Since at least the 19th century, the owning class has used art aesthetics to reify their own power in the face of slave rebellion and worker-fomented crises in capitalism. In her article, “(I Was There) When It All Went Down,” Caroline Stevenson traces the history of capitalists using lifestyle marketing and the “art aesthetic” to become ever more flexible and plastic under the increasing speed of capitalism during and after the Industrial Revolution. Capitalist bosses responded to slave and worker unrest and rebellion not by meeting demands but by constructing an image of what an ideal life under capitalist conditions could be if European workers committed their lives to their existing factory job and if enslaved people accepted the conditions of their enslavement.
Elite couturiers like Charles Frederick Worth, the “Father of Haute Couture,” shifted their focus from marketing a craft or product – which ostensibly has some value for workers as a commodity – to selling lifestyles that workers and people in the undercommons should aspire to (instead of revolting). Worth accomplished this in part by manipulating his own image from that of a sober businessman wearing a normative business suit to that of a free-spirited art patron wearing “flowing, fur-lined robes, cravats, and a signature velvet beret” (Stevenson). In well-documented patterns through which capital appropriates experimental designs for its own ends in order to reify its own structures and reduce the threat of the new, Worth probably directly stole ideas for his artistic persona from working-class and enslaved people risking something with their anarchistic clothing choices crafted from the conditions of their lives to laterally communicate with their communities. He forcibly shaped existing ways that people fashioned themselves into an aesthetic to buy into (from his company!) rather than a standpoint to practice from and within.
Worth’s aesthetic transformation paid off, according to Stevenson, along the re-coupled lines of art and capital:
Just as his couture house was perfecting methods and procedures common to industrial production, Worth distanced himself from the image of the modern entrepreneur he was becoming, securing his position as a powerful arbiter of taste and fashion sensibility.
This is so critical to track. When it became distasteful to inhabit the image of the Entrepreneur – ie, when workers organized to show how “distasteful” it is to exploit people and when enslaved people across the American South continued to act in rebellion against the cotton industry that the Paris fashion houses relied upon in the 1860s – Worth pivoted to the image of the Artist, specifically through his fashioning of himself and of his home. By looking like an artist, Worth could continue to obscure the reality of the almost total synergy between the growth of British cotton textile manufacture and the expansion of Deep South slavery — by 1860, as Mark Harvey reports:
“88% of British cotton textiles were made from Deep South slave cotton. The numbers of slaves being tortured – reaching three million – grew in direct proportion to the number of textile wage workers in Britain – reaching 460,000 by the 1860s.”
Within 10 years of Emancipation and the end of the Civil War, American cotton “exceeded its pre-war levels for British industry, now based, not on free wage labour, but on various forms of sharecropping and debt peonage that persisted until the 1940s and beyond.”
The re-clothing of the British and European working class in cotton textiles was “thus based on a long history combining regimes of wage labour exploitation in the metropolis with slavery and bondage in the United States” (Harvey).
This pivot away from the image of the capitalist who relies on slavery for his profits is exactly what allowed Worth to refuse responsibility for the structures of harm and violence that he was building and gave him a “tasteful” genre for continuing to profit off of workers’ labor in Europe and enslaved people’s labor in the US. He used the genre of fashion for his own aims and laminated his owning power to the capacity to buy enough of the “right” kind of garments, producing an image of a fashionable artist as a consumer rather than a maker, an owner rather than a worker. This successful rebrand — as well as its effects on who was seen as fashionable, who could arbitrate “good taste” — was not a natural or inevitable process but actually a constructed strategy that Worth employed to struggle for power in a moment where many other things may have happened (and already did beyond the dominant archive).
Slave rebellion and worker revolt continued to shape the landscape of possibility. In Texas, gangs of runaway former-slaves participated with Indians and Mexicans in guerrilla-like warfare in the 1840s that paved the way for slavers to massacre insurrectionaries in 1860 after a series of property destruction at cotton plantations. In similar lines of property destruction, textile workers in Europe like the Luddites were organizing a workers’ movement against the “imposition [by people like Worth] of an entirely new regime of economic relations” supported by blood cotton (Coetzee). Characterizing workers as “technophobes” does not describe their actual position, argues Coetzee. They were, rather,
“technical experts in their field, intimately familiar with the technology of their industry. Their programme of destructive protest was not indiscriminate but specifically targeted those enterprises which most flagrantly exploited cheap labour.”
In early 1812, machine-breaking was made a capital offense, and several captured Luddites were executed over the next few years. Textile counties were flooded with 12,000 soldiers, sent to hunt down and kill rebel workers in the mill towns. As Hobsbawm has pointed out, this tradition of “collective bargaining by riot” and machine breaking had a long history in the labour disputes of the 18th century, and was often a highly effective method of forcing employers to accede to workers’ demands.
To recap: workers organized and slaves rebelled to make being seen as a capitalist who used blood cotton distasteful to the point of danger. Taste is a political project being negotiated minute by minute. Taste has been mobilized by elites to “corral pleasures such that they converge” (Fisher)— a convergence in service of their own aims. Dominant taste serves dominant power. What Worth wore is what Worth wanted to sell and how Worth wanted to obscure his own violence. He also was part of the owning class.
A baseline understanding for anarchists and anti capitalists who care about clothing is that getting dressed is a process wherein wearers from all positions negotiate and proliferate meaning, value, and power; it is the style of engagement as well as its context and effects that matters and upon which we should focus our attention. Clearly, the owning class engages with fashion to further their own domination. The art historian Nancy Troy writes that couturiers like Worth
“recognised and exploited the value of advanced art as a cultural sign of social distinction... [and to distance themselves] from the increasing necessity of publicising and building a market for their wares within an evolving consumer culture.”
This process continues into 2022, where being seen as an artist or “innovator” allows people like Elon Musk to construct cults of personality around their apartheid-generated wealth and create Vogue videos with their “artistic” pop star wives.
Influencers and fashion designers alike rely on what Bordieu argues is not the “rarity of the product, but the rarity of the producer.” However, producers are not all the same. Some people have access to the means of production, and some people don’t. An obsession with the image of the individual , rarefied artist gets in the way not only of understanding their actual relation to capital and their proximity to violence (ie, their responsibility) but also to the types of efforts we may collectively want to assert in terms of our own aesthetics and own our relationships to clothing, with all of its meaning, context, and power. Perhaps, instead of worshiping a lifestyle sold to us by an influencer and bought from the hands of someone like Bezos (or some other now-faceless billionaire), we may want to spend some time slowing down and untaming our own sensibilities from that which we can buy or easily consume. If we reacquaint ourselves with sensibilities actually drawn from our relationship to place, politics, and each other, how might we arm ourselves with our own feralness in a nonconvergent, but potentially coordinated, manner? I am not arguing here for what is called a “naive negative” position of “resistance” to racial capitalism — as if we could simply take off the cellular re-making that we have all undergone. I don’t believe in “the authentic and pure position of art that exists independently of mediatised representations of reality” ( Stevenson). Yet I am troubled by Stevenson’s claim that “The idea that fashion or art can claim a higher purpose or exist beyond and above the ideology of commercialism is not just an outmoded case for opposition, it is a wishful critical position.” People’s desires to live in a way where everyone has access to nourishment and care and where the current racial class order is obliterated — and their hopes for using art or fashion to experiment with those desires — matters. We don’t have to call our experiments “a higher purpose” than commercialism, but we can be clear about what we are doing and what it supports in our own bodies and in the collective. Purist ideas about individual action aside, I don’t think clothing would matter if it didn’t have the capacity to remake the world. People like Worth creatively fought to make the world into a shape that served their purposes, even while many other things were happening and where they were responding to the pressures of guerilla warfare and machine breaking. Guerilla warfare and machine breaking remade the world, not from a “wishful critical position” but from a tactical set of agreements among textile workers. And those textile workers clothed themselves, in ways that also signaled to each other that they were available for action.