The apparent inability—perhaps unwillingness—to end the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia, has fuelled suggestions that the world’s population has become desensitised to violence and human suffering; that it is cowardly and more selfish, lacking in sympathy and empathy.^[1]

Evidence to support this view seems overwhelming, but it is nonetheless inaccurate. It is too simplistic to think people are indifferent to the wartime suffering of Gazans, Ukrainians, and the inhabitants of the 90 other countries affected by the 54 additional conflicts being fought across our planet—the largest number since the Second World War, according to Vision of Humanity.^[2] It is similarly inaccurate to think people are oblivious or indifferent to other crises that confront our planet.

Images of human suffering and human-caused suffering have become widespread, and seemingly more graphic, as digital technologies have developed and social sharing platforms have multiplied since the start of this Millennium. But familiarity has not bred contempt, cowardliness, or disinterest. The volume and vocality of discussions described as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, along with the ‘culture wars’ that this malleability of information sparks, demonstrate that many humans are passionately engaged in projects that contemplate divergent pasts, presents and futures for our species.^[3] The telling of multiple tales presumably explains why the concepts of ‘narrative’ and ‘storytelling’ have become prevalent in recent years. According to Google’s ngram viewer, which records the annual frequency of word usage in published texts of various languages between 1500 and 2022, both words have been printed more frequently since 2018.^[4]

Plural problems

These observations highlight the plurality of the challenges our species faces. The development of communication platforms and the often-polarising messages broadcast by them suggest people are bewildered, certainly discordant, about all that is happening on Earth. Singular challenges of a comparable scale to what we are now experiencing are logged in the historical record; some can be recalled through memory. Conjoined challenges are rarer. They are also little known because they have tended to presage societal collapse.^[5]

Never before has our species had to contend with escalating military conflict and the ever-growing threat of nuclear Armageddon, environmental collapse, pandemics, and the catalysing factors of political polarisation and increasing wealth disparity, all whilst burdened by the knowledge—even guilt—that these are problems of our making. Emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually, we lack the experience and skills to know how to process what we’re experiencing.

We are the architects of our world and have decisively shaped planet Earth, such that the term Anthropocene is gaining orthodoxy.^[6] But it would be inaccurate—arrogant even—to assume that we can fully comprehend what our species has collectively caused. We are ill-equipped to understand the enormity of what today’s images of suffering and hardship demonstrate, and to conceive of effective responses.

Humans need to live long enough to reproduce and to support their offspring to do likewise. We are tribal. We thrive in smaller groups, even if we regularly access and benefit from larger social networks, where we can more readily grapple with the attendant issues communities of this size present.^[7] We are ill equipped to process the complexity of decision-making that the much larger society we have created demands of us.^[8]

Tyrannous choice

When it becomes a choice whether we have dairy milk in our tea because numerous variants now exist alongside it, we pause. However brief, we struggle to make sense of a choice that for most people living today has only ever been binary: ‘with milk’ or ‘without milk’—although even then it was a choice that could prove socially fatal if you happened to believe that milk should enter the cup before the tea (cf. Gosford Park 2001). This is a trivial example, which only makes it more significant, because if we falter here—and we do—how are we to grapple with children burning to death in bombed cities? With people dying from starvation as they queue to be fed? With people who consider the destruction of buildings and the death of people from war a real estate opportunity? With people who deny a war is being waged at all?

As a historian who works in a fashion school, I am struck that the paralysis inflicted by the decision-making I am alluding to has been most consistently and eloquently explained in relation to fashion consumption.^[9] In writing this I am fully aware that my disciplinary position and professional journey—from medieval history to modern fashion—will shape my vantage point and influence my assessment, but I think there is something here that is worth dwelling on.

In 1987, French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky published The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. In this labyrinthine study Lipovetsky argues that fashion became the preeminent social mechanism in the ‘west’ during the twentieth century. Its ‘reign’ fostered ‘flexible attitudes’ in people and rendered knowledge ‘increasingly elastic’. Consequently, people became ‘receptive’ to information that ‘dissolved the strength of their convictions and made them permeable, ready to give up their own opinions and systems of reference without much struggle’. Indifference to knowledge and a tendency to acquiesce meant that ‘people’s culture began to resemble a mobile patchwork, a splintered construction over which mastery is weak’. While fashion may seem to generate ‘a positive attitude toward innovation’, this is illusion. Fashion society ‘at once accelerated and rigidified the tendency toward social mobility, giving impetus to modernism, and conservatism alike’. Social expectations or ‘constraints’ ended up being caught between these extremes.

The arguments of Lipovetsky’s book—described as ‘maddening’ and ‘stimulating’ by sociologist Richard Sennett—are unique but not unprecedented. Eight decades prior, in 1903, German sociologist Georg Simmel published ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in which he argued that a ‘blasé outlook’, characterised by an ‘indifference toward the distinction between things’, emerged within Europe’s twentieth-century metropolises. This insight was important in framing Simmel’s influential essay of 1904, ‘Fashion’, in which he suggests that the development of fashionable dress and appearance is driven by people’s contradictory desire to look like their peers and to stand out. The inability to reconcile these competing aspirations results in mental anguish. In the twenty-first century, Simmel’s appraisal has become near orthodoxy. In fashion scholar Rebecca Arnold’s phrase, it is ‘the dichotomy that has haunted fashion’.^[10]

Anthropologist Daniel Miller has also used fashion—specifically the persistent appeal and ubiquity of denim jeans and the Little Black Dress—to develop philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s thinking on the psychological challenges that arise from ways of living typically labelled ‘modern’ (and ‘western’). He has explored the discomfiture people experience when grappling with the ‘tyranny of choice’.^[11] 

A dark digression is relevant at this point to consider the challenges that confront people thinking and being in societies described as modern and ‘western’ and their links to suicide. In my book Hang Ups: Reflections on the Causes and Consequences of Fashion’s ‘Western’-Centrism, I reference a comparative study of suicide by psychologist David Lester.^[12] Whilst Lester is clear, and obviously correct, that attitudes to and instances of suicide vary considerably between the world’s global cultures, he says the evidence is plain that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ‘[l]ower suicide rates [are] found for nations with less economic development and where Islam [is] the dominant religion’. His research establishes that there is an ‘issue’ with ‘the impact of the pervasive western culture on the suicidal behaviour of those living in less modern cultures’. In short: suicide appears to be a specific, and negative, consequence of modern ‘western’ values and societal structures. Lester’s findings resonate with echoes of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who published Le Suicide in 1897, the first study of this social fact. Durkheim’s undertaking was framed by his belief that suicide rates had increased significantly across Europe within the first half of the nineteenth century. Observing that ‘[a]t each moment in its history . . . each society has a definitive aptitude for suicide’, he was concerned to understand why this ‘aptitude’ appeared marked at this moment in Europe’s history. Clearly, there is something problematic, and harmful, about the way decision-making is understood and practised in ‘western’ modern societies. 

Fashion is central to modern life, which is why Simmel, Lipovetsky, and Miller turned to it when trying to understand how people make decisions. As perhaps humanity’s most widespread and enduring cultural practice, fashion offers an unmatched window into human choice-making and social behaviour. Since the eighteenth century, fashion has been capitalism’s most devoted partner—economist Werner Sombart deemed it capitalism’s ‘favourite child.’ Fashion is certainly imbricated in what decolonial scholar Angela Jansen describes as the ‘west’s’ ‘project of modern civilization [that] has reduced cultures, nature and history to a pool of resources to be classified, extracted, and consumed.’^[13]This means that across different chronologies, cultures and geographies, from the playground to the office and the social gathering, fashion’s reach and role in reinforcing social structures probably exposes human decision-making processes more clearly than any other cultural phenomenon. But there’s another reason these three scholars gravitated toward fashion in their analyses—one they themselves overlooked.

Seeking sense in fashion

The arguments of Simmel, Lipovetsky and Miller highlight the importance of fashion in the maintenance of ‘western’ societal structures. However, I don’t think their analyses go far enough. In suggesting that fashion conveys a blasé outlook, or acts as some form of numbing psychological salve, these authors provide a partial assessment because they assume the dressed body is the end goal to which people strive. This assumes that dress at some point becomes settled, fixed. However, as an embodied cultural practice, the dressed body is dynamic. Consequently, the attitudes these authors believe the fashion industry helps to manifest through its consumers are not resolved trains of thought—results—but negotiations, active and ongoing discussions. They show how people wear different styles of dress to figure out different ideas of self and social position. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan opined, the medium really is the message.

I’m not about to confirm that there is a direct correlation between shifts in clothing styles and social upheavals. I do not believe there is simple causality between hemline lengths and economic health.^[14] However, this observation, and many others like it, persist because they reflect a truism of human dress that Simmel, Lipovetsky, and to a lesser extent Miller, don’t fully explore. Namely, we wear what we feel. In this sense, how people dress is less a final presentation of what they mean but the live workshop where they clarify what they think.

The volatility of the fashion industry during the past five years, which has seen luxury brands wane, fast fashion brands wax, and an emphasis on nostalgia, humour, and authenticity, does not reflect—or does not chiefly reflect—people who are indifferent and flexible, but people who are attempting to decide what they think and who they are in response to all that is going on around them. This search for selfhood and social positioning through dress is not new, but I would argue that the manner and pace now constitute a difference of kind, rather than degree, if we were to compare our present situation with that of just two decades ago.

What this shows, I think, is that the analyses of Simmel, Lipovetsky and Miller overemphasise the role of reason in human decision-making. We have been seduced—perhaps more likely intimidated—by Roland Barthes’s ‘vestimentary code’ into thinking that clothing’s sign language demands decipherment as an end point because it seems so immediate, public and ‘obviously crying out for explanation’, when in fact it is really a starting point.

Reason is important, particularly when decision-making does become complicated. However, as anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, reasoning from first principles is as flawed as it initially seems faultless. He contends that ‘any judgement that had no basis in intuition, however justified it might be on the grounds of “cold” logic, would carry no practical or motivational force whatever.’^[15]

Thinking ≠ feeling

Decision-making around fashion consumption has drawn the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines for centuries because it frequently confounds expectations about what is logical and sensible, contributing to a still-prevalent view that fashion is trivial, a poor academic relative. While a certain amount of illogic might be apparent in most forms of consumption, the speed with which fashion’s product cycles rotate have given the industry and its related academic field a problematised distinction matched by few cultural products and practices.

This view of fashion is neither wholly accurate nor fair. The perception that fashion constitutes a conundrum exists largely because academics, trained to be ever so reasonable, prioritise reason in their research. What they often fail to grasp, which makes fashion seem so capricious, is that reason and logic are not the sum of human decision-making, in dress or anything. Intuition and emotion, as Ingold insists, are both important. In very many cases emotion may be more so. However, the marginalisation of emotion reflects how ‘western’ thought, and academic practice in particular, has tended to legitimise and prioritise reason. Back to Ingold:

Where the logic of ethical reasoning, setting out from first principles, leads to results that are counter-intuitive, we do not reject our intuitions but rather change the principles, so that they will generate results which conform more closely to what we feel is right.^[16]

Fashion as exception and norm

The focus of this discussion has shifted to fashion, but complex decision-making has remained the subject. The ubiquity of fashion makes it a compelling example of how both rational thinking and emotions drive human choices. However, when scholars and analysts study fashion’s social influence, political power, and commercial success, they almost invariably ignore the emotional side of decision-making and focus only on rational explanations. The way researchers treat fashion is typical of a larger problem that exists beyond the academy: the emotional and intuitive aspects of how people relate to each other are routinely ignored.

The sidelining of emotion and intuition is most apparent in how we are tackling some of the gravest challenges that threaten the future of our species, from escalating military conflict and the ever-growing threat of nuclear Armageddon, to environmental collapse, pandemics, and the catalysing factors of political polarisation and increasing wealth disparity that deepen these crises. When addressing these challenges, we tend to prioritise reason and logic over emotion and intuition.^[17] However, this approach overlooks a crucial reality: most people’s willingness or reluctance to engage with these threats is primarily driven by emotional responses. No matter the crisis—war between Israel and Palestine or ecological overshoot—the response is the same. When emotions and intuition are brought into the discussion, it’s usually not as part of a deliberate strategy, but rather as an outlet for frustration when existing methods aren’t producing results.

Fashioning a reckoning

Fashion, far from being a trivial cultural practice, represents a crucial pathway for understanding and potentially addressing our most pressing existential crises. Rather than viewing fashion as evidence of societal superficiality or paralysis, I suggest it demonstrates how people actively use embodied cultural practices to negotiate meaning, identity, and responses to an overwhelming world. Fashion is a ‘live workshop’ where people work through complex emotions and thoughts about their circumstances—a process that exemplifies the kind of concurrent adaptation we now require. Unlike traditional forms of knowledge-building, fashion allows people to process current realities while simultaneously experimenting with future possibilities through their embodied choices.

Fashion’s integration of emotion, intuition, and embodied experience offers a model for how we might approach global challenges like war, environmental collapse, and political polarisation more effectively than our current rationalist frameworks allow. Instead of relying solely on logical analysis that lacks ‘practical or motivational force,’ fashion demonstrates how to engage people’s emotional and intuitive responses while helping them process and express their feelings about complex realities in real-time. This capacity becomes essential when facing challenges for which there is no historical precedent and no established adaptive response. Fashion, as ‘capitalism’s favourite child’ and humanity’s most ‘ubiquitous and historically continuous cultural practice,’ already demonstrates how to create meaningful engagement with difficult circumstances through embodied, emotional, and intuitive processes that operate beyond the constraints of past experience. By recognising fashion as a sophisticated system for collective sense-making and real-time adaptation rather than dismissing it as irrational consumption, we might discover new ways to mobilise the kind of concurrent past-and-future adaptation necessary to navigate the unprecedented convergence of crises facing our species.

^[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0vewvp14zdo; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/25/king-belgium-speak-truth-gaza-europe-cowardly-leaders; https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/covid-lockdown-cost-of-living-crisis-b2169718.html. 

^[2] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/highest-number-of-countries-engaged-in-conflict-since-world-war-ii/. 

^[3] Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (London: John Murray, 2020), 4–5. 200–201.

^[4] For ‘narrative’ see, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=narrative&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3. For ‘storytelling’ see, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=storytelling&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3. 

^[5] L. Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (London: Penguin 2025).

^[6] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html. 

^[7] David R, Samson, Our Tribal Future: How to Channel Our Human Instinct into a Force for Good (London: Footnote 2023). The so-called Dunbar number, which suggests our ancestors lived in groups of c.150, has been challenged – it is hard to determine a precise number when talking about ways of living so long ago – but it does seem that our forebears resided in small groups, but frequently accessed larger groups for the inevitable benefits this afforded. See, Douglas Bird, et al., ‘Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies’, Journal of Human Evolution, 131 (2019), 96-108.

^[8] On this, see Bruno Latour, ‘Waiting for Gaia: Composing the common world through arts and 

politics’, lecture at the French Institute, London (2011). http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf

^[9] What follows is a lightly adapted version of the discussion in my book Hang-Ups: Reflections on the Causes and Consequences of Fashion’s ‘Western’-Centrism (London: Bloomsbury 2024), 3-4, 13-14. 

^[10] Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 12.

^[11] Daniel Miller, ‘The Little Black Dress is the Solution. But What’s the Problem?’ Elusive Consumption, eds. K. Ekstrom and H. Brembeck (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 113–127; idem, ‘Why Clothing is not Superficial’, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 11–23.

^[12] What follows is a lightly adapted version of what I write in Hang-Ups, 160.

^[13] Angela Jansen, introductory text for the online course “Decolonial Fashion Discourses & Praxis” that was organized by the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion in 2023.

^[14] https://www.bbc.co.uk/videos/cleypn52q9xo. 

^[15] Tim Ingold, ‘Culture, nature, environment: Steps to an ecology of life’, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 2011), 25.

^[16] Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

^[17] One of the best recent discussions on this is Kate Marvel, Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet (London: Scribe 2025).