Is the Fashion Blog a Space for Critical Race Theory?
reposted from sydneysolon.com
In a June 2020 statement, The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) pledged to increase Black talent and hold mandatory diversity and inclusion training. Chairman Tom Ford writes, “Our industry is in pain and it is not enough to simply say that we stand in solidarity with those who are discriminated against. We must do something”.
500 of America’s foremost fashion designers proclaim, “We must do something.” Inspiring, perhaps, but a blanket statement at best. Committing to representation is one approach to the complex problem of racial inequity as it stands in the contemporary fashion economy. Doing something is placing a bandage on an open wound. The wound in question? Fashion is white - an economy an art built upon complex histories of subjugation, oppressive labor, and exclusivity. Tom Ford thinks the industry is in a state of pain post-pandemic. I disagree. The industry’s pain is not a state, but a slow, consistent hum that was built on unequal ground. If fashion truly wants to build a better, equitable future, it has to reckon with its dark past. Maybe the CFDA and Tom Ford are in too deep. Where to start with any social change? At the grassroots level. In fashion, that’s the personal blog. Now stay with me here - let’s talk about Pierre Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital, Man Repeller, and Minh-Ha T. Pham’s Blog Ambition. Let’s talk about fashion confronting race in the digital metasphere.
The origins of fashion violence lays in the project of colonialism - the act of one nation seeking to exercise control over an external territory for economic and capitalistic gain, thus colonizing the members of the subjugated people. Using racial categorization to create subjects of power, colonialism creates an unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity. Features of colonization include a spread of the colonizer’s language, religion, economic systems, and culture. In addition to radicalized violence, colonial control is exercised through what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence” – whereby the white powerful elite creates a predominant culture that explains the world through their own lens, reproducing a self-identity of eurocentrism (Vera, Hernan et. al., 2003). (Marxist philosopher Antonin Gramsci would call this ‘cultural hegemony’.)
Here’s where it gets juicy - with the colonialist aim to acquire capital, Fashion represents both economic and non-economic forms of capital. On one hand, to own or consume fashion is an economic practice, requiring money and resources. On the other hand, more symbolically, Fashion knowledge is cultural capital, meaning that to do and participate in Fashion requires a certain amount of cultural competence or social elitism to identify what is in vogue. In Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital”, he writes, “Cultural Capital in its objectified state presents itself with all the appearances of an autonomous, coherent universe which, although the product of historical action, has its own laws, transcending individual wills (...) therefore remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate.” (247). Here, Bourdieu brings our attention to the following: while we’d like to believe that our understanding of culture and ideas of taste are our own, they are actually pre-determined by the prevalent systems of hierarchical power. Imperial powers, specifically the US, England, and France, have for the past centuries set standards for media and representation. This is not to say that we have no free will or choice when we are choosing what to wear or what to desire, but rather that we underestimate the role that investment in whiteness plays in forms of fashion consumption.
Minh-Ha T. Pham’s “Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body” contextualizes where colonialist ideologies exist in the digital sphere. In focusing on fashion-theme blogs, Pham argues that the blog is a site of ‘cultural-political struggle’. In an excerpt, Pham recites one of her own inaugural blog posts, where she recounts an early shopping memory in the US. Her mother, a talented dressmaker, would study the clothing at the department stores, not for purchase, but for reproduction on her own. Pham, coming from an immigrant household, writes, “as my mom scrutinized the cut, thread type, and seam construction of popular styles of clothing we could neither afford to buy nor be left out of, she transmitted an array of social, economic, and effective lessons” (23). Pham’s blog and Bourdieu’s idea of capital shed light on both theoretical and personal ways that US cultural hegemony is propagated. Pham’s mother’s awareness to construct western clothing style is a recognition that certain styles that work in the west would be a gateway to assimilation, whereby certain hems provide cultural capital to the wearer than others. To dilute her ways of garment making shows an inherent recognition that certain norms and forms of western clothing are more valuable than traditional ethnic wear.
Additionally, Pham recognizes that the architecture of the digital commons, the site of blogging, is “structurally antidemocratic, especially as it is increasingly integrated into and pervaded by capitalist logics that are imbricated with colonial and imperialist histories” (3). But Pham also takes the opinion that the blog is not a completely repressive apparatus, citing the potential uses of “blogging reimagining the terms and histories within which subjectivities are produced and performed in the digital age” (3). Pham’s essay argues that the blogosphere has the potential to be the site of decolonizing fashion or disentangling the raced body from its role as a subject of the Eurocentric gaze. In self-publishing her own fashion history, she takes up digital real estate to tell a personal story of clothing in relationship to her identity formation as an immigrant. She recognizes that her conceptualization of clothing and styles was informed by her own identity as being subjected to Eurocentric ideals of style. Pham’s blog, and many others which she references, had been used as a place to move personal narrative and history into the digital commons, reclaiming space for stories that fall outside of white hegemony.
How does this moment of new fashion mediatization, particularly in the form of digital storytelling, allow for a new way to work against fashion’s historical problem of white cultural hegemony? I suggest that the post George Floyd era of media surrounding the ‘pull up or shut up’ watchdog mentality opens up a new field of communicative potential for fashion. Take the rise and fall of Man Repeller, founded by fashion blogger Leandra Cohen. In an open letter to the MR Community, Cohen writes: “I want to explicitly state on our site that Man Repeller will not remain silent in the face of police brutality and white supremacy. I have a lot of listening and learning and growing to do before I will truly know how to thoroughly make a sustained impact in the fight to eradicate systemic racism, but that won’t stop my effort. I know that the learning will be uncomfortable at times, but that won’t make it any less urgent.” Cohen’s statement practically mirrors that of the CFDA, calling for an increased attention to marginalized voices and racial injustice. But it doesn’t really offer much on how the publication would put this call to activism in practice. Perhaps most importantly, Cohen’s statement was met with opposition to the internal MR team, claiming internal racism within the company structure and critique of its falsified sense of liberation – the ‘Man Repeller’ archetype really means a model-skinny, rich, ‘feminist’ white woman is the liberated woman. Following a swift attempt to rebrand into simply ‘Repeller’ after Cohen had stepped down from the publication, Man Repeller announced in October 2020 that it would shut down its operations due to looming financial stress.
The rise and fall of Man Repeller this year is significant of bigger changes and new accountability in the age of digital fashion media. While packaged as feminist, liberal, and empowering, MR was born out of the same tired colonialist paradigms that are present in much of the fashion industry. The way in which it has upheld forms of white, classist cultural capital is no longer a viable or acceptable narrative in the digital blogosphere. Pham’s essay makes me hopeful that as media moves forward, and voice is democratized even more so, fashion consumers can begin to do the work of ‘decolonizing’ fashion, that is, to challenge the historically Eurocentric persona that fashion seems to take on. To return the CFDA statement, “We must do something”, and I believe that on the part of the fashion media consumer, that something is taking stock of where Bourdieu’s “Symbolic Violence” lives, in internalized ideas of the white messiah, or in this case the white, female fashion ideal. Recognizing where and in what forms white hegemony is practiced in the formation of trends and style is a starting point towards curing the pain of the fashion industry.
Works Referenced
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). The Forms of Capital.
Césaire, Aimé (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press: Introduction & 29-79.
Cohen, Leandra M (2020). “Where We Go From Here: A Message for the MR Community”, Man Repeller. https://repeller.com/man-repeller-open-letter/
Ford, Tom and Kolb, Steven. (2020) “An important message from the CFDA chairman and president & CEO.”The Council of Fashion Designers of America, inc. https://cfda.com/news/an- important-cmessage-from-the-cfda-chairman-and-president-ceo
Camera Obscura 76, Volume 26, Number 1. Duke University Press
Mondalek, Alexandra (2020). “Man Repeller to Shut Down”, Business of Fashion. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/man-repeller-shutting-down-leandra- medine-cohen
Vera, Hernan et. al. (2003). “The beautiful American: Sincere fictions of the white messiah in Hollywood movies.” White out: the continuing significance of racism, 113-128.
This piece was originally written for the interdisciplinary seminar, Media and Fashion with Professor Moya Luckett.
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