Corporate Callout: Profit and Social Capital
by Taraneh Azar
originally from our Devotion issue
The discourse between fashion as a consumer product and fashion as an artistic beacon emerges along the ambiguous line of social consumerism. The role that fashion plays in society balances between its visual concept and the industrial movement of mass consumerism. The pliant nature of fashion as art lends itself to wide implication and serves as a testimony to the expression of a socially and culturally transparent generation of consumers. The intersection of function (even one as simple as covering your body) and stylistic choice places fashion in a unique position between cultural expression and art. The catch arises when brands fuse their products with contemporary issues. In reality, even though garments can signal social identifiers to those around us, the houses producing these products are ultimately still corporations. They support political parties and social movements for the reason that any corporation does anything—to drive profits and capitalize off of a target consumer market.
We live in a particularly image-driven society. The result is that we are what we wear. Whether actively choosing to buy into that view or not, our natural snap judgements of people are shaped by what we see and garment choice comprises a large segment of that appearance.
Fashion must be addressed as a form between two oftentimes opposing forces—the corporate sector and the identity-driven consumer. Understanding that houses already recognize this unique feature of their industries is key to understand what those Burberry rainbow stripes or “We Should All Be Feminists” Dior t-shirts are all about.
Virgil Abloh’s collaborations with Jenny Holzer, with key themes of social justice and cultural revolution, are tinged with irony. Lest we forget, Abloh is running the key house of LVMH, which is one of the largest and highest grossing cultural conglomerates globally. Holzer is known in her work for questioning the accumulation of power and the abuses that corporate entities inflict on the masses through exploitation and capitalization. Abloh has a reputation as one of the biggest corporate mouthpieces today, stealing designs from lesser-known designers and failing to award credit when warranted. Abloh assumes the role of corporate fashion personified while Holzer has been revered for her opposition to those very phenomena. It is hard not to see the blatant dissonance between the pair as Abloh assumes an air of social awareness within his S/S 18 presentation through his collaborations with Holzer, a long-revered feminist and social commentator, while Abloh himself stands for a corporate sector which abuses the power that Holzer is so well known for calling out.
The corporate sector is telling consumers what to wear, even if one actively opts for garments with ‘socially aware’ imagery or only chooses to dress in a way that signals their position as an ally and someone who endorses what’s right. The corporate sector is telling consumers what to care about and therefore wear, and we as consumers are the engine reinforcing this largely new principle.
That being said, corporations are choosing key social movements to represent when looking to drive up sales and sell what’s cool and what everyone wants—a big red flag that screams “I’m socially aware, I’m cool.”
We are our image and we devote our time, money, energy and lives to shaping not only who we are and what we do, but more importantly what others think we are and think we do. It’s easy to deny and say “no, not me.” But the truth is, corporations are only able to capitalize off of social movement and cultural need because we allow them to. We swap image for actuality, appearance for reality and social direction becomes, by default, empty. To resist the trend of appearing to be down with the revolution, acting when needed to defend social progress and change is the only way to combat the dilution and appropriation of the movements that drive progress and change. In buying into corporate social capitalization through opting for the appearance of social awareness that is void of action we, by default, intercept the very movements that corporations—and us who feed them—deem attractive enough to appropriate.
Awareness and the ways in which one actively participates in being culturally aware are forms of social capital. Revolution and social movement are selling points–selling points so attractive and appealing that scores of individuals are flocking into the realm of inactive awareness without standing up for the movement when it comes time. While some of the consumers eager to buy items from Burberry’s LGBTQ+-centered Fall/Winter 2018 collection are those whose identities are finally being represented, others are people who continue to misgender trans women (I’ve experienced it firsthand).
Off-White’s SS18 collection attracted a crowd of individuals eager and willing to endorse the fact that “The Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise,” but they still revere corporate America as the center of the fashion world. They watched wide-eyed and inspired as models walked the runway among abusive influencers such as Ian Connor, who has been accused of sexual assault by 21 different women over the past two years. And to go back to the irony of Abloh and Holzer’s collaborations, note that Connor has appeared on Abloh’s Instagram page time and time again. Connor even sat front-row for Abloh’s debut Louis Vuitton collection. One has to consider the implications of letting him sit next to the most influential people in the fashion world for one of the most highly anticipated collections of 2019. Holzer, on the other hand, has been a championing voice for, and inspired a generation of, intersectional feminists. You get the picture.
The appearance of devotion is one that consumers and corporations alike choose to support. By enabling legacy houses like Dior and Burberry to create a culture of appearance while lacking accountability or action when it comes to social movement and revolution, social movement becomes empty—it means nothing more than what you post on Instagram or what rhetoric you spew at parties.
Identity must be reflective of action and consumers need not endorse the image of social awareness before the oppressed, but rather the true meaning behind any given social movement.
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