Will We Be Beautiful? Fashion, Clothes & People in Contemporary Capitalism

To be human is to wake up, every morning, and don the costume that completes your identity, for better or for worse, by choice or by coercion.

There is nothing on this planet quite like fashion; it is not simply art or design, it is not simply economics or production, and it is not simply capitalism. Huge swathes of reality as we know it have been structured by the demands of fashion, from how raw materials are harvested and developed, how all these materials circulate, to how this circulation and acquisition is financed; this is a world that has been fashioned — even Marx himself, in his critique of the world, could not get away from yards of linen and coats. As a potential “object of critique”, little holds a candle to fashion’s flame; there is little that is more worthy of thinking about critically, and yet, it is a subject that has been rendered invisible by theory and philosophy. 

Meltdown Your Books, anonymous author extraordinaire of Where Does A Body Begin? returns with another question. It is a book that unravels from a specific claim: you cannot escape participating in fashion, and even the way that your most unstylish co-worker dresses is a part of the fashion ecosystem. There is no such thing as existing outside of fashion, you cannot signify nothing. So regardless of whether you want to or not, regardless of whether you intend it or not, fashion is the first thing we think about every day, the first decision to be made. Fashion contains the world, the good, the bad, the ugly, and — this cannot be stated enough — the beautiful.