Global Fashion: Unequal Exchange Between the Capitalist Center and Periphery

Global fashion refers to the worldwide system of clothing production, distribution, and consumption, driven above all by capital’s imperative to expand. This expansion is evident in the relocation of production to countries with the lowest wages and weakest labor protections, the exploitation of surplus populations of garment workers through racial hierarchies, and the general cheapening of labor power. The system operates unevenly across regions, distributing benefits unequally in ways that both reflect and reinforce colonial structures. Many formerly colonized regions and their fashion systems are incorporated into global fashion as peripheries, supplying labor and “authenticity” to corporations, media, and educational institutions in the capitalist core.

This chapter critically examines how the capitalist world-system and global fashion as its product depend on neocolonial power relations and unequal exchanges between the centers and peripheries of the global economy. In doing so, it seeks to bridge studies of fashion and decolonization with critical political economy. Such an approach accounts for the surplus value extracted from fashion’s peripheries, demands its redistribution, challenges the relentless accumulation and monopolization of capital–now the greatest threat to the survival of the planet–and, in doing so, opens the possibility of decolonization on a planetary scale.

Keywords: Capital, Race, Coloniality, World-system, Delinking