Can Fashion Be Defended?

Fashion’s complicity with the global dispersion of commodity culture is unquestionable. Yet, can fashion, imperfect as it is, be defended? Bartlett maintains that, as an embodied everyday practice, fashion is endowed with the capacity to bring pleasure, to incite and transmit affect. Thus, she argues, in an era when politics is largely mistrusted, and increasingly divides people along lines of nation, class, race, sex and gender, fashion might effectively provide a means of challenging such dissension. As a globally dispersed, emotionally charged and highly visual practice in our image-saturated world, fashion may even go some way to repair old and new injustices, at the same time creating a bridge between politics and economics, so providing a platform for today’s most urgent social and cultural conversations.