how capitalist realism shapes my fashion imagination
90s kids love visuals… but what about context??
fashion rant of the day is about my own taste and what elements i’m drawing on when i’m constructing an outfit.
i’ve been listening to marc fishers capitalist realism w @fenroot and it’s really challenging me to see that the chaotic, visual, and vibes-based approach i have to synthesizing information and to putting together an outfit is not necessarily just my personality but also a product of how i was raised as both a disciplinary and control subject in the seat of US empire under post fordism in the age of the cyberspatial capital. i grew up wired into “entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture” (fisher), and this matters in terms of the ways my fashion imagination is shaped.
until about three years ago, i never used to try to explicitly draw on historical references or political events (visual or otherwise) and connect those dots to MY sartorial project. i just trusted that the eternal present i live in (consuming this media, that media, remembering the past in “my own way,” (still media-derived and constructed) etc) was enough to give me something interesting and maybe political to say with my outfits. i would just pick up a piece and work with it, making leaps of faith about why a shape worked and what it could do with this other shape and this other material. all of this was often based on vibes alone. a sense i got.
i studied affect and i should know better than to assume that my “sense” of something is sufficient if i’m trying to have any critical or experimental way of showing up in the world. my “sense” is a built structure of feeling. it’s historical. so it’s important for me to remember that i’m part of a generation that fischer notes has been “born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture - a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” instead of having to come up with my own chain of events leading up to an outfit, i just assume that it has a certain meaning in the NOW, and go with it. i’m able to do that because “Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read, write, or listen: slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile- magazine informational plane.”
that imaginational, associative, implicit, visual power is STRONG and cool and has made a lot of things possible for me but is also, i’m learning, a particular training and not the only way to do things or the only way i want to inhabit my aesthetic choices.
indeed, this method i’ve been using for so long and assuming was a practice of personal expression may not be an expression of the new in any sense, especially that which is specific to my body and my purpose for being alive. instead, we are experiencing “a fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex….With the breakdown of the signifying chain [the subject] is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.”
instead of doing what i’ve always done, i want to refuse the purity and unrelatedness that is being posed by the current landscape of fashion…
i also see a responsibility to contextualize fashion historically and to consider if what we’re wearing is materially enacting any of what we’re saying it’s enacting. i don’t just want to “look good” according to current taste standards; i want to be contributing to a conversation. a values based conversation! a historical conversation! where we can mount challenges, not just send vibes!
if we live under capitalist realism, what do we need to do fashion wise to make new realisms possible? capitalist realism is “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (fisher).
thus, fischer asks, “If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.”
how can fashion be studied to understand how capitalism is already inconsistent, or used as a tactic to show its untenability?
what new realisms can fashion erupt? how can a historicized practice of getting dressed challenge the naturalness of capitalist realism?