The Fashion Industry
Clothing was central to the industrial revolution; textile manufacture inaugurated the factory system with adults and children labouring in appalling conditions spinning cloth made from cotton produced by slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. The market for the product was driven not just by need, but by fashion. Marx saw fashion as a dynamo as well as a product of capitalism. In Capital Marx wrote of “the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion”. Capitalism requires constant novelty — not just in the mode of production, but in products themselves — in order to maintain sales and profits. Alongside “normal” business cycles and changes due to external factors such as the weather, “fashion, and the sudden placing of large orders that have to be executed in the shortest possible time” leads to precarious work; periods of “inhuman toil” alternating with starvation — a situation which intensified with the development of railways and other technologies.
Its excesses are manifest in episodes such as the collapse of Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh in 2013, where in appalling conditions and on starvation wages, workers sweated producing fashion items for Benetton, Bon Marche, Mango, Matalan, Primark and Walmart. Some 1,134 garment workers were killed and 2,500 maimed. Clothing accounts for 79 per cent of total exports from Bangladesh; 43 per cent of US clothing workers are paid below the minimum wage and illegal low pay and long hours are rife in the British textile industry.
Fashion is not only exploitative of people; it is hugely destructive of the planet. Agrochemicals — pesticides and fertilisers — account for 77 per cent of the cost of raw cotton production in Kenya. Expensive high fashion is inseparable from the wasteful and exploitative mass production and consumption of “cheap” fashion items, worn for a short time and then discarded.
Tansy Hoskins, in her book Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, shows how capitalism “stitches up” its consumers as well as its workers and its raw materials, from cars to the latest iPhone or other “must-have.” Fashion is central to capitalism’s underlying philosophy of “planned obsolescence” — the “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.” And it is central also to capitalism’s ability (so far) to ride out its crises by super-exploitation of both workers and consumers.
As the Marx Memorial Library notes "Fashion is the ultimate vehicle for alienation, reification and commodity fetishism persuading us to think that we “belong” — when we don’t — or to think that we’re “different” — when we’re not! Today, fashion attempts “to persuade us to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have produced by people and processes we prefer not to think about, to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t know.”