Fashion for Every-Body: envisioning all humans to prosper in fashion

How could fashion be re-invented as an artistic practice based on equality and a fairer system that encourages all humans to flourish? Addressing global inequality in fashion requires exposing discriminatory and exploitative practices, both in the design process of sketching and designing in studios to manufacturing and stitching in factories. This means challenging the domination of colonial extractive knowledge and processes to re-envision alternative fashion systems that call for an end to profit driven wage-labor and money, nations and nation states. How could fashion move away from capitalist modernization?

This paper suggests for fashion to reconstruct counter capitalist and socialist experimentation, fashion should look for inspiration from the socialist theories of Karl Marx and William Morris and past political and socialist experimentation for societal equality. Drawing on socialist visions offers scope for future radical and novel conceptual frameworks which could enable a more egalitarian version of fashion to emerge. Addressing inequality is not new, turning towards histories of global socialisms can show fashion how alternative egalitarian non-hierarchical community principles envisioned societal equality through the arts; the Paris Commune which briefly in 1871 proposed luxury as a shared human right. Here, the concept of communal luxury, taken from the Manifesto for the Federation of Artists, re-envisions artistic practice as a joy that everyone takes part in, a collective endeavor that forms part of daily life so that ‘all art was artisanal and skilled in its production and in the socialisation of its makers’ (Ross 2016, p.58). This approach if applied to fashion would allow for an inclusive and decolonial fashion design system in which designers and those engaged in manual labor could be more closely aligned towards a participatory aesthetic experience, as practiced by the Communards in the Paris Commune.

To work towards a fashion in which all humans flourish and every type of body, regardless of race, ethnicity, ability, gender, class or sexual orientation, requires a process of making colonial logic visible and learning from those who have challenged societal oppression. The Paris Commune shows that another fashion is, indeed, possible.