Frantz Fanon: Fashion and Decolonization on a Planetary Scale

This chapter investigates how Frantz Fanon’s planetary decolonization project can mobilize fashion practice and theory into a praxis of global struggle against the systemic racial inequalities of the neocolonial, capitalist fashion system. I first look at Fanon’s life to establish why he placed his trust in the ‘Third World’ as the driving force of decolonization and how his Third World remains relevant to understanding contemporary fashion’s global precariat. Second, I explore the need for an anti-racist praxis of fashion based on reciprocity and transformation, two cornerstones of Fanon’s critical analysis of the lived experience of race. Such praxis challenges fashion’s hegemonic whiteness and racialized system of production, as well as its enclosure by national identity politics, making it conducive to collective action beyond national borders. An anti-racist fashion praxis, however, cannot bring about reparatory change without addressing the feelings of alienation perpetuated by colonial legacies. Therefore, and third, I recognize such alienation as a psychosocial phenomenon, drawing on Fanon’s interrogation of capitalism and the collective unconscious. I critically examine contemporary narratives that frame fashion as a means of 'healing' and 'wellbeing', highlighting their disregard for the psychological and socioeconomic legacies of colonialism and the ongoing need for reparations. I conclude by showing how a praxis of anti-racist struggle can reinvent fashion as the liberating possibility of becoming ‘somewhere else and something else’ (Fanon, 2021: 193). Fashion, when redefined as such, feeds back into the dialectics of planetary decolonization, creating the transnational solidarity and action our world sorely needs at this point in its history.