Hoskins is a young English Marxist who has
written a break-through book on clothing – or as it is called in academe –
‘fashion.’ Many male leftists in the U.S. think
clothing is an after-thought and anyone not wearing a t-shirt, blue jeans and
dirty sneakers or boots all the time is bourgeois or something. Typical male workerist stuff, but there it
is.
Marxists and workers have used clothing and
fashion in iconic ways. The Bolsheviks were known as the ‘men in leather
jackets.’ There is Lenin’s cap, Mao’s
jacket, Che’s beret, Trotsky’s 3-piece suit and glasses, the Black Panther
Party’s leather jackets and berets, Castro’s military fatigues, Malcolm X’s
suit and short hair-style, Ho’s wispy beard and the Vietnamese ‘black pyjamas,’
Chavez’ red shirts, the red bandannas worn by U.S. miners in the 1920s around
their necks (which got them called ‘red necks’), Palestinian ‘keffiyeh’
scarves, black power dashiki’s and Afros, Nehru jackets worn by African socialists like Julius Nyerere,
red bandannas worn over mouth and nose by street protesters in our time, union
jackets, protest T-shirts, red and black armbands, protest buttons, camouflage worn
by U.S. autoworkers, meat-packers and miners in the strikes in the 1980s, etc. Che Guevara’s beret image is reported to be
the most reproduced image in the world.
Clothing is about the most intimate
‘product’ we use everyday - its use value is right up there with food and
shelter. However, somehow it is to be
ignored – perhaps because of its female associations. Ignoring clothing and other body adornments as cultural factors is one of the most immediate and unavoidable impressions people
make. Fashion is a large capitalist industry – the third richest human in 2013 was the Spaniard who owns fast fashion house Zara, which sells cheap clothing. In
2010, fashion sales reached $2,560 trillion. The industry employs millions of workers across the globe. Hoskins explores every
aspect – oligopolistic ownership of designer brands, production and labour
conditions, advertising and fetishism, clothing and women, racism in the
industry, modeling, fashion blogging, styles like ‘fast’ and haute couture, high fashion 'branding,' dreadful
environmental and animal impacts, some WW II history - and the constant of economics. For instance, there are 6 main high-fashion
oligopolies – the same number that control the media in the U.S.
Take jeans.
Designer jeans. Spend some time looking at jeans over $100 a
pair. What do you see? Many of them look like the really-used rack
at Savers, a local reuse store. Carefully
ripped and torn, chemically ‘stone’ washed or bleached all over or in various
places, using thin denim material to be soft.
This use of bleach pollutes the water; sanding jeans to soften and whiten them produces
silicosis in the workers who do it. The
jeans have already had their life spans shortened because the style is
‘worn.’ You are purchasing ostensible authenticity. And incidentally, you
have to come back to get new ones sooner.
This style broadcasts that these are not to be purchased as work
clothes anymore but instead as disposable clothes. The very tight skinny jeans style also leads
to clothing that stops fitting at a quicker pace than looser jeans. Designer jeans have planned obsolescence. Welcome to the idiocies of capitalism, advertising and 'style.'
Hoskins goes into detail on the body
image of high fashion, and attendant industries like dieting and cosmetics, as
destructive to women and models - even leading to the formation of a Models
Union in 2009 in London. She looks at the debased fur and animal skin trade
– including the horrible conditions undergone by alligators for Hermes fashion
bags that sell for $200K, or by the children who have to strip the alligator skins. Massive cotton irrigation has drained
watercourses like the Azov Sea in Uzbekistan to 15% of their former
size. In China, fabric production itself uses 200 tons of
water for every ton of clothes. The Dow
Bhopal disaster was from an explosion of pesticides used for cotton production
at that unmaintained facility – a crime yet to be paid for by Dow. Even clothing recycling promotes the idea
that clothing production is a ‘circle’ - when it is really a drain. In 2002 China alone produced
20 billion pieces of clothing – 4 for everyone on the planet. She criticizes some who allege that ‘fast
fashion’ or cheap clothes are ‘working class.’
Marx and Engels both commented that workers in London had access to bad food and poor
clothes. Marx commentated: “They wear … a suit of tatters.” Things have not changed that much if you buy t-shirts at Wal-Mart. Socialism can change that.
The fire in 2013 at the Rana Plaza
in Dhaka, Bangladesh reminded U.S. labor folks of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York. 1,133 died and 2,500 were injured at Rana Plaza, all after
being ordered into an unsafe building.
This was the largest garment fire in history. This happened in 2013, a hundred years after Triangle - which we thought we'd never see again The conditions of 1911 have only
been exported to other countries whose labor movements are not yet strong enough to stop them.
Hoskins reveals that even ‘luxury’ brands use this sweat-shop labor.
Hoskins deconstructs the myths around
‘haute couture.’ For instance she
delineates the history of high fashion’s collaboration with fascism. When Paris
was occupied, Chanel, Vuitton and Dior continued to dress the Nazi military
wives and the Petainist collaborators. Chanel
herself, unlike the cuddly film in which she was played by Audrey Tautou, was ‘anti-Semitic,
homophobic, a social climber, opportunistic, ridiculously snobbish and an active
collaborator’ according to Hal Vaughan, who wrote a book about her. Of course, Tautou was incidentally the
commercial representative of Chanel at the time of the movie, which conveniently ended before the war. Hugo Boss designed and made the original
‘brown shirts’ for the Nazi Party, being a party member since 1931. Cristobal Balenciaga dressed Franco’s wife in
Spain, then moved the Paris where he also
dressed the Nazi elite. In 1972 he came out of retirement to dress Franco’s
niece. Not all designers are like that, but the majority know where their bread is
buttered.
Given the massive and obvious problems in the garment industries, corporations are trying to respond. Hoskins analyzes the ‘charity consumerism’
sometimes used to sell clothing – ‘ethical fashion,’ ‘sustainable fashion,' and
the like. Many times this is part of CSR
schemes by large corporations to ‘greenwash’ and ‘blue-wash’ their products, in order
to sell more goods. She points out two
kinds of consumer boycotts – actual political consumers and the cons that
attempt to imitate them. She critiques
phony philanthropists like U-2s Bono, who started a clothing factory in Africa, only to sell it off and have the production moved
to another country. Instead of dealing
with the real problem - Africa’s fashion
industry was destroyed by cheap imperial imports – Bono joins the crowd. Or his “RED’ program, which neglects every
labour, environmental or political consideration to donate a small amount to
fight AIDS. This only when you buy a top corporate product from Armani, GAP, Converse or
American Express. Or TOMS shoes, which
says it will donate a pair of shoes if you buy a pair. The pairs they donate are really very cheap
plimsouls made in Ethiopia,
not quality shoes. This actually allows
TOMS to make a larger profit overall and does little for the indigenous African industry.
Hoskins, however, has not come to degrade
all fashion as ‘capitalist’ fashion, but to indicate where it can go
right. Clothing, like all art, crafts
and cultural forms, is integral to what it is to be a human being. We wear clothing every day. And we can, if we want, dress for the purpose
of our minutes - not just in some routine way. Clothing does not have to be a commodity. The “Mao suit’ won’t be the
only clothing under socialism, as that was in large part a product of fear and conformism. In East Germany,
Hungary
and other post-capitalist states, nudity was actually a big movement, so
clothing might be optional at times. She
describes clothing movements inside capitalism that try to oppose commercialism
or capitalism – punk, hippiedom, grunge, rap, the hijab – only to point out
that clothing cannot challenge capital because it is regularly
co-opted. High fashion regularly steals
ideas from oppressed groups - Jean Paul Gautier was the most prominent. Even Top Shop in the UK sold Palestinian scarves for
mass sale. The commodification of rebellion.
Class is the prime point in clothing. A classless society will remove the class
markers that mar fashion. It will halt its wastefulness, environmental damage and exploitative working conditions. She points to
revolutionary Soviet designers like Liubov Popova & Varvara Stepanova, who
created quality art clothing to be worn by peasant and working women. And whose designs flew of the shelves.
A socialist look at feminism, “Fortunes of Feminism” by Nancy Fraser is
also available at Mayday and will be reviewed soon.
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
November 6, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment