The more we learn about how fashion is created, the more we face a moral dilemma that pits our individual freedom of expression and purchasing power against both the environment and the dignity and rights of the poor and working classes around the world. Choose one ethical issue, and explore the tensions that arise between our desire to express ourselves and the ethical consequences of that desire. Where should we place the responsibility for creating a more ethical fashion industry? Make an argument that addresses the ways in which fast fashion may be challenging us to re-think the relationships between fashion, identity, and culture. Select at least four course readings, drawing on at least one reading from the Summary & Synthesis set and at least two readings from this Argument set. A successful essay will focus on a question or problem raised by the course readings; it will offer a clear claim and support that claim with good evidence from the course readings; it will engage with potential counter arguments; and it will follow the style principles. 

Source 1

 

The fashion industry's dirtiest secret

 

The boom in quick, cheap knock-offs is creating a looming environmental disaster

 

Millions of tons of clothes are thrown out each year and are piling up in landfills across the globe. Beate Folesky / EyeEm/Getty, urfinguss/Getty, Peter Cade/Getty, steve cole images/Getty, Tyler Le/Insider

Gad Allon | Business Insider | Dec 23, 2022 |

 

The fashion industry has a staggering garbage problem.

 

Every year more than 100 billion apparel items are created by the industry - enough for every person on Earth to get 14 new pieces of clothing each year, and more than double the amount of clothing produced in 2000. And because of our "buy-and-return" culture, a lot of that clothing is getting sent back to retailers. Despite what many people think, most clothing returns are not restocked, repurposed, or reused - they end up in the garbage.

The problem is dire: Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new ones. And every year, 101 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. And the trend toward fast fashion - cheap, mass-produced items that chase short-term fads - are only making us more wasteful. The fast-fashion brand Zara produces 450 million garments, with 20,000 new styles each year, which remain in fashion for a limited amount of time until they're replaced by new styles the following year. If 20,000 sounds like a lot, the "new kid on the block" just asked us to hold their beer. Shein, a Chinese company which has only been around since 2008, releases 6.000 new styles ... a day! And not all of those clothes are sold. Many fast-fashion companies are stuck with mountains of excess inventory that they struggle to get rid of. The holiday season exacerbates the problem. Around Christmas, more people are buying clothes they intend to return, and more people are tossing old clothes to make space for new ones. That's especially true this year. With the pandemic receding in the rearview mirror, people are planning to buy more winter coats and dress clothes for holiday parties and travel, according to a report from the market-research company The NPD Group. And retailers are urging people to buy, buy, buy in order to clear out the record levels of inventory they built up due to supply-chain delays.

Overconsumption, however, will only lead to more clothing getting thrown out. Thirty percent of what we buy online - half of which is clothing - is returned, and according to ReturnGo, a firm I advise that helps retailers improve their return processes, 25% of returned products end up in the waste stream

Despite the promises of eco-friendly brands to recycle their customers' returns, old clothes rarely get refurbished. A report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that, globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually recycled into new clothes. In contrast, 9% of plastic and about 70% of cardboard are recycled. In 2013, H&M became the first major retailer to initiate a global used-clothing-collection program, setting up thousands of bins in stores across 40 countries. The company encouraged customers to recycle their used clothing, offering vouchers and discount coupons to people who took advantage of the program. But according to a 2016 Fast Company report, very few of the items are recycled into new garments. A majority of the clothes H&M collects end up being donated, while the rest are turned into products like cleaning rags or wipes that only live a short time before ending up in the trash.

 

While these recycling campaigns are great marketing tools, the reality is that the scale and technology needed for them to work doesn't exist. Recycling clothes is expensive, and the existing technology isn't adequate to handle the volume needed to make a difference for the planet. And since manufacturing clothing has become incredibly cheap, it rarely makes financial sense for companies to invest in repurposing or recycling old clothes. So what can companies do to limit

waste?

How can fast-fashion companies reduce their impact?

The fashion industry takes a heavy toll on the environment. Clothing production consumes one-tenth of all water used industrially, resulting in 20% of the world's wastewater - much of which is too toxic to be treated and reused. The most environmentally harmful stages of clothing production are the extraction of raw materials and the manufacturing of fabric. And this impact is worsened once the clothes are finished: The transportation stage - delivering clothes from warehouses to stores or from stores to customers - also creates a huge amount of greenhouse gasses. Each product is delivered to customers' houses one by one, only to be returned or discarded after the (very short) fashion season has ended. Some clothes live longer in secondary markets, but many go straight to the landfill, where they sit in heaps until they can decompose.

Most businesses design their products with manufacturability in mind - meaning they think about the cost implications of manufacturing a product while in the process of designing it. To reduce the harm companies cause the planet, designers should also think about the sustainability of a product when they design it

One way to do this is to simply use more sustainable raw materials. According to a Swedish study. The use of Tencel, a fabric made from sustainably sourced wood, significantly reduces the amount of water needed to manufacture a clothing item. A 2021 study found that silk has the highest environmental impact among various fibers at the extraction stage. In general, natural fabrics such as wool and cotton are more sustainable than synthetic ones. It takes a cotton shirt six months to decompose and a wool sock can break down in five years. By comparison, synthetic fabrics like lycra and polyester - materials used in spandex shorts and other athletic gear - can take centuries to break down.

 

Some brands are leading the way in sustainability, including the up-and-coming brand Garcia Bello, which was conceived of in Argentina by Juliana Garcia Bello. Garcia Bello upcycles returned clothes - taking outdated clothing and mixing it with raw cotton to generate new items, allowing the designer to extend the life of the garment or fabric. The practice also favors clothes that are handmade, ensuring better durability, fit, and lower carbon impact. Another way to limit impact is to focus on the waste caused by returns. Since the pandemic, online shopping - and returns - has surged. In 2022, consumers are expected to return $279.03 billion worth of merchandise, or about 26.5% of the amount they spent - an increase from 2019 when returned items accounted for 19.8% of commercial spending. Brick-and-mortar stores can be used not only as return centers to create more efficiency in the return process, but as they were originally intended: places to try and find the most suitable products in person. David Bell, Santiago Gallino, and Toni Moreno studied data from Warby Parker about the effect of having physical locations where customers can view and try products. They found that these showrooms improved the company's overall operational efficiency by decreasing returns. In addition to limiting returns, companies can also limit waste by recycling. While recycling clothing can be expensive, there are some companies that have figured out a way to limit waste by recycling. Patagonia has said it recycles 100% of the gear customers return through its "Worn Wear" program. But in 2019, the company acknowledged that some products are "too well-loved during use," and the technology to repurpose that gear is it available vet. Patagonia sometimes holds on to these products until - maybe, one day - there's a solution, but other products are sent to landfills or the incinerator. In 2015, in the US alone, Patagonia generated 262 million tons of solid waste. Only 91 million tons, or 35%, of that was recycled and composted. According to Patagonia, the rest ended up in landfills or were converted into energy in a process called combustion-energy recovery. While recycling did help limit Patagonia's waste, the ability to recycle used clothing is still a long way from being a viable option for companies.

 

Whether these different approaches can work at scale is a different question, but starting small may allow firms to test these methods' viability and appeal to consumers. And there's good news for companies trying to step things up: A June McKinsey survey found that more young people are actively seeking out sustainable brands, indicating that as young people start buying more clothes, there will be more of a market for eco-friendly clothing.

Time to be honest

In order to fix fast fashion, companies need to start being more transparent about their sustainability practices. Being honest forces companies to acknowledge that sustainability is a work in progress and puts pressure on the overall system to improve. It also ensures that the waste companies produce is out in the open. Most consumers that care about sustainability are aware that not every practice a company uses is perfect. But misleading consumers who are looking to buy from ethical companies makes matters worse and invites even more criticism.

Unfortunately, not a lot of companies are successful at being transparent about their environmental impact. H&M was once thought of as a sustainable company, only to be criticized later for greenwashing. It used scorecards to describe how environmentally friendly each clothing item was, but a Quartz investigation found that these claims were often overblown or completely false.

 

Everlane is another brand that paints an eco-friendly image while not doing enough to limit its impact. A 2020 report from Remake, an advocacy organization focused on the environmental impact of the fashion industry, found that Everlane was one of the lowest-scoring brands for transparency, only earning a point more than the fast-fashion giant Forever 21. "There's a lot this brand is hiding," Remake wrote of H&M in its report.

As more countries like Ghana begin banning the import of clothes that just get dumped in landfills, companies will have to find solutions to clothing waste. For a solution to be viable, though, it will have to be both sustainable and cost efficient, which means that companies need to have sufficient scale to ensure the cost of recycling is low enough and the fabrics used can be recycled efficiently.

But because we can't always leave things up to firms, there's something we can do as consumers to reduce wasted clothes. The biggest positive impacts come from elongating the life of a garment, reducing transportation, and focusing on sustainable materials. So, this holiday season, try buying local, natural fibers, and items that are likely to remain in fashion longer than Fashion Week

2022 

Gad Allon is the faculty director of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology and a professor of operations, information, and decisions at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Source 2

 

Fast Fashion Is Bad For The Environment. For Many Plus-Size Shoppers, It's The Only Option.

 

OLIVIA MUENTER | REFINERY29

LAST UPDATED NOVEMBER 30, 2021. 2:00 PM

 

If you were a statistician tracking the growth of the size-inclusive fashion market, you could point to a number of data points that say that shopping as a plus-size person is easier and more accessible than it was even a decade ago. On the surface, that's true: In the last 10 years, shoppers have seen an exponential improvement when it comes to retailers offering a size 16 and up and more affordable prices, particularly when it comes to fast fashion. (There are more niche options from smaller, independent brands than ever before, too - eveningwear, workwear, luxury, athleisure.) We've come a long way, sure, but, while there are plenty of plus-size fast-fashion brands available today, it is much harder to find sustainable size-inclusive labels.

There is plenty of information out there that points to just how harmful fast fashion can be, both for the garment workers making the clothing and for the environment; there seem to be even more anti-fast fashion brands and campaigns to remind us of this fact, too. With more consumers educated on the topic, it's not uncommon for influencers and celebrities to be criticized or shamed for shopping or promoting fast fashion. And while we should all be working to minimize our carbon footprint, is the generalized message that says we "all" should be shopping from sustainable retailers fair if over 60% of

women aren't included in the size charts of the movement?

To start, consider the number of options available. Ethical and slow fashion is a smaller market to begin with, which automatically means there are going to be even fewer plus-size options when compared to straight-size ones. As with the rest of the market, though, when you expand your search to ethical fashion brands that offer above a size 22 or 24, you're left with options you can likely count on both of your hands. This is before the price factor and the style preference even factors in.

Marielle Elizabeth - a writer, photographer, and expert who has been working in the intersection of ethical and plus-size fashion for years - thinks that plus-size shoppers shouldn't be held to the same standards as straight-size consumers when an actual, wide-ranging variety of styles in size-inclusive fashion has only existed for a small fraction of time. In particular, for someone who's a size 26 and up, being able to shop at more than one or two stores has really only been an option in the last five years or so.

"Plus-size people, regardless of whether we're talking about ethical fashion or fast fashion, have really only been able to buy pieces in their size with any level of trendiness

- and even that feels tenuous as a plus-sized person - in the last few years," she tells Refinery29. "[Many] plus-size people are still figuring out their sense of style and how they want to dress themselves."

To then shame plus-size consumers for buying from a retailer that's finally catering to their style needs may miss an important level of nuance. Particularly when considering the fact that existing in a fat body means experiencing marginalization in a much broader sense than just shopping. "It is extremely well-documented that fat people are paid less, that they're given less professional opportunities," Elizabeth shares. "And so all of those things compound in a way that makes it, in my opinion, much harder for plus-size people to confidently spend the amount of money that ethical fashion costs."

It's true: While the word "ethical" when it comes to fashion has blurred to the point of becoming a buzzword, it most often refers to brands that have a traceable supply chain in which every person involved in making a garment is provided with safe working conditions and paid a living wage. This means that ethical fashion often costs much more than fast fashion, which underpays workers, among other corner-cutting, questionable practices. Simply put, sustainable fashion costs more money, which can be a significant barrier to entry for folks in marginalized communities. You can, of course, buy clothing secondhand - which is not only more affordable but also keeps fashion from ever entering the landfill - but that sometimes poses its own sizing limitations.

Gianluca Russo, a plus-size fashion expert and author of the upcoming book The Power Of Plus, says that he has mixed feelings about tagging fast-fashion brands on social media. "As someone in the plus-size fashion space, it's nerve-racking to tag the brands I'm wearing on Instagram when I know that a majority of them are fast fashion. But the truth is this: That's all I have," he shares. "As a plus-size man, my options for clothing are abysmal."

Though Russo is conflicted about sharing the brand names, he notes that, for him, it's better than the alternative, which would be to not provide a resource for members of his community: "If we stay silent about the limited options we are finding, then we're doing a disservice to those who look to us for inspiration and guidance." It also supports the notion that the impetus for change should be on the consumer, rather the brands themselves or government officials who should be regulating the industry.

Until regulations are in place, Elizabeth says her goal is to figure out how to include more people in the movement, rather than alienate them. "For me, the question with ethical and sustainable fashion always comes back to how are we making it more accessible and how are we making it so more people want to participate, not how are we making this a competition of who is the most ethical, because both of those things often loop back to financial privilege," she says. "I think that vilifying influencers that are helping people feel better about their bodies and helping people feel more confident in whatever clothing they choose to wear and whatever means they have to buy that clothing is not a way to sell people on ethical and sustainable fashion."

What's more, as she points out, consuming consciously doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing experience until you can afford to buy sustainably all the time. It can be a small change, or a gradual shift, like swapping a few fast fashion purchases a year for a single, high-quality piece that will last a long time. As Elizabeth says, even something as small as changing how you wash your clothes or committing to repairing clothing instead of tossing and replacing it can make a positive impact environmentally.

"We keep trying to get people functioning at 100% instead of just trying to get everyone participating at like 10%," Elizabeth notes. "And I think about that a lot when it comes to the work I do working with the intersections between plus-size fashion and ethical fashion: How do I get someone that's never bought an ethical garment ever before to buy one single ethical garment?" An even easier first step: Following creators like Elizabeth, who share slow-fashion brands and resources regularly (check out her Patreon, too). Because, yes, size-inclusive brands do exist. Do more anti-fast fashion brands who claim to be ethical need to expand their size ranges? Yes. Still, even if every slow-fashion brand did offer plus sizes, the fact remains that most plus-size shoppers have a very different experience with style and clothing than straight-size shoppers have - and as long as fat bias and discrimination exist, this will remain the case. This concept goes beyond just plus-size customers, too.

 

As Elizabeth says, "I think collectively the goal should always be to consume less and make better purchases, but I think the way in which we view ethical, sustainable, and slow fashion needs to hold space for people that have different barriers that they're facing, whether that be size, whether that be gender, whether that be disability, whether that be race." Maybe, one day, the fashion industry will reflect on these differences, and real change will occur for all. 

 

Source 3

 

Power Dressing: Charting the influence of politics on Fashion by Maya Singer September 17,2020 | Vogue

 

Marine Serre has always used face coverings (like this upcycled sweater from fall 2020) in her collections, evoking everything from the traditional burka to balaclavas worn by protesters worldwide-something which has provoked both praise and criticism. Illustration by Christina Zimpel

"THERE ARE DECADES where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen." The famous Lenin quote is acutely resonant in 2020, amid a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and ongoing protests sparked by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Borders are closed, millions are unemployed, and whole industries have been decimated. Meanwhile, the strangest and perhaps most consequential presidential election in American history is upon us.

 

What does any of this have to do with fashion?

 

Everything, it turns out. Fashion is a planet-spanning $2.5 trillion business that employed more than 1.8 million people in the United States alone before COVID-19 reached our shores. Its touch extends from the starry realm of the red carpet to sweatshops as far-flung as Bangladesh and as near as Los Angeles. By some estimates, the industry is responsible for as much as 10 percent of annual global carbon emissions. Fashion also conjures society's dreams, challenges its norms, and reflects back what it believes about itself. And yet the question persists: Can fashion be political? To which the proper reply must be: Wasn't it always? In the Middle Ages, sumptuary laws prohibited commoners from dressing above their station; during the French Revolution, sansculottes wore hardy trousers as a badge of working-class pride. Nearer our own era, the Black Panthers used clothing both to seize power and to resist it, adopting a uniform of leather jackets and berets to signify their deputization as a counter-police force while in the

"Greed is good" 1980s, power suits and pouf skirts sublimated Reaganite corporate triumphalism. There are countless examples of this kind of intertwining.

"Fashion functions as a mirror to our times, so it is inherently political," notes Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "It's been used to express patriotic, nationalistic, and propagandistic tendencies as well as complex issues related to class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality." What's radical today, Bolton goes on to point out, is the way social consciousness and environmental concerns are informing fashion: Designers worldwide, whether indie start-ups or internationally famed maisons, are incorporating politics at every level of their brands, from the fantasies spun on the runway down to the nuts and bolts of how collections are produced. These designers aren't just making clothes-alongside activists and organizers, they're making change. And that's a selling point.

"Every choice you make as a company will influence the world," says Marine Serre, one of the designers at the forefront of fashion's new wave. "What you make, how you make it, how you speak about what you've made for me, everything is politics?"

"I think people are getting it now: Politics isn't binary," says Virgil Abloh of Louis Vuitton and Off-White. "It's this system we're in and all the ways it manifests. There's the politics on your phone and the politics on your street. And, yeah, there's the politics of your clothes."

 

By "binary," Abloh is alluding to America's partisan divide, the polarization of Republican and Democrat, Fox News vs. MSNBC, that most people refer to when they talk politics. But as he notes, the partisan is only one element of the political, and "the politics of your clothes" today can mean everything from buying one of Off-White's i support young black businesses T-shirts—with proceeds this quarter going to the anti-gun violence organization Chicago CRED to not buying much of anything at all out of a dedication to sustainability. Fashion politics may mean signing the #PayUp petition launched by the organization Remake in the wake of reports that brands were stiffing factories post-COVID, leaving already vulnerable garment workers in the lurch; it can mean wearing a black gown to the Golden Globes in support of Time's Up or dressing to affirm a genderqueer identity-all of which is to say: The politics of fashion are in the eye of the beholder. But they are there, acknowledged or not.

"I'm not about screaming an opinion, but obviously my work is engaged with conversations about race, about class, about justice," explains Samuel Ross, designer of British menswear label A-Cold-Wall*, a 2018 finalist for the prestigious LVMH Prize.

"Through the look and feel of my

clothes, I'm trying to capture an experience often overlooked by fashion." Ross points to a childhood spent in part on London council estates of brutalist structures of poured concrete; in transforming that experience into something aspirational, he's affirming the dignity of poor and working-class people living in tower blocks today.

Serre, meanwhile, has the climate on her mind. She dedicates at least 50 percent of her runway collection to upcycled clothes creating a slick frock out of vintage Fair Isle sweaters sourced from the Netherlands, for example and her current collection imagines new communities emerging, phoenix-like, from a burning world. It's a theme of hope and unity that's also reflected in Serre's crescent moon logo, made famous by its appearance in Beyonce's Black Is King.

"It's

an ancient symbol—it crosses East and West; you see it in Arabic culture and in Greek. Anyone can recognize themselves in this logo and you can appropriate it like I have, because it's totally free."

"As I see it," [Martine] Rose says, "fashion in the absence of opinion and argument is just...merch."

 

Maria Grazia Chiuri seems to agree. Seizing the reins at Dior in 2016, she opened her first show with a statement of intent, printing the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's essay "We Should All Be Feminists" on tees sent down the runway alongside looks that pointedly updated the aesthetic codes of a house built on the ur-femininity of founder Christian Dior's New Look.

"Declaring my—and the maison's—wish to step away from the stereotype of women by integrating feminist ideas is a way of keeping Dior's heritage relevant," Chiuri explains. "At this stage, being feminist should be the default."

Feminism, pluralism, eco- and class-consciousness: Designers such as Ross, Rose, Serre, and Chiuri are joining in crucial debates. For Virgilda Romero Vasquez, however, the intersection of fashion and politics is a matter of life and death. A mother of four who began working in L.A. garment factories when she arrived from Guatemala 19 years ago and who still makes only about $300 a week-Romero Vasquez was, on July 29, impatiently awaiting the result of the California Assembly Labor Committee's vote on SB-1399, a bill that would eliminate the piece-rate payment system that allows factories in the state to pay sewers well below minimum wage. Romero Vasquez was also recovering from symptoms related to COVID and going to work in a small, airless building where, she told me, it's often too hot to wear a mask. "We had 40 people working," she says, "and seven of us got the virus, but only six came back-the other passed away." (SB-1399 also includes provisions to make brands legally liable for poor conditions in the factories they've subcontracted to make their apparel. If the concern seems

remote, Romero Vasquez may prompt you to reevaluate: The factory where she previously worked produced almost exclusively for a popular fast-fashion brand with celebrity ambassadors.

Meanwhile, she describes the space as rat-infested and says it's common for the rodents to urinate and defecate on the clothes.

"I don't know why people think they get clean things from a

dirty place," she says.)

Issues of labor exploitation in the fashion supply chain that of fast-fashion brands in particular-have languished in the shadow of glitzier conversations about what we wear and why. But just as coronavirus outbreaks in L.A. garment factories drove this summer's explosion of transmission throughout Southern California, the labor question eventually affects everything and everyone else in the industry. "How could it not?" asks Livia Firth, cofounder and creative director of the sustainability consultancy Eco-Age and a forceful advocate for a more ethical supply chain. "No matter what clothes you're wearing, someone made them. Do you know who?

And how? The newest form of political fashion is to be able to tell that story?"

Questions about labor are relevant whether you're asking if the pro-feminist T-shirt on a store-window mannequin was made by a woman in a sweatshop, or comparing a brand's pro Black Lives Matter Instagram post with its record of diversity in hiring. Or if —as Chiuri did for Dior's cruise 2020 show —you answer the question by celebrating traditional artisanship, collaborating with Ivory Coast-based studio Uniwax to create expressive reinterpretations of toile de Jouy.

All of this is a necessary part of the budding movement for accountability-the raison d'être that unifies everything from eco-activist campaigns for transparency about climate impacts and waste to callouts about cultural appropriation as when activist Céline Semaan challenged Serre on her use of Islamic imagery on burka-like face coverings) to initiatives like the 15 Percent Pledge, launched this summer by Brother Vellies founder Aurora James to commit retailers to upping their inventory from Black-owned businesses. Talk and empty gestures just won't cut it anymore.

"Give a little money, post a black square on Instagram, then back to business as usual-

-it started

to feel like a big PR push, as though the uprising was just a temporary blip," says stylist Law Roach of the corporate solidarity statements issued amid the Black Lives Matter protests in June.

"That hurt," he adds. "That hurt me a lot."

Roach, who works with such stars as Zendaya and Celine Dion, says the demand for accountability extends to celebrities and influencers.

"You can't just post a photo of yourself

wearing a BLM T-shirt people are onto that; they'll be up in your comments, like, What have you actually done for the movement-and who made that shirt, anyway?"

"Look— posting those selfies helps normalize previously radical concepts," says Apryl Williams, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. "I'm not dismissive of any of that, but I do worry that people overestimate its power. If you're not really engaged with the issues, all you're doing is performing."

 

The diffusion of politics into performance is, of course, an ever-present danger when fashion takes up a cause. Another is that politics itself becomes "fashionable" and thus subject to fashion's trend metabolism. "What happens when an issue becomes passé?" asks author and activist Naomi Klein, whose seminal 2000 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies anticipates many of the conversations about accountability reemerging now. "Inevitably, that's what happens, because what fashion wants is novelty-and what movements need is time." As Klein points out, the fight for workers' rights has been building for decades, advancing in tandem with the globalization of supply chains, and over all this time, the fundamental demand the right to unionize hasn't changed. "That's the game-changer," Klein says.

"Workers are always their own best advocates, whether the issue is unpaid overtime or unsafe conditions. The trick," she adds,

"is how do you force brands to uphold that right?"

***

THIRTY YEARS AGO, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an article titled "The End of History." Anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the Soviet-style communism that parried with Western capitalism for global dominion, Fukuyama

argued that the great political debates had all been settled and that going forward, "politics" would be a matter of tinkering. Fukuyama's thinking was blinkered in many respects, but his analysis does help explain why, for the past 30 years, a lot of what fashion's been up to has consisted of looping through vintage ideas at an ever-increasing clip. If we all feel like everything has already been said and done, why even try to say or do something new? Marc Jacobs captured that zeitgeist in his grunge collection for Perry Ellis, shown in 1992 at the peak of post-Cold War exultation, with its thrift-shop aesthetics auguring a fashion epoch premised on reiteration and pastiche.

The exception to this rule is the creative spark lit by diversity, which makes perfect sense: When the world is complete when there's nowhere left to go - the "shock of the new" is supplied by outsiders fighting their way in...

 

Most of the designers and creatives interviewed for this story are Black, as is stylist Law Roach.

Each of them authors their own version of fashion, and fashion politics, as does Pyer Moss's Kerby Jean-Raymond, who stunned the industry by opening his spring 2016 show with a

12-minute video about police brutality; Hood By Air visionary Shayne Oliver, whose recent comeback has been enthusiastically welcomed; Telfar Clemens, of White Castle collaboration fame; multidisciplinary minimalist Grace Wales Bonner; Amaka Osakwe, founder of the Nigeria-based Maki Oh, whose soigné looks incorporating native techniques count Michelle Obama as a fan; Tyler Mitchell, the photographer and filmmaker who recently inked a deal with the creative agency UTA. Calls for greater diversity in fashion have intensified in the wake of the BLM protests; the point of this very abbreviated list is to show that, for the fashion industry, inclusion is not an obligation it's an opportunity.

"More Black creators means more stories, more ideas," asserts Abloh, explaining why he's devoted a fair amount of time of late raising money for a scholarship fund that will send Black students to premier fashion schools. "As an industry, we've got to find ways to onboard people from the community—which is hard when internships don't pay and hiring is based a lot on who you know or who your family knows." (It's also hard when companies don't foster an inclusive work environment, Abloh might have added an issue that another new initiative, the Black in Fashion Council, cofounded by publicist Sandrine Charles and Teen Vogue editor Lindsay Peoples Wagner, was launched to address.)

More diversity in the fashion industry is a prima facie good. But it's important to be clear-eyed about what it won't do, which is cure the sickness of the supply chain. For years, issues of economic justice here narrowly defined as the right to consume and the right for garment workers to earn a living wage have been set in competition with each other, as though insisting on the latter is tantamount to saying low-income Americans don't deserve stylish clothes. This is a false choice: America's poor and precarious don't need access to cheap, disposable goods-they need money. They're in the same quandary as the garment workers, as the economic fallout of the pandemic has laid bare. Where inequality is concerned, money is both the problem and the solution. The rest is noise.

Martine Rose believes that, thanks to COVID, we are now, suddenly, living with a future again.

The end of history ended the moment the gears of the world sputtered to a stop "creating a tear in the fabric of reality," as she puts it. "It seems like, after so many years of fiddling around the edges of the familiar, something genuinely new could come in." She points to movements that arose in prior moments of rupture, like Dada emerging from the ashes of World War I or hippie counterculture blazing defiance to the society that produced the war in Vietnam.

A-Cold-Wall* Ross is more cautious. "I think COVID has surfaced conversations that have been going on belowground," he suggests. "I don't believe that means we'll get a total social reset, but it has created space to ask questions. We can see the system now—and choose to evolve it in a direction that's more humane. Which makes it an exciting time to be a designer," he adds, "because you can help drive the shift."

That shift won't be the work of one election. It may not even be the work of one generation. But the work starts today, and a key part fashion can play is to use its genius for dream-creation to help people imagine what comes next. "Let's embrace change," Rousteing says. "It's how you make new history