Fashion and Emotions in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said warns us against the possible consequences of assuming a radical, irreducible difference and distance between ‘different’ cultures: “In our wish to make ourselves heard, we tend very often to forget that the world is a crowded place, and that if everyone were to insist on the radical purity or priority of one’s own voice, all we would have would be the awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess” (1994, p. xxi). In this presentation, drawing on Said’s emphasis on “overlapping territories, intertwined histories”, I will discuss the limitations of the concept of cultural appropriation as a critical tool. I will argue that media critiques of cultural appropriation can be viewed as symptomatic of an emotional capitalism (Illouz, 2007) whereby the radicalism of cultural activity is reduced to an increasingly emotional language of so-called cultural sensitivities without regard for issues of labour, production, and the global political economy in its interconnectedness.

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This symposium explored how fashion reacts to, processes, and embraces the global crisis of borders and displacement, engaging academics and a number of young designers from Austria, Ukraine and UK, who live and work in and between their homelands and the West, and creatively draw on their heritage in their engagement with the field of western fashion. Engaging a number of practitioners from these countries resonates with the current world-wide interest in their work. Historically, the phenomenon of fashion was viewed with suspicion in the socialist world, while socialist fashion was frowned upon in the West. Yet the recent burst of creativity and energy in the region has already resulted in designers from the New East becoming some of the hottest names in the global fashion world. This symposium engaged with the latest generation, whose participants successfully reverse an exotic, passive Other into an exotic, yet agency-potent Other. Consequently, their work is actualized as some of the most successful projects in the field of contemporary western fashion.

The symposium was part of programme of events which accompanied Calvert 22 Foundation’s exhibition Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at Calvert 22 Space from 23 February – 15 April 2018.