Own Your Politics: The Entanglement of Resistance and the Luxury Fashion Industry
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis takes as its subject the increasing instrumentalization of social and political content by the fashion industry in recent years. Such content raises questions about the relationship between notions of political resistance and market capitalism. Marxist theorists such as Frederic Jameson and David Harvey would perhaps view this phenomenon as a confirmation of the ways in which late capitalism incapacitates forms of political descent by absorbing it within its machinations. Within this line of thinking, the way in which various designers use the fashion runway as a forum for protest would suggest late capitalism’s seemingly boundless ability to absorb critique within the commodity form. Such a notion would run parallel to the claim by Jameson that the diversification of cultural production in postmodernism has rendered it illegible. The first chapter illustrates how such notions of absorbed resistance are consistent with the aesthetic project of several influential fashion designers today. The primary example locates this in the trend “normcore.” I will elaborate a history of the term, showing the ways in which New York based art collective “DIS” was instrumental in its formation. I will then show how the trend firmly established itself within canonical fashion aesthetics through the works of several celebrated fashion designers and brands. The notion that the absorption of political descent within the market system indicates an incapacity of social resistance reaches an impasse however, when considering other forms of social resistance. Most notably, the persistence of racial inequality and the cultural output of minority groups advances an ulterior form of resistance whose project, while coterminous with economic exploitation, is not perfectly delineated within its terms. In the second chapter, I engage with such canonical postmodern thinkers as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in order to think through specific examples of resistance by political outgr…
abstract: This thesis takes as its subject the increasing instrumentalization of social and political content by the fashion industry in recent years. Such content raises questions about the relationship between notions of political resistance and market capitalism. Marxist theorists such as Frederic Jameson and David Harvey would perhaps view this phenomenon as a confirmation of the ways in which late capitalism incapacitates forms of political descent by absorbing it within its machinations. Within this line of thinking, the way in which various designers use the fashion runway as a forum for protest would suggest late capitalism’s seemingly boundless ability to absorb critique within the commodity form. Such a notion would run parallel to the claim by Jameson that the diversification of cultural production in postmodernism has rendered it illegible. The first chapter illustrates how such notions of absorbed resistance are consistent with the aesthetic project of several influential fashion designers today. The primary example locates this in the trend “normcore.” I will elaborate a history of the term, showing the ways in which New York based art collective “DIS” was instrumental in its formation. I will then show how the trend firmly established itself within canonical fashion aesthetics through the works of several celebrated fashion designers and brands. The notion that the absorption of political descent within the market system indicates an incapacity of social resistance reaches an impasse however, when considering other forms of social resistance. Most notably, the persistence of racial inequality and the cultural output of minority groups advances an ulterior form of resistance whose project, while coterminous with economic exploitation, is not perfectly delineated within its terms. In the second chapter, I engage with such canonical postmodern thinkers as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in order to think through specific examples of resistance by political outgr…
author: Van Horne, Brent A
keywords: Arts and Humanities, Fashion Design, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media, Normcore, Race, Identity, Postmodernism, Gucci, Balenciaga
date published: 2021-02-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:14Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York