Fashion as a Social Movement

You can look at apparel as a 3 trillion dollar industry, a detriment to our environment, or maybe our most powerful form of self expression. But one way people rarely see fashion is in its ability to bring about equality.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Italy with my family. We would weave in and out of small boutiques, stopping to look at the works of up and coming designers as well as big brands. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, lined thin walkways and we would window shop, treating these stores more like art galleries than places to buy clothes.

And these feelings fit perfectly with contemporary ideas of what fashion is — beautiful art pieces where the paints are cloth and the canvas is the human body. Each work worthy of museums and royalty, crafted by erudite sewers, weavers, and artists.

But in the past 8 years, fashion changed. All of a sudden, a minimalist aesthetic took over. Simple pieces nearly indistinguishable from what you could find at off-price department stores became high-end. What happened?

The last 10 years have been defined by immense social unrest. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wallstreet, Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, March for Our Lives. It all happened in a single decade. And fashion followed suit.

But the artists behind what we started seeing as fashion had a different goal than any one of these movements: End classism by changing what we wear.

What’s interesting about clothing is that it so directly defines us in the eyes of others. If you think back to school you most likely still have vivid images of what the skaters wore, how the rich kids dressed, and what athletes sported. Those personas were the beginnings of classism for us as children. We would only hang out with certain groups, look up to some, and look down on others. And even now, when we go back to our hometowns we still talk about the paths that certain people took, not realizing that it was our behavior, discrimination, outcasting, and bullying that led people down a certain path. Not their clothing, but our reactions to it.

So the idea of clothing ending classism is simple, but compelling: if you can make basic, affordable, streetwear the definition of high end fashion, then all of a sudden the upper class begins to look like everyone else.

That’s why a $300 t-shirt makes sense. Not for regular consumers, but for the purpose of the movement. Put immense value on clothing worn by everyday people, so that everyone can replicate the style. “High-end” no longer inaccessible to most.

And this doesn’t only apply to economic class, but also apparel that contributes to perceptions of gender identity and nationality. You’ve probably seen a resurgence of famous artists donning threads typically worn by the opposite gender. And brands like Superdry making non-English text part of their appeal.

Brands like Fear of God, Yeezy, Supreme in its formative years, and more recently Balenciaga, have led the movement to break down class based on apparel. Kanye talks passionately about ending bullying. Jerry Lorenzo talks about the difference in streetwear and fashion and how his brand attempts to eliminate the gap.

Minimalism, born in the 1960s, paralleled the social revolutions of the time, begging the question: why should art be unaccessible? Fashion today is our art movement and its creators are asking: why is our identity worth less than yours?

But even when used as a movement for change, fashion has a fatal flaw — going in and out of style.

So when minimalism is over, when the movements quiet down, and when wealth and overabundance are in vogue again, what happens next? Do we buy in, or continue repping clothes that are accessible to everyone around us?