Weekend Edition #16

Is fashion art? Is shopping religion? Did social media replace the mall? I don't know! Let's discuss!

Hi!

I’ve been thinking a lot about fashion and identity this week, and why we wear what we wear. Last week I compared the world’s fastest fast fashion brand to one of the slowest small business manufacturers to illustrate the two extreme ways clothes are made these days. But truthfully, the middle of the market is jammed with retailers like Uniqlo, Everlane, and Quince, and if you wanted, you could easily buy all your clothes from these stores and have a good, functional, well-made wardrobe.

But clothes aren’t fashion. And most people want more than just well-made basics, judging from the fact that the apparel and textile sector is the fourth largest industry in the world.¹

So what is fashion?

Is fashion art? Avery Trufelman asked this question in her recent fashion newsletter, Articles of Interest. She invited Tamar Avishai, host of the art podcast, The Lonely Palette, to try to answer the question. Avishai wrote a beautiful essay filled with thought-provoking examples that I encourage you to read, but concluded at the end:

By and large, art is art. Fashion is fashion. They solve different problems. They antagonize one another. Often they misunderstand each other. But they’re always in conversation with one another.

I agree that fashion is a visual medium, as art can be. However, and this may surprise you, I don’t believe fashion is art.

To me, fashion is language. We use clothes functionally. We use fashion to communicate something about ourselves to the world (and back to ourselves, too).

When I was a freshman at Williams College (I later transferred to UVA), I took a course from Professor Bill Darrow called Shopping: Desire, Compulsion and Consumption. Interestingly, the class was part of the religion department, and that is exactly what we explored: had fashion, shopping, the mall, and consumerism replaced religion? Or perhaps formed a new type of religion?

I credit the course with giving me my first inkling that my teenage obsession with fashion, clothes, magazines, and yes, shopping, might mean something more than just figuring out what to wear. This was the introduction in the syllabus:

If the workplace was the essential site of modernity, then the shopping mall is the quintessential site of postmodernity; the place where consumption trumps production, and it has been argued, our only remaining public space. This course will focus on the experience of shopping, focusing on three themes. First we will explore the manufacturing of desire on which consumption must depend…we will then turn to exploring the history of consumerism from the eighteenth century through today. Finally, we will explore the place of shopping in our collective imaginations, attending especially to the relation between the gendering of the shopping experience and expressions of contempt toward consumerism.

What strikes me the most reading this twenty years later is how the shopping mall was not just our only remaining public space, it was our last public space. The mall has been replaced with social media. Instagram and TikTok and Substack are our new town squares.

When I was a freshman in college, I thought I would major in English or Art History, but I found both of those subjects too insular, too cocooned from the happenings of the real world. This is fully debatable, I am aware. It’s also not a bad thing. Art, to me, is escape. Reading literature (or commercial fiction), staring at paintings, going to the theatre, listening to a concert. I do all these things to calm and stimulate my brain, but in ways that are distinctly separate from the goings on in there as they concern my actual life.

Meanwhile, fashion is most exciting when it’s the perfect match between those inner thoughts and the external environment. Fashion makes visual your desires, your hopes and dreams, your myriad visions for your future, and at the same time, since we can see everyone else’s expressions, it tells us about where we are collectively as a society and culture.

Our clothes are always talking, and it’s pretty fun to listen to what they have to say.

Have a great weekend!

x Lindsay

P.S. Here is the required reading from Religion 308 Shopping: Desire, Compulsion, and Consumption, if you’re interested!

• Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping

• Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping

• Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests

• Paco Underhill, Why We Buy

• L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

• Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress in Modern English

• Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair

• Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World

• Zukin, Point of Purchase

• Liechty, Suitably Modern

1. https://fashinnovation.nyc/fashion-industry-statistics/#:~:text=The%20fashion%20industry%20statistics%20show,4th%20biggest%20in%20the%20world.