Nothing in fashion can be made without the human hand. Yet, the venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tech bros are insistent that artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, NFTs, and blockchain technology will improve the industry — they need to be stopped.
The fashion industry has always been a utopia for outcasts, weirdos, and rejects — think queer, non-white, unathletic etc. Despite its perceived glamour, it doesn’t come as a surprise that nerds would find a home in this world too. This isn’t about the nerds passionate about improving the performance quality of knitwear or carefully doing the maths to create optical illusions with pleats and ruffles, but rather, the kind of people who’ve quickly realised that there’s a lot of money to be made. Especially when you can remove the costs of all those outcasts, weirdos, and rejects working as designers, researchers, forecasters, and media professionals.
This begins with a man richer than God (and maybe even Jeff Bezos), Bernard Arnault, the head of luxury conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy), which owns brands like Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Marc Jacobs, to name a few. While not the only one worthy of accusation, Arnault led the pack of businessmen in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, absorbing creative, independent fashion designers and houses into large conglomerates focused on profit over art. Arnault and his cohort introduced pre-fall and resort fashion shows, extending the fashion season to create more demand and products, ie. more revenue.
By 2019, designers were burnt out from producing over ten collections a year, with their manufacturers being required to overproduce almost instantly with the See-Now-Buy-Now model.
The introduction of the internet and technology led to fashion designers abandoning risk and innovation in favour of what the Instagram algorithm would rank higher. Ultra-fast fashion giant, Shein, is infamously known for its ability to mass produce sellout collections through rigorous internet monitoring, paid advertising, influencer campaigns, and plagiarism.
Trend forecasting, which was once done through travel, extensive research, and good ol’ fashioned looking outside, began to use complicated data and machine learning. This has all led to a reigning sameness, a feedback loop where a creative idea may go viral before being stripped for all of its uniqueness and shown over and over to audiences until becoming a trend that’s unimaginatively repacked and resold.
Even fashion media has succumbed to this. Conde Nast and Hearst, two of the largest media conglomerates in the world, run a monopoly on fashion publications. The decay of print media has led to once critical, thoughtful, and interrogative writers and magazines having to over-rely on the dollars of advertisers, Google AdSense, and social media likes and views. The reviews of collections on Vogue Runway rarely critically engage with the works of big-name brands like Gucci or Louis Vuitton but instead, offer clickbait about which nepo baby “slayed” the Chanel runway or discuss how neon halters are perfect for TikTok’s maximalism trend. They’re not immune to brownnosing for fast fashion retailers either, like how Vogue and Glamour have on several occasions praised H&M’s conscious collections — the sustainable lines utilising recycled plastic bottles and organic cotton while overproducing polyester mini-dresses and still failing on their promise of reparations to the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster.
The metaverse and digital clothing have been proposed as a solution to the fast fashion crisis and climate change. Imagine how much less consumption and human rights violations there would be if all of our clothing only existed on a screen. Joe Soap can wear Dior in Fortnite. Plus-sized people will no longer be restricted to cold-shoulder tops and juvenile prints once meterage, costs, and physics are no longer a part of the equation. With blockchain technology, businesses can clean up their supply chains–the decentralised networks could allow consumers and producers to verify where clothing is made, how workers are being treated, and the legitimacy of their materials and products.
As amazing as this could be, it doesn’t offer solutions for the literal islands of textile waste currently polluting our soil and water. This doesn’t take into consideration the cultural techniques and crafts that would be lost to a screen. What about the fact that buying more–even if it is just online–so that we can create more online content does not solve our relationships with overconsumption? And, of course, we can’t forget that we’ll still need something to wear when logging onto cyberspace.
This is not to declare that every STEM student, data analyst, or computer scientist is set to ruin fashion and creativity. Like removing the mask off of a Scooby-Doo villain, the culprit is always capitalism. These new-world technological solutions don’t seek to support labourers, create the kind of efficiency that would allow creatives the time to make new, make us conscious consumers, or actually rectify fatphobia and racism — what is inserting a fat model into a 90s haute couture show with AI when most retailers don’t physically produce sizes larger than XXL? How does reimagining Black women in historical positions of power when they will still face deadly misogynoir in real life? These solutions seek to abandon our reality and escape into paradise, but all daydreams must end. Fashion is differentiated from clothing/dress by the desire to innovate and, as has been proven by our smartphones that look virtually the same year to year, there is nothing innovative about late-stage capitalism.
This is reminiscent of something former Disney CEO Michael Eisner once said–you know, the place that used to make transformative cartoons and spellbinding stories that have now become an IP-hungry monopoly:
We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. We must always make entertaining movies, and if we make entertaining movies, at times, we will reliably make history, art, a statement, or all three. We cannot expect numerous hits, but if every film has an original and imaginative concept, then we can be confident that something will break through.
We’ve made the same mistake as Disney, prioritising money sans history, art, or a significant statement. Unless the statement is that we should never, never rage against the machine.
