liberal academia. But Marx is a serious philosopher, who has not only accurately described some of our societal and economic conditions, but offered prescriptions that – it may shock you – have been incorporated into even the American society that only accepts the color red in its meat.
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.
Under the capitalist economy, Marx posited, such relationships disappear, or as he famously wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.” Division of labor replaces a skilled craftsman with an assembly line worker who is charged with doing a repeated single task, who has neither the conception nor the ownership of the final product, which is sold by someone else half the way across the world. Instead of identifying with the final product, the worker is now alienated from it, and therefore is no longer invested in it as an artifact. Neither is the capitalist who sells it, because the product now becomes merely a commodity to be exchanged, meaning traded for money. Moreover, under the capitalist world order, where money becomes everything and where accumulation of objects becomes the most direct measure of one’s self-worth, the consumer sees the product in the same way. We start valuing things for what they cost; their worth is measured not in terms of what an object does and how well it does it, but in monetary terms, in what it can be exchanged for. This is what Marx called exchange value.
Marx posited that exchange value is abstract (what is money?), while use value is concrete (try walking around in the winter without a coat). Our prizing of abstract value leads to another of Marx’s concepts, commodity fetishization, where we put commodities above ourselves because we value them for what they can be exchanged for, and not for their use.
If this all seems too brainy, let’s get concrete. Anyone who has tried to sell anything on Grailed will know exactly what Marx is talking about. By and large, the audience there only views garments in terms of exchange value, what it costs them, what the market is willing to pay, and so on. They are the epitome of the exchange value mindset that Oscar Wilde described so pithily in 1890, when he wrote, “Nowadays, people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” People with the exchange value mindset don’t alter their ill-fitting garments, because alteration may decrease their resale value. Most of the streetwear market, with its artificial scarcity and flip mindset, is the epitome of exchange value. Hype is exchange value. Limited edition is exchange value. “Collecting” has become an alibi for exchange value.
Let’s go further. What is a $600 t-shirt with a logo on it if not an example of a commodity as an abstraction? Its use value is next to zero. Additional use value can be derived from superior craftsmanship of an object, but an expensive t-shirt offers none. What is valued in such a garment is the purely abstract – the logo it carries and the price itself. This is commodity fetishization.
Now zoom out and extrapolate that t-shirt mindset to all of fashion, and you can easily see that the fashion consumer is exhausted by decades of being forced to value fashion in purely abstract terms. We’ve gone through decades and decades of quality dilution, which has diminished use value, to be replaced by the logo as the marker of exchange value. The purely commercial run-of-the-mill commodities, like those t-shirts, that were once shoved into the showrooms for department store buyers are now on the runway. Fashion has turned to the logos and to collabs for empty value creation. And its consumers are now drowning in abstraction. But abstraction is like junk food; you feel good while you gorge on it and then you don’t. And so finally, with fashion enthusiasts first and foremost, they have come to the inevitable conclusion that there is no there there, and no amount of creative director musical chairs or celebrity endorsements will get us out of this malaise.
There is only one solution, for consumers to rediscover use value and for producers to give them garments they can be excited about. We need something concrete. The designer who understood this best was Martin Margiela. His work was about the garment, first and foremost. In his quest for prioritizing the garment, he made an all-white label that was attached to a garment by four stitches, so it could be easily removed. But the exchange value driven consumer did no such thing, turning the garments into a fetish. By now Margiela has become a fetish unto himself. Going forward, we need to reevaluate this state of affairs. Karl Marx can help.
