What Happens to Fashion When Exclusivity Stops Being Chic?
In the fashion industry, elitism is supposed to be a feature not a bug. But, darling, elitism is so last season.
After months of aimlessness and These Uncertain Times, of being not just pandemic-inessential but practically speaking useless (the end of going outside spelled the end of new clothes), the fashion world is back in the news for something other than its absence. As many industries call out bigotry from within, the glamorous ones are no exception, but are in a rather specific bind. Ginia Bellafante’s New York Times article about the reckonings at Condé Nast, publisher of magazines including Vogue and Bon Appétit, gets at why a new fashion for radical egalitarianism has caught that company off-guard:
For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right” people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright. There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change.
But something clicked for me when I stopped to consider the subhed: “Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?”
Rather than simply wonder (as many are these days) whether fashion’s rigid power structures are flexible enough to permit greater diversity, it’s helpful to step back and look at what the industry is.
Exclusivity is a feature — the defining one — not a bug. To talk about snobbishness or lookism as things fashion writing or marketing could not just mitigate with better etiquette but root out is to miss the big picture.
Efforts to combat racism in fashion are not new, and do not inherently imply reinventing the industry. Models like Iman or Naomi Campbell can exist in a world that venerates conventional beauty, wealth, and thinness. So, too, can non-white editors and designers.
But conversations about inclusivity have a way of not stopping at one group. Perhaps it should be possible, but under the current all-oppressions-are-intertwined approach, it’s impossible to talk about racism without also discussing sizeism, ableism, classism, and more.
I think of Frida Garza’s Guardian critique of a lifestyle site recently found guilty of being out-of-touch: “Man Repeller suffers from the same problems most of fashion media does: a tendency not to talk about money, failing to maintain truly diverse staff, and only occasionally incorporating plus-sized fashion into its coverage.” Garza then quotes a Man Repeller commenter, who hones in more precisely on the problem: “I’m sorry but MR can never be inclusive. You’d have to change your entire raisin d’etre [sic] capitalist driven exclusivity is your core and base, there’s no changing that with a bit of reading.”
Indeed, the whole point of the fashion industry — not just one blog or magazine — is aspiration. If you see someone who’s got what you don’t, maybe you feel inadequate, and think that if you bought what they’ve got, you’d be a foot taller and five million dollars richer. It’s the high school popular kids, but for women, etc., of all ages, and on a societal scale: these people are the most beautiful, these handbags the most covetable.
Upscale lifestyle writing is about aesthetic judgments: the superiority of some lifestyles to others. Only certain homes are worthy of a profile in Architectural Digest. While the specific criteria often shift, fashion is wedded to the notion that some garments, some bodies, are better than others. True egalitarianism would mean that anyone you see at the supermarket or on the bus is as deserving of lifestyle coverage as the well-connected daughter of rock stars.
These tensions are built into the different meanings of the word “discrimination.” The same term is used for “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex” and “the ability to discern what is of high quality; good judgment or taste.” It doesn’t take a deep grounding in Bourdieu to see where problems might arise. Is it ever possible to be discriminating without, in one way or another, discriminating?
A similar dilemma arises in elite education. There’s the same emphasis on exclusivity (absurdly low admissions rates), and performances awareness here and there in lieu of more substantive changes. In education and fashion alike, elite status gets signaled via a perhaps surface performance of anti-bigotry. (In my Toronto neighborhood, upscale boutiques have Black Lives Matter signs, while more utilitarian stores do not.)
But universities are also about education, and exist perfectly well in countries where there’s lower (or no) tuition, and where admission is open or at least not quite so laborious. It’s not inconceivable for higher education in the U.S. to purge itself of a great deal of its snobbery. Harvard itself might not survive, at least not in a recognizable form, but learning would be fine.
Fashion has a long history of announcing that it “cares” about the cause of the moment, long enough that this was skewered in a 1992 episode of Absolutely Fabulous. The tendency of fashion to absorb and regurgitate other, perhaps more serious aspects of the surrounding world is even its own meme (“but make it fashion”). Think grunge on the 1990s runway or, more recently, choreographed protests at fashion shows.
The fashion and beauty industries are not strangers to hypocrisy: an anti-aging cream could be marketed as investing in one’s self-worth. The newly fashionable transparency about e-commerce models’ dimensions often just means knowing, rather than intuiting, that the model is 5’10” and wears a size two. And now, there’s a way in which a brand or influencer’s from-the-rooftops apology for white privilege can serve to obscure other forms of (overlapping) privilege, such as money privilege.
As my podcast cohost Kat Rosenfield has astutely argued, anti-racism of a kind (a very surfacey, introspective kind) is the new self-help for posh white ladies. There’s nothing stopping a designer shop from decorating its plywood with protest slogans, and some are doing just that.
But the fashion of the moment — an at least performative embrace of hyperinclusivity and anti-capitalism — is anti-fashion on a more fundamental level. It’s not enough for the upscale fashion and lifestyle universe to self-flagellate, to promise to Do Better. To truly embrace inclusivity, it would need to self-destruct.
I personally would not lose sleep mourning the end of that world, and the self-hatred baked into its business model. I say this as someone who takes joy in clothes, shoes, and the occasional glittery nail polish. A landscape without Vogue, Chanel, and the various more obscure and thus more chic trappings of high-end style would not be one of everyone going around in identical potato sacks, or where everyone (still) employed in associated industries would be out of a job.
Style — and style coverage — would still be possible. Concepts like “objective beauty” or “good taste” might not, but would that really be so bad?
