The following text is a lightly edited transcript of a TED talk I presented at TEDxRHUL in January 2024. The recording can be accessed here.

‘Timeout: Why we need to re-think the narrative of fashion’

“At a time of crisis, we need to think about a radical reset”. This dramatic call to action was made in March 2020. The crisis in question was the COVID-19 pandemic and at the time, and much of the world was in lock-down to curb its spread.

If I were to ask you to identify who made this statement, you’d probably seek to name a politician or health official. These would be reasonable guesses, but wrong. The person calling for a re-appraisal and re-start was the chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue, Anna Wintour. 

It should not be surprising that a leading figure in the global fashion industry would make this clarion call for change at this moment in time. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far claimed the lives of approximately 7 million people around the world, emphasized systemic inequalities in education, healthcare, politics, and divides between ages, genders, races, and sexualities. This was certainly the case for fashion. One of the world’s largest industries, it has long been criticised for its appropriation, its discrimination, its exclusivity, its pollution. The differential impact of the pandemic emphasized these derelictions.

Initially, calls for action were heeded. Various organisations within and around the fashion industry put forward proposals for change, including the Business of Fashion and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The intention of these plans was to reconnect the commerce of the industry with its conscience. Some individuals made their own promises. The Creative Director of Spanish fashion brand Loewe, Jonathan Anderson, vowed never to stage a catwalk again.

Four years later and we might reasonably ask, what came of these plans; how different is the fashion industry? Like Anderson, who has continued to organize catwalk shows, the Pandemic-era proposals seem to have been kept with as much determination as a New Year’s resolution, which is usually forgotten by the second week of January. And think about yourselves here: can you say that your engagement with fashion at the beginning of 2024 is substantially different to how it was at the beginning 2020: Are you consuming fashion with different priorities? 

For me, the sobering reason why change within the fashion industry is not more apparent, let alone radical, is because the stories we tell to justify and to motivate us to undertake change are insufficiently compelling. We might rue fast fashion or recoil at the realities of climate change, but our misgivings are not enough to sustain an agenda of action. Consequently, the case for a return to normality has largely won out. So, what I want to do today is twofold. First, I want to question why those pandemic-era plans for change within the fashion industry faltered after 2020, when they seemed to have the backing of industry heavyweights. Second, I want to make a new proposal for steering change within and around the fashion industry. 

In essence, I believe that a resolution to these conundrums can be found if we re-think the stories that we tell through fashion, and the stories that fashion tells through us. This might seem abstract, so let’s start by thinking about time, one of more established and pernicious stories told through fashion. Have a think about the following question: If fashion were a unit of time, what duration would best describe it?

A decade? 

A week? 

A nanosecond? 

Perhaps just one unit of time is insufficient. For, if fashion is conventionally thought to move speedily, we’re aware that it repeats itself, and, irrespective of the amount of time that we each give to it, we know that fashion is a constant; right now, we are all engaging with it to varying degrees. And I say that without judgement. Truly. 

In 2019, the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized an exhibition that focused on the complicated relationship between fashion and time. The Institute’s Chief Curator Andrew Bolton, described fashion as a ‘modish time machine’. He said fashion was ‘an acutely accurate and especially sensitive timepiece’. Bolton’s metaphor is compelling, but I disagree with it, for two reasons. First, I think the movement of fashion is too erratic to be sensitive. It pays little heed to ecological seasons and escalates time through the release of multiple collections across the year. Second, fashion’s artificial construction of time, which emphasizes linear advancement, has long been used to tell a story of western progress. I’m sure we’ll all be familiar with those timelines that chart developments in human history through changes in people’s clothed appearances; almost all of them wearing western dress.

Fashion’s connection with a linear conception of time is long-standing. We can securely trace it to the nineteenth century. Actually, to a specific date: 1884. This is the year when Greenwich Meridian Time became established as a standardized measure of time. At a conference held in Washington DC, it was decided that coordination of the world’s clocks would be based on the local mean time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Determining that the Prime Meridian would lie within London meant that the UK became the chronological centre of the world. It also meant that a western conception of time became globally established, for two reasons. First, it sanctioned the west’s prioritization of routine and efficiency, mechanization and progress that was becoming increasingly important during the nineteenth century as industrialization began. Second, the percentage of the world’s population that formed part of Europe’s empires increased from around 30% at the start of the nineteenth century to around 80% at its end. The people controlled by Europeans were expected to think and behave like Europeans. This meant they had to accept a western construction of time, and among other things, a western conception of fashion. 

Fashion was important in the development of European imperialist thought because the industry as we know it took shape during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the period when large department stores opened their doors, catwalks were first strolled, fashion periodicals were perused, and many of the luxury fashion brands that we covet today were established. Almost immediately, contemporary commentators recognized the decisive and divisive social impact that fashion would have in defining people based on what they wore, when and where. Few cultural products were as effective in embodying the west’s preoccupation with progress and civilization – a word that was coined in the nineteenth century – than fashion. Consequently, fashion became synonymous with the west’s civilizing project of linear advancement, and modernity. This point can be demonstrated through the language we use to talk about fashion. The word ‘moda’, which means ‘fashion’ in some European languages, along with its anglophone cognates ‘mode’ and ‘modish’, comes from the Latin word for ‘modern’. This language creates a symbiosis between fashion, time and modernity.

Fashion’s preoccupation with the present and future has been neatly summarised by André Leon Talley, a former creative director of American Vogue and a colleague of Anna Wintour’s. In his memoir The Chiffon Trenches, Talley writes, hauntingly:

‘fashion is not an industry that lives in the past, but rather carries its past along. Like a shadow, wherever it goes.’

 What Talley means, and what I am arguing, is that fashion is not just a lousy timekeeper, it distorts time to galvanize a western story of progress. So accomplished has fashion been at doing this over the last two centuries that we, as consumers, are for the most part probably unaware of the binaries that fashion manifests between age, gender, race and sexuality. If we do perceive them, we probably consider them an axiom of the industry. They are a tolerated evil because we acknowledge that to rid fashion of these inequalities necessitates changing the attitudes and structures that the contemporary fashion industry has come to embody and buttress. 

This is the reason why I think stories for change within the fashion industry faltered after 2020. The industry as it has developed since the nineteenth century has become both incubator and catalyst for western thought and actions. Consequently, it might be reasoned that one cannot be changed without the other. During the Covid-19 pandemic and immediately after it, a reset was too daunting to contemplate against a backdrop of the emotional and physical distress that very many people were feeling.

Explicable as this is, it does not make it excusable. So, now we need to turn to second task of my talk: How do we create new stories to make a more compelling case for change within and around the fashion industry?

Here, I reach beyond fashion to draw upon the work of narratologists, academics who study the function and role of narrative and storytelling in human lives. In most cases, narratologists focus on literature, sometimes movies, occasionally music. They do not consider fashion. I think they should because fashionable appearances play a huge part in enabling us to tell stories about our lives, and they help us to interpret the stories that other people tell about their lives. Think about the following observation made by narratologist Arthur Frank: 

Stories and humans work together in symbiotic dependency, creating the social that comprises all human relationships, collectives, mutual dependencies, and exclusions.

Doesn’t this apply to how we conceive and construct our fashionable appearances to demonstrate our membership of social groups, and how we – consciously or not – exclude people from groups? 

The reason fashion is effective at telling human stories is because it is a meme. Now, I can guess what you’re thinking! In saying that fashion is a meme, I am drawing upon evolutionary biology. It is from here that the now popular idea of memes linked to social media got hi-jacked. In evolutionary biology, a meme is a unit of transmission. It is something that so effectively conveys an idea from one human to another that it becomes implanted in their minds. I’ll use Victorian men and their top hats to make this point, because many of the ideas that frame our lives, fashionable or otherwise, can be traced to their thinking. Once received, an idea germinates, and in so doing, it can be spread to more people, across different geographies, cultures, and chronologies, until it becomes orthodoxy. If it sounds like I am talking about a virus, this is exactly how ethnologist Richard Dawkins describes the meme in his book, The Selfish Gene.

We can certainly recognise this selfishness in fashion, which maintains ‘western’ essentialist ideas, through its perpetuation of binaries relating to age, gender, race and sex. However, by acknowledging that fashion is a meme – a carrier for human stories – a solution to our problem of how to motivate and maintain change emerges. We can use fashion to construct new stories to transmit; stories that more accurately reflect the complexity and diversity of our lives, and which can supercede the tall tale that fashion priorities linear progress. 

The task is not easy, or quick. Alessandro Michele, former creative director of Gucci, emphasized the persistence of stories told through fashion in a series of excoriating messages that he posted on Instagram in March 2020, just two weeks after Wintour had voiced her opinion about the need for change. Criticizing the fashion industry and the people it clothed, he lamented people’s ‘reckless actions’ that had ‘burned the house we live in’. Fixated on ‘[s]o much outrageous greed’, Michele asserted that humankind had lost ‘the harmony and the care, the connection and the belonging’.

Nonetheless, until we recognize the role that stories have in the consolidation and critique of the socialized binaries that fashion readily presents and preserves, I do not believe that effective change will be possible within the fashion industry, or in fashion education, which is the point at which I engage with the industry. And nor it will change occur beyond the industry either, because fashion’s ubiquity has clothed many western assumptions with a cloak of taken-for-grantedness. A proposal that focuses on storytelling is doubtless not what Anna Wintour had in mind when she contemplated a reappraisal of the fashion industry in 2020, but I believe it has potential to change the industry for the better of all, and that would be a radical reset.