The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion 9781350102309, 9781350102330, 9781350102323

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
A political perspective on fashion
Structure of chapters
2 Fashion is Conflict
Fashion as conflict, tension, politics
Passion and the escape from freedom
The dynamics of positive violence
3 Metaphor and Mask
(Un)masking fashion research
Masks of power and statehood
Diffractive voices
Masks and provotypes
Artistic research—polyphony, layering, deception
4 The Current State of Fashion—the Supremacy of Style
A social contract of freedom and fashion
Struggles of sovereign vanity
Fashion, desire and envy
Selling the state of aestheticized domination
5 The Fashion Police—Micro-Regulating Everyday Style
Fashion as interface for interdividual struggles
Aesthetic regulation, social combat and cupcake fascism
Social order and the preos of fashion
6 The Fashion Safehouse—Counter-Capabilities and Com-passions
Counter-capabilities and participatory knowledge
From zero-sum conflict to shared self-expansion
Fashion between four walls
Pockets of com-passion and the displacement of violence
7 Beyond the State: Towards Deep Fashion
The spectacle of selection
Approaching expenditure and conflict
New relational models for fashion, and beyond
Towards deep fashion
Appendix
References
Index

Citation preview

The Psychopolitics of Fashion

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion Otto von Busch

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Otto von Busch, 2020 Otto von Busch has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriano Brioso Cover illustration by Otto von Busch All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0230-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0232-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-0231-6 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1

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Introduction A political perspective on fashion Structure of chapters

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Fashion is Conflict Fashion as conflict, tension, politics Passion and the escape from freedom The dynamics of positive violence

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Metaphor and Mask (Un)masking fashion research Masks of power and statehood Diffractive voices Masks and provotypes Artistic research—polyphony, layering, deception

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The Current State of Fashion—the Supremacy of Style A social contract of freedom and fashion Struggles of sovereign vanity Fashion, desire and envy Selling the state of aestheticized domination

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The Fashion Police—Micro-Regulating Everyday Style Fashion as interface for interdividual struggles Aesthetic regulation, social combat and cupcake fascism Social order and the preos of fashion

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The Fashion Safehouse—Counter-Capabilities and Com-passions Counter-capabilities and participatory knowledge From zero-sum conflict to shared self-expansion Fashion between four walls Pockets of com-passion and the displacement of violence

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Contents

Beyond the State: Towards Deep Fashion The spectacle of selection Approaching expenditure and conflict New relational models for fashion, and beyond Towards deep fashion

Appendix—The Fashion Police Manual FM 1–15 References Index

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Illustrations 1.1 Embassy of The Current State of Fashion at Parsons, 2012. Courtesy of the author. 3.1 Passport props for embassy, Parsons 2012. Courtesy of the author. 3.2 Seasonal visa sticker, updated for MIT Hacking Arts, 2017. Courtesy of the author. 3.3 Visa application form, The Current State of Fashion, 2012. Courtesy of the author. 3.4 Books on the political philosophy of The Current State of Fashion, written by secretary of state, Ralf Wronsov, 2014–2015. Courtesy of the author. 4.1 Iceberg model of fashion. Courtesy of the author. 5.1 Fashion Police interrogation room at “Fashion as Social Energy” exhibition, Palazzo Morando, Milano 2015. Courtesy of the author. 5.2 Uniform for officer in the Fashion Police, 2015. Courtesy of the author. 5.3 Uniform for supportive militia to the Fashion Police, 2015. Courtesy of the author. 5.4 Witness statement of encounter with unknown Fashion Police agent (incident #33), 2015. Courtesy of the author. 5.5 Witness statement of encounter with unknown Fashion Police agent (incident #42), 2015. Courtesy of the author. 6.1 Fashion safehouse at Konstfack, Stockholm, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 6.2 Workshop at fashion safehouse, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 6.3 The fashion fighter’s manual (cover), zine produced at Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 6.4 The fashion fighter’s manual (pp.13–14), zine produced at Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 6.5 Skill share form for fashion safehouse, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 7.1 Sketch for a monument to an unused perfume, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

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Illustrations

7.2 Sketch for a monument to unused nail polish, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author. 7.3 Cardboard monument to a neglected hoodie, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author. 7.4 Cardboard monument to an unused nail polish, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author. Appendix: Fashion Police manual FM 1–15, exhibited at “Fashion as Social Energy” exhibition, Palazzo Morando, Milano, 2015.

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Acknowledgments I want to thank the many people who contributed to make this book possible, in pain and excitement, desire and despair; students, colleagues, friends and reviewers. I especially want to thank the participants in discussions and workshops, at Parsons, MIT, Wesleyan, Konstfack, HDK and Museum of Contemporary Crafts, who all contributed immensely to all that may be good about this work. The faults are surely mine. As for sustaining the endeavors of the many projects presented, I must thank many supportive friends. A few heartless tormentors and bullies I leave to hear the raven chorus. To my fylgiur: the huntsman, the northern lights, the universe. Thank you for your patience, and may you have a life full of love, vitality and viriditas.

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Introduction

In 2012, not long after New York Fashion Week, a pop-up embassy appeared at the entrance of Parsons School of Design (Figure 1.1). The embassy for “The Current State of Fashion” allowed people to apply for passports if applicants answered a few questions and agreed to have their photo taken. The questions resembled an ID or visa application with the usual data about name, birthdate, height and such, and the back contained some questions sampled from the US visa form. The questions included were whether the applicant has been arrested, is a drug addict, or has engaged in trafficking. But along the way the questions turned to fashion: had the applicant supported organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), or advocated home-made, tie-dyed, patched or mended clothes? That is, was the applicant actually trying to undermine The Current State of Fashion? It was quite obviously not a real embassy, but as applicants had to identify their skin-color on a pantone scale and were introduced to the border policies of the state, questions were being raised. Connections emerged between the seemingly disparate phenomena of states and fashion: who counts and who can become a full member of the community, where are the borders and how are they controlled, what goods and people are allowed to travel where? What really are the values of fashion if they are spelled out as constitutional documents and enforced through a state-like institution? Who rules in the realm of fashion and by what legitimacy, and are these rulers held accountable? How are the “dictates” of fashion enforced on people, and what rights or obligations do the citizens of fashion have? The embassy was a starting point for a longer discussion about how to think of fashion as a state, a social system obsessed with who is “in” and who is “out.” Over the coming years a mode of approaching fashion appeared which utilized some basic concepts from political theory. The central themes became power, order, policing, and resistance, all set within a quite cynical framework of state regulation and, ultimately, violence. 1

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

Figure 1.1 Embassy of The Current State of Fashion at Parsons, 2012. Courtesy of the author.

Fashion is not alien to violence, as stories of worker abuse and deaths keep appearing in the news cycles on a regular basis. Yet it is important to also recognize that fashion, as a social phenomenon, can be violent. Indeed, fashion harbors and with subtle means even promotes violent social tendencies. Chanel is known for suggesting, “beauty is a weapon.” Anecdotal stories circulate of outraged citizens of Paris attacking Dior models wearing “The New Look” just after the Second World War (Arnold 2001: 4), and even in more recent times, people have been killed for their clothes and what they represent (cf. Schmidt 1990; Hermann 2012). Anxiety and fear affects the way people move in cities and how they dress depends on these contexts (Koskela 1997; 1999). Historian Timothy Patrick Campbell (2018: 619) states, “In the long run of modernity, dress is the dark matter of aesthetic life—underconceptualized, difficult to fully see, yet always exerting its pull on us.” The “pull” of fashion is there, whether we want it or not. Fashion is a conflict, and it drags the wearers with it. With its wide spectrum of expressions, fashion is no longer a monoculture

Introduction

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broadcast like decrees from Paris. But this does not mean it has lost its power over its subjects. Even if fashion is more diverse and global, it does not mean “anything goes.” Instead, fashion today consists of micro-cultural multitudes of varying intensity, while still containing concerted trend expressions. Fashion is still “ephemeral, dangerous and unfair,” as Karl Lagerfeld (2007) argues, and it is a phenomenon most of us have to relate to as we are pulled into its orbit as soon as we get dressed. As will become obvious, there is a narrative “we” apparent throughout this text. The book’s general assumption is that everybody is always already engaged in fashion, whether we think of it or not, or want to or not. All cultures engage in some form of modification of looks, and these practices are stratified and shift over time. But specifically in this text, as a rhetorical gesture, the “we” points towards a consumer subjectivity, where most consumers have some agency to assemble personal expressions from ready-made components and affect their look. Yet, as will be highlighted along the way, fashion is not equally distributed but takes place in a continuous conflict where the possibility of participation differs radically between abilities, races, sizes, attitudes, privilege, and is embodied into items of dress. Even if fractured, dispersed and unequal, there is still a paradoxical “we” of fashion consumers; those addressed by the system as potential consumers—people who better keep up and stay ahead. “We” are the subjects of fashion, the general population addressed in the advertising, even those who are not even considered citizens of The Current State of Fashion. The general “we” in fashion points to this position of subjecthood; we do not choose fashion; it is inflicted on us. It imposes itself onto our lives with a certain force. Fashion scholar Susan Kaiser (2012: 30) argues we are all “forced to appear” and thus being perceived and judged for this appearance. There is no unmediated way of appearing, Kaiser highlights, and even if we may feel in control over our consumption, we have little say in the reception of our appearance. To “appear” before someone else means to be cognitively coded, to be socially determined, to appear “legible” to the means of aesthetic communication. To appear is not a neutral event, but is caught in a struggle on many levels; who is seen, by whom, coded with what signification, and in what form of appearance. To appear is a struggle over an unevenly distributed sensible field, where attention is sparse, coded with bias and charged with status and passions. Parallel to philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s (2010) notion of a politics of aesthetics, fashion is a struggle over expression as much as over sensation and participation in civic life; and these aspects are caught in struggles that entangle the decisions of the everyday fashion users.

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

The projects in this book turn to the playful yet very useful definition of fashion made by Swedish fashion journalist Suzanne Pagold (2000: 8) where fashion is “to dress like everyone else, but before everyone else.” The strength of this simple definition is that it suggests an everydayness of fashion, but also highlights the inherent conflicts in this notion; how fashion includes and excludes at the same time. But thinking of fashion as inflicted upon its users can also be taken more literally. Infliction, from the Latin fligere, “to strike,” means something hits the body like the strike of a whip, a whiplash. Like a passion, that which is inflicted upon the subject is something uncontrollable that must be suffered. It may be sought out, even desired, but is not entirely chosen. It is embodied, affecting the wearer who is socially embedded in a power-dynamic not under their control. This is the psychopolitics of fashion; the conflicts of desire and power, competition and rivalry, inner struggles as well as social gambles over positions and domination. The psychopolitics of fashion is about courting desires close to social dangers (von Busch & Hwang 2018). As will be argued throughout this text, the notion of psychopolitics helps highlight the conflicts within the social enactment of fashion. Basing the analysis on the processes of social regulation, psychopolitics put emphasis on emotions such as envy and jealousy. As emphasized by French neuropsychiatric JeanMichel Oughourlian (2012), there is more to the formation of the self than individual psychology. To Oughourlian, the formation and experience of the self is always affected by inter-dividual struggles and any understanding of the psyche must be seen as emerging from a conflict between peers. Thus we are all drawn into what Oughourlian calls “psychopolitics,” and many aspects of the self, which may be experienced as emerging from within, are heavily influenced by relationships to peers and rivals. Another perspective on psychopolitics derives from the ideas of cultural critic Byung-Chul Han (2017) who connects such politics to today’s auto-exploitation of the psyche. To Han, the biopolitics of Foucault’s discipline society have leveled up to push for a full inversion of freedom into a “positive violence” of ubiquitous self-entrepreneurship and competitive achievements, which are continuously quantified and compared through the transparency of social media. What both Oughourlian and Han highlight is that the psyche is a battlefield for inter-dividual and political power struggles, and this book unpacks how fashion is one of the theaters of war. As will be argued later, the psychopolitics of fashion affect the formation of consumer subjectivity, a process that requires a perspective of rivalry, competition and struggle. The meanings and signs of expression are ambiguous and socially negotiated, and often appear with ambivalent claims about identity.

Introduction

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Yet appearance still makes claims about who I am, who I am not, who I may become, etc. People not only appear before others, Kaiser (2001) posits, but have to engage, to some degree, in a struggle to “mind” the social through their appearance, through the interface of dress. Some can care much or care less, yet most find it hard to totally ignore the social responses they face from our peers based on appearance. As Kaiser puts it, “few individuals are immune to fashion in contemporary society” (2001: 80). The struggles over who and how one “minds,” appearing as much as being seen by others, take place under a system of distribution and an ideology of values. Attention, as well as minding, is distributed across the social realm in ways that manifests social power. The distribution of goods paired with the codes of interpretation take place within a state of infrastructure. This is obvious when it comes to access to clothes and brands, but also media and images, social platforms and attention algorithms. All these aspects affect the distribution of sensibilities and aesthetic as well as ethical discourse. The state of infrastructure, as much as the distribution of fashion sensibilities, is caught in a continuous struggle over influence and control, among institutions and invested interests just as much as by individuals. Yet, fashion consumption is not easily divided into the caricature victims versus subversive heroes that so often is portrayed in the media. That is, consumers are neither mindless fashion slaves duped by capitalist propaganda, nor stylish resistors and rebels disconnected from any influence or market. Instead, most are stuck in the many-faceted conflict zones somewhere in-between, doing their best to find a place that makes sense to them in relation to their peers. Like any other state, the people who are within it only take notice of it when in conflict with it. States appear to our senses at borders or in the confrontations that produce victims of exclusion or violence. But it is also within its means that fashion becomes a struggle between peers and rivals, between in-groups and out-groups, between those who are “in” and those who are “out.” Fashion is a continuous struggle, and it often takes its most concrete form in school bullying, where clothes often act as an excuse for judgments, rejection and violence (von Busch & Bjereld 2016). The conflict of fashion does not finish after school though, but the same mechanisms continue to play out throughout life in the aesthetic “social combat” of fashion. The projects throughout this book take as their point of departure The Current State of Fashion—meaning the condition of fashion as it currently manifests in consumer society, that is, the circumstances under which fashion appears in its everyday form. The projects play with the concept of “state” to

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approach the present condition of the fashion system, but also as parallel to a sovereign state, or a nation state. With a twist, examining fashion through the lens of the state echoes the way anthropologist James C. Scott (1998) suggests readers understand politics by “seeing like a state,” yet here we will instead see fashion in the light of statehood, policing, identity-production and resistance. Not only are modern sovereign states, as we know them today, a relatively recent invention, appearing over the last four hundred years, but as Scott (2009: 40) highlights, states continuously struggle to project their power beyond the palace walls, out towards what he calls “state space.” This state space is the controlled environment through which it can extract taxes, energy and manpower. Yet, the state continuously needs to reproduce its self-image as the central agent and upholder of order in this “state space” in order to continue existing. For fashion to be influential, it also needs to project power into the world, not unlike state space. These mechanisms constitute the “state space” of The Current State of Fashion. According to Scott (2017), the evolution of states is connected to the late history of the human species and its environment, and state history is a history of accumulations of domestications. Humans domesticate fire and plants, and later livestock and subjects, and the state continues to domesticate slaves and women in the patriarchal family and hierarchical order in its control of subjects. State domestication means making subjects “legible” for state extraction, especially by establishing dependency between state and subjects, as manifest in nutrition and livelihoods, which are “best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing” (Scott 2017: 21). That is, for the state to survive, it needs to make its subjects dependent on it. As Scott has it, states emerge from what is extractable by the “tax man,” as much as from state hegemony, ideology and its “dispositifs.” It is in the double-action of these opposing jaws that subjects can be caught and pressured to work for the function of the state. And as we will see later, parallels can be drawn to fashion, between the local “policing” of fashion, and the ideology rationalizing the legitimacy of state power and the legibility of its subjects. Forces of statehood turn people into subjects, but also into willing and competing consumers where compliance translates into status. In fashion, it is aesthetic meritocracy that allows for social advancement. As Scott (2017: 87) points out, domestication works both ways; humans make plants and livestocks their subjects, but also humans become dependent on this relationship for their own survival. The state is caught in a similar bind, and also fashion with its producers and consumers, leaders and followers. Statehood is a

Introduction

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set of practical extractive functions, Scott argues, but also a narrative told about itself to make the state seem natural to its subjects, establishing a state-sanctioned worldview. Such stories change with time and context. In much of the current condition, state narratives have merged with consumerism: the state as a guarantee not only of modernity, but of shopping-as-usual. As Guy Debord (1983: 5) writes about the society of the spectacle, “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.” The state of fashion is a vision of the world materialized through the enactment of fashion on the terms suggested and promoted throughout the statehood of the fashion ideology and its infrastructure.

A political perspective on fashion There have been a series of studies examining the connection between politics and fashion, not least historical surveys of how clothing has been affected by state dictates (Guenther 2004; Paulicelli 2004). There is also an emerging fascination with the representation of state power, diplomacy and international affairs as part of an “aesthetic turn” in political theory (Behnke 2017). A common thread is that fashion and dress express political issues, not only in everyday individual and group identity, but also in matters of state politics. To understand international politics, unpacking aesthetics can help reveal the mechanisms of states as much as constitutions, institutions and speech acts can. Also cultural theorists have approached fashion from an angle of politics to highlight the connection between fashion and democracy. French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky (1994) argues for how virtuous fashion can be due to its fluidity of social references and mobility. Here, fashion is a blessing for democracy, mitigating social conflict as it “pacifies and neutralises antagonisms” (1994: 150). Under the reign of fashion, we can “take greater charge of our own lives, to assume more self-mastery, to achieve self-determination in relationships with others, to live more for ourselves” (1994: 148f.). It is the true independent subject of democracy, as fashion promotes “an ego that is more fully in charge of itself ” (1994: 190). Political theorist Joshua Miller (2005) partly aligns with Lipovetsky and argues that an overlap between democratic ideals, such as personal freedom, equality, mutual respect, and common action can be expressed in clothing, even if they also are in tension with one another. “The pursuit of perpetual change in

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fashion is destructive to tradition and common ties,” Miller argues (2005: 9), “but fashion in the broader sense can also be useful to democratic movements.” Miller examines how fashion is part of free political expressions, negotiating messages, solidarity and provocations. At its best, fashion can foster respect for different dress and through this relationships that help manifest democratic ideals. On one hand, Miller sees democratic potential in the expression dress and fashion allows. On the other hand, he still holds the critiques against fashion by Rousseau and Veblen as valid as it may fragment the social body politic. He acknowledges Xenos’ (1989) argument for a disconnect between desire-driven consumption and social and political action, especially in the modern context of continuously reproduced scarcity. As Xenos (1989: 95) sees it, through massproduction and affluence, modern societies have paradoxically created a social world of scarcity, and this is explicit in fashion, as “the stylish always possess a scarce resource independently from the things themselves they make fashionable.” Indeed, as Miller (2005: 13) posits, Social inequality is often reflected in dress and appearance, and the rich, beautiful, and fashionable commonly use clothes to lord over social rivals. Fashion contributes to the blindness that prevents citizens from seeing each other as fellow citizens who are each worthy of respect.

Miller’s argument for taking on fashion as a political possibility for a democratic ideal reveals a clash of two almost opposing perspectives that are sometimes brought to attention in cross-disciplinary inquiries. The clash emerges from struggles within the disciplines themselves, but also this fracture risks undermining the possibility of a shared ground. Even if I will simplify this clash of perspectives below, it may help expose a prevalent difficulty of crossdisciplinary studies in fashion. One perspective emerges from political science and examines fashion through the lens of political aesthetics, arguing that fashion is a subject worthy of serious study within the field of politics. Here, scholars struggle against a tradition within their discipline that treats fashion as superficial, apolitical or even dangerous to the civic realm. Indeed, for those used to studying constitutions and wars, fashion may appear trivial and ephemeral. Yet, from this perspective, fashion can be political, and politics dress fashionably: social movements dress to signify political struggle, or the dress codes of presidents and diplomats affect political processes. In short, state politics could be unpacked by a serious study of dress.

Introduction

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The other perspective comes from cultural theorists, examining the politics of dress from the realm of aesthetic signification, performance and practice. Here, the task is primarily to see how arts, culture and aesthetic expressions are infused by political struggles, basically informing or even weaponizing aesthetics to enforce or undermine power (Thompson 2015; 2017). The struggle within the field is against a tradition that has historically been a proponent of keeping a distance to allow “art for art’s sake,” but which already treats cultural expressions as if they are as important as state politics. According to this approach, dress can be understood by studying politics. The risk appears as the two perspectives meet and each field infantilizes the other. Political scientists feel they “discovered” fashion as signifying something as a serious political signifier, and that they are the first to treat it with significant academic weight, while cultural theorists overstretch their models to force everything and nothing into politics. However, in the end, both camps stay with their own models and no new perspective emerges that can be helpful to bridge the disciplines. A project like the one undertaken in this book walks a tightrope, and risks falling into one, or even both traps simultaneously. But it does so with a special twist as it takes an artistic and design-oriented approach to examine the psychopolitical forces in everyday fashion. It is a perspective meant to guide a creative and designerly approach to fashion, and not primarily promoting a political, sociological or cultural model for studying fashion. The idea behind experimenting with a state-inspired perspective on fashion is that it can highlight social and political tensions we may otherwise miss. These include aesthetic boundaries and their policing, illuminating the rivalry between peers and the social pressures that are employed also in the design of fashion. Through the lens of a sovereign state, critique of the current model is also possible, and we can highlight how a counter-system could manifest itself. Just as much as it manifests structural processes of power, the model of a state also offers the possibilities of resistance and imagining more utopian forms of social organization, beyond the model of existing statehood. There is also the mobilization of a counter-current against the stream sweeping us all towards more and more unsustainable forms of competitive consumerism and social disengagement. Historically, the emergence of the centralized state was accompanied with imaginations of alternative forms of statehood. States were followed by parallel ideas of utopias, and using the state as blueprint for fashion may offer room to play with utopian states in more articulate ways. First we must, however, unpack the conflicting forces within the state of fashion.

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Structure of chapters Passions, conflicts and tensions may be immaterial, but design and art practice can manifest their presence. As mentioned, this book will unpack a series of design projects aiming to manifest fashion as a conflict that can be unpacked through the lens of the state. The argument will be structured around the projects, discussing possible framings and models to see how these tensions play out between subjects. The next chapter, Chapter 2, will introduce a series of perspectives on the conflicts inherent in fashion, that is, how can we examine fashion as a social tension and political struggle between processes of inclusion versus exclusion. It is a tension that mobilizes the psychopolitical passions into a form of “positive” violence, hidden under the perceived shallowness and freedom of fashion. In Chapter 3, the approach of this book will be discussed in the context of artistic research. The purpose of this type of inquiry is to invite participants to experience and engage in the inquiry and help articulate tensions within everyday dress. In order to promote this engagement with the subjects at hand, I have in the projects donned a series of masks to create conditions to facilitate unpacking the psychopolitics of fashion. Along with these masks, I have produced artifacts and environments and experiences that are meant to operate as “provotypes,” such as the embassy mentioned in the beginning, aiming to add new voices into the polyphonic dialogue of research. Masks and metaphors help express and articulate these approaches. Chapter 4 examines the basic figuration for a fashion politics, a fictional state called The Current State of Fashion. Here, the purpose is to explore how fashion systematically mobilizes the passions of vanity and envy as part of its social contract. The state manifests in the ordering of fashion, and in how it is constituted through an ideology of sovereignty, boundaries, exclusionary value hierarchies and aestheticized forms of domination. In Chapter 5, the micro-politics of the state are examined, or how microregulations take place to enforce the values of fashion into social relationships. To unpack this, The Fashion Police is a project that manifests and questions the everyday regulatory mechanisms of positive as well as negative fashion coercion. The rules, or preos of fashion, are naturalized into how people expect fashion interactions to work—who is “in” and who is “out,” as most of us recognize these demarcations through very subtle social signals. Chapter 6 examines a project meant to expose, invert and displace these power relations with the shared efforts to build and utilize a Fashion Safehouse.

Introduction

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The purpose of the safehouse is to unpack the social aspirations as well as pressures that draw us into fashion, in order to facilitate experiments in resistant environments. Starting from the conundrum of autonomy, the construction of a safehouse materialized tensions between independence and interdependence in a series of workshops, where participants experimented in how to cultivate relationships of mutual growth by sharing counter-capabilities to fashion. Each environment tests the notion of autonomy in relation to fashion, while also pushing to displace fashion outside the walls of the safehouse. Finally, the concluding chapter focuses on how to move from a violence of fashion beyond the celebration of aesthetic domination and bullying, to a mode of reflection, self-knowledge and a cultivation of self-esteem. The aim is to help displace the monuments of “success,” as embodied by celebrities and aesthetic autarchs, and instead form a “people’s history” of fashion struggles. Or rather, by examining the “unworn stories” of one’s unrealized desires, we may better understand what forces hold us back from realizing a more meaningful freedom of aesthetic expression. By creating a Museum of Smothered Selves, I have tried to unpack the state’s celebration of its heroes, and challenge this narrative through everyday monuments and a fictional museum to perished selves. Even under a regime of fashion, what room is there for play, and how can we move towards a more meaningful and “deep” engagement with the freedom fashion can manifest? With fashion also come judgments, anxieties and fears, and the policing we bring with them. The irony of states is that in their eagerness to measure, tax and control, they also offer means for usurping power. At the center of the state are the cities, and in these monuments to taxation and population control also thrive the multitudes of insurgent ideas, the seeds of rebellion and the diverse expressions of possibility. These same cities are also the places where the expressions of fashion thrive. That is, a state also produces the room for its negation. In response to the projection and enforcement of the state space, freedom is also no constant or fixed position. Freedom must be the process of claiming and living freely, manifesting it in everyday experience. Similarly, we must imagine fashion primarily not as following decrees, but as the process of claiming and living fashionably, manifesting its freedom as everyday risks and playful transgressions. This book aims to unpack fashion as a conflict, but also to help articulate how new models of thought when it comes to fashion can help actively make the current unsustainable reality obsolete. Ultimately, it is great that designers strive to “do less harm,” but we must also learn to add leverage against an unsustainable

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model. Without seeing conflict, designers are doomed to reproduce existing forms of aesthetic struggles and modes of domination, making them even more present. Understanding the psychopolitics of fashion is thus part of a larger shift towards a more meaningful freedom of fashion, or what can be called a “deep fashion.” However, to start, we must unpack the foundation of fashion: the conflict ever present in the process of appearing.

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Fashion is Conflict

When the conflicts around fashion appear in the media, it is often in the form of the ubiquitous gossip of rival celebrities and social scandals. The more sinister parts of the industry, such as pollution or deadly accidents, rarely break through to the front pages. Somehow, it is not the duty of fashion media to critically examine its own field. However, it is important to see that the conflict of fashion does not only take place in the media gossip, and similarly, the violence of fashion does not only happen overseas in arid cotton fields or collapsing factories. The conflict appears in the everyday practice of dress, in ubiquitous judgments, rivalries and rejections between peers. And it is not a new phenomenon. Iconic fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth had already remarked on this doubleedged nature of dress in an interview in 1895, stating that: “Women dress, of course, for two reasons: for the pleasure of making themselves smart, and for the still greater joy of snuffing out the others” (Worth cited in Polan & Tredre 2009: 9). It is a significant remark, that conflict is the greater joy of fashion. One may think conflict is an unwanted byproduct of fashion, but Worth highlights the pleasure of judgment fashion offers, and he places this as the prime passion of fashion. The dark undercurrent of fashion is that we desire it to be so; when we buy into fashion we buy into a struggle over aesthetic as well as social superiority; fashion is indeed “ephemeral, dangerous and unfair” as Lagerfeld says (2007). So if using Coco Chanel’s notion that beauty is a weapon, acquiring fashion is a way to arm ourselves for the civil war of appearances. If we are “forced to appear” as Kaiser argues, we better be ready: if you want peace prepare for war. That is, when we buy the better brand, the fresher look, the more popular style, we also buy into a quest for aesthetic authority, the possibility of inflicting fashion over our social surroundings, and acquiring the legitimacy to look down on those unworthy of our aesthetic position. At the heart of fashion there is a conflict that we most often encounter in the colloquial terms of “in” versus “out,” or in the many forms of expressing what is “cool” versus “uncool” (Quartz & Asp 2016). This conflict resonates with the idea 13

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

that politics is, at its foundation, also a conflict, as formulated by political theorist Carl Schmitt (1932/1996). Schmitt argues the distinction between friend and enemy denotes the essence of the concept of the political. As the enemy threatens the other’s way of life, it’s an “existential threat to one’s own way of life” (1932/1996: 49). Here, the political is not a notion of overcoming conflict and burying the hatchet, but conflict is the foundation of any political situation; between the haves and have-nots, the barbarians and the civilized, people against people. To Schmitt, this conflict must not be taken lightly, as the “friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols” (1932/1996: 27). The distinction also reflects moral and symbolic expressions, which intensify the conflict and engage a multitude of signifiers of opposition. The political thus expands to saturate all aspects of culture, setting values and signifiers against their opposites to mobilize a whole spectrum of emotions against the enemy. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. Schmitt 1932/1996: 27

We will return to Schmitt later on, but as he posits, the friend/enemy distinction is an existential condition. Its way of mobilizing the passions allows it to take on extreme social manifestations, such as warfare. Applying Schmitt to the common catchphrase of having a “passion for fashion” reveals an existential and emotional condition of fashion, tied deeply to the sense of being. Having a passion is a twofold emotion: firstly it is ephemeral, a fleeting interest, a quick connection and engagement. Fire is a common metaphor for passion, as by definition it cannot be lasting as it is combustive and self-consuming. Secondly, a passion is intense, beyond the control of mind or reason, an emotion so powerful it leads to internal conflict and suffering. A passion is a desire so dominating and intoxicating that reason becomes its slave. It is an inner as well as outer struggle over power; confidence and self-esteem are its currency as much as social position and popularity, and its worth fluctuates with time and context. Like stock, the value of fashion is primarily set on the markets of desire. With regard to time, fashion is by definition a form of ephemeral passion. Its transitory nature may be clearer if we set fashion in relation to the old Greek two fold division of the concept of time. The first type of time is that of kairos, the propitious moment or opportunity, the second is chronos, the sequential time or duration. The division between the two not only concerns duration, they also

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differ in intensity; kairos has a qualitative nature, while chronos is quantitative. A passionate love affair is a sudden outburst of lust, caught in the quality of the moment. It is passionate precisely because it is consumed by desire and cannot last, and is therefore safely harbored in kairos. Suffering, on the other hand, may be chronic, it stretches across time to appear endless, and it can indeed be inexhaustible. It can be useful to apply these two concepts to unpack the difference between fashion and clothing. Clothing may last for decades, it has a quality of stability, and resides safely within the realm of chronos. Fashion, on the other hand, is an intensity that lasts only a moment, and is thus better captured by kairos. This also resonates with how Pierre Bourdieu (1993: 135) argues that fashion “is the latest fashion, the latest difference.” In correspondence, while placing fashion as an event, Giorgio Agamben (2009: 49) notes that, Fashion can be defined as the introduction into time of a peculiar discontinuity that divides it according to its relevance or irrelevance, [. . .] But if we try to objectify and fix this caesura within chronological time, it reveals itself as ungraspable [. . .] the “now”, the kairos of fashion is ungraspable: the phrase, “I am in this instant in fashion” is contradictory, because the moment in which the subject pronounces it, he is already out of fashion.

As fashion breaks stagnated social roles of custom and tradition, it automatically becomes a signifier of the new, the latest (futile) rebellion against petrified social and aesthetic hierarchy. For cultural theorist Gilles Lipovetsky, fashion actualizes a logic that breaks the traditions of cultural stagnation and repetition, but also infuses the notion of the “new” into struggles over social position and prestige, In eras when fashion dominates, the traditional past is no longer the object of devotion. The current moment galvanizes people’s awareness. Novelties have prestige: change and the present are venerated. [. . .] Fashion entails a specific temporality and a specific sociality. Lipovetsky 1994: 227

In Lipovetsky’s notion, the chronic, in lasting traditions and history, offers no change, promises nothing new, and struggles to attract under the modern project. Passions and desires, on the other hand, burn bright in the light of possibilities, progression and even revolutionary change; a fulfillment the preservation of the past cannot attain with the same vigor. In its auto-combustion, passion is also a form of greed for pleasure that snares the mind and clouds the eyes of reason. Traditionally the passions have been seen as primitive drives in a human being, for example in the seven deadly sins,

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

perhaps most (in)famously in envy and lust. In the realm of fashion, passions such as lust, greed and jealousy are emotional states that drive consumption. Many philosophers, especially among the stoics, have highlighted how the purpose of human life must be to control our desires and not slave under our desires, insatiable lusts, jealousies, fears and other passions. Fashion asceticism and the struggle over the passions have appeared under many guises over the ages, from moral condemnations and sumptuary laws, to today’s discourse about responsibility and sustainability. The connection between fashion and passion becomes even more apparent as passion is an emotion, an inner movement. It is not isolated inside the body, but is a process of tension and conflict that moves in tandem with the surrounding world. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman sees fashion as the tension between sameness and difference, and this creates a perpetuum mobile, a continuous “self-feeding, self-sustaining, self-propelling and self-invigorating process” (Bauman 2010: 55). It is a self-perpetuating process fused into the fabric of the current social order, and we are incapable of stopping or even slowing it down as it gains evermore speed and impact (Bauman 2010: 56). As both a fleeting desire and a force of enslavement, fashion has a power over human beings that is in a continuous state of becoming. According to Bauman, fashion gets its kinetic energy from its self-contained movements and counter-movements; between belonging and uniqueness, social conformity and autonomy, imitation and separation, security and freedom. This movement is like a pendulum “swinging indefinitely, by its own momentum” (Bauman 2010: 57). The energy between these opposite poles produces difference and at the same time imitation fueled by status anxiety; it places social groups, signs and sensations in continuous conflict. It is through conflict the power of passion is turned up, and the pendulum cuts through the souls of consumers. Thus fashion is an energy, pushing its motility always far from equilibrium, tilting off-center, and is dependent on continuous flows of matter and energy to keep itself in motion. As Bauman notes, fashion cannot exist in a condition of stable state, as it needs to be perpetually renegotiated (Bauman 2010: 58). He continues: “The perpetuum mobile of fashion is thereby the dedicated, dexterous and seasoned destroyer of all and any standstill. Fashion casts lifestyles in the mode of permanent and principally un-finishable revolution” (Bauman 2010: 58). In its perpetual motion, fashion lets no one feel safe, but one needs to constantly update oneself to stay in motion. It is a matter of individual survival to avoid being socially excluded. You have got to keep up with fashion as it is “sanctioned with capital (in the sense of social death) punishment for desertion”

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(Bauman 2010: 59). To follow Bauman’s advice you constantly need to reinvent yourself, and you have an obligation to choose; “If you do not wish to sink, keep surfing” (Bauman 2010: 59). To keep up, we feed the momentum, and reinforce the conflict. The paradox of passion is that we experience its power growing as we submit to it. In a similar vein, one gains power in fashion by surrendering to it. Very few can step out of this power play. Yet the conflict of fashion is not evenly distributed, but we regulate it every day. Some contexts, hierarchies and professions play down the aesthetic battles, often replacing it with other status values. An unquestioned authority can afford to let the guard down, while people in precarious status positions may have to be more cautious. Prestigious social groups in urban centers engage differently than people in rural areas, and marginalized groups have to struggle for recognition, and are drawn into the conflict at a severe disadvantage. In some contexts the conflict may be mitigated, for example as casual dress and “athleisure” becomes regarded as acceptable dress for more formal settings. Yet it also exposes other anesthetized frontiers, such as an imperative for health and the cruel judgments that comes with taking wellness as a sign for moral character and “natural” aesthetic perfection as an ethical ideal (Widdows 2018). The human mind is primed for reading status, as we will see further on.

Fashion as conflict, tension, politics An objection to the focus on strict difference, or the tensions between two poles, “in” or “out,” may be that the landscape of popular dress is very different from just one or two decades ago. There is no longer one dominant fashion, no dominant media channel, but instead a continuous expansion of overlapping and blurred styles with no explicit direction; an expanding balloon where all points on the surface are moving away from each other as well as from the center. The balloon keeps expanding, and more and more styles become accessible at higher speeds, and only a click away. Thus there is no longer one Zeitgeist or style discourse we can frame as a coherent distinction between the “old” and the “new.” Yet this does not mean that all boundaries are gone. Ask teenagers at their school what type of expressions will work and what will not and you can easily get the answer of a clear demarcation of what brand or style is the current right one. Instead of dissolving clear boundaries, it may be that as inconsistencies and ambiguities increase, the boundaries have instead been intensified, now into gray zones of conflict. A clear frontier has dissolved into a hybrid conflict of

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

lifestyle expressions. Kaiser (2012: 2) notices that “fashion thrives on contradiction (conflicting truth claims) and ambivalence (conflicting emotions): both/and ways of knowing and feeling,” and this may be more true than ever. As fashion ceases to connote a distinctive set of commodities, it may instead increasingly point towards a field of contradictory, asymmetrical and overlapping conflicts. If we return to Pagold’s (2000: 8) definition, that, “fashion is to dress like everyone else, but before everyone else,” it highlights that fashion is a process of tension. It puts the finger on contradictory and often opposing forces, in likeness (imitation), temporality (competition), and the dynamic boundary of whom we consider being “everyone”—“everyone” being the ones whose opinion matter. We seek to be part of the right “us,” not the everyone who are “them.” There is no global “right,” no single dominant style, but a ceaseless dynamic of local overlapping conflicts amongst peers and group formations. There may be many “scenes” to appear at, as Goffman (1959) would have it, or several “fields” of fashion at work at once, not least aesthetic personas cultivated through social media (Rocamora 2011). In today’s global and connected markets there are more combatants engaged in the struggle over the psyche, and thus the politics are a bit more messy. While there are many definitions of fashion, Pagold’s version highlights the predominant tension around what difference that counts, and also how the strategic avoidance of fashion happens in a social and temporal context. Even dressing down or going retro is dependent on who does it first, and how this move is anchored in status hierarchies. More importantly though, Pagold’s definition helps point towards several conflicting forces at work in fashion, and her illustration of the concept could be broken down into three main tensions: 1. mimesis (to dress “like” others): a tension between difference versus seriality, that is, to dress with the right amount of difference, avoiding the too obvious seriality, copying to look like clones; 2. social faction (to dress like “everyone”): a tension between inclusion versus exclusion/rejection. This is to be part of the right “everyone” and not the wrong “everyone,” that is, we imitate behaviors of the people we look up to, not just any people (actually, when the “wrong” people have it, we stop wearing it); 3. speed/acceleration (to dress “before” others): a tension between winner or loser, victor or vanquished. Fashion is to be an early adopter of a style, a conqueror, and trying to keep the second tier from catching up.

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Not only does Pagold’s distinction point clearly towards the way fashion relates to oppositional factions, in resonance with Schmitt and Ranciere, but also the inherent motion propelling fashion as suggested by Bauman’s (2010) perpetuum mobile. But Pagold also explicitly highlights what Paul Virilio (1977/1986) would call a dromo-politics of fashion. Virilio’s “dromology,” which he takes from Greek dromos, the arena for horse racing, articulates a politics and violence of speed, perhaps most obvious in warfare (Virilio 1977/1986: 47). Acceleration, speed and desire are means in political struggles over control where opponents try to outmaneuver and race ahead of each other towards their strategic goals. To speed ahead, and stay ahead, is dependent on both increasing one’s own performance, as well as impeding competitors. Only winning counts. Following Pagold’s definition, the significance of fashion is depleted if it is too inclusive. Or to put it differently, fashion is devalued when shared. The intensity of fashion is a dynamic resulting from the tension between these social orderings, the social politics of inclusion and exclusion. It is about limiting who copies whom, and making sure the timing and contexts are also controlled; when, where and in what company is something “right.” Thus the important part of the dynamic above is to highlight the boundaries between the opposites; that it is a struggle and conflict between people, of keeping some people in while keeping others out. On the one hand, the conflict inherent in fashion may be obvious on a macroscale, for example as manifested in historical sumptuary laws, mirrored in today’s copyright laws, in class distinctions, or simply in the price tags required for exclusivity. But on the other hand, and perhaps a bit less apparent to the historical study of dress, the tension plays out in psychosocial relations and processes. The conflicting intensities of fashion are enacted between in-groups and out-groups as they claim marks of distinction (Freitas et al. 1997), what social psychologist Marilynn Brewer (1991; 2001) calls “optimal distinctiveness.” Ultimately, it is a demarcation process demonstrated by various forms of social violence, as well as in the more intimate dynamics of self-esteem, pride and envy. The politics of inclusion versus exclusion is essential to the philosophy of Jacques Ranciere. The essence of Ranciere’s (2010) discussion is that everyday politics constantly covers up for power to make the condition of the “political” impossible, that is, to make sure the excluded remain invisible and their struggles unarticulated. As Ranciere has it, genuine politics, with its inherent political conflict, is a continuous struggle over whose voice influences the order of things. The possibility of the political is that of disrupting the distribution of parts and roles in society, highlighting a dissensus in order to make a claim

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

about new forms of distribution, not least the “distribution of the sensible.” The sensible, which manifests in perceiving as much as in partaking, is a matter of partitioning and sharing, and these aspects intimately link politics to aesthetics and conflict. Ranciere puts this open conflict of the political in contrast to a practice he calls “the police.” The police are the social process that uphold the current order of society, silencing conflict through hierarchical selection and privileging the people on the inside. His use of the term “police” is a play on the ancient Greek word for the city-as-a-state, the “polis,” a seemingly democratic state, yet where governance was built on the exclusion of women and slaves. Free men constituted the inside of the polis, those who counted, while those excluded were outside and whose opinions did not count, even if they resided in the same polis. The boundaries of “in” and “out” were upheld by a multitude of everyday mechanisms, limiting the possibility of upsetting the order, and these mechanisms Ranciere calls the police. The effect of the police is the limitation of insurgent possibility, using its totalization to stabilize the status quo. The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible. I call “distribution of the sensible” a generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the dividing-up of the world (de monde) and of people (du monde). Ranciere 2010: 499

The “sensible” is what, in a certain context, can come to perception and be articulated. The sensible is thus always relating to a hierarchical position within a larger field of culture and appearance. It is the cognition and perception of the living environment, everything from taste to language. It renders the world intelligible, while simultaneously dividing and stratifying it and keeping the excluded unintelligible and unseen. The police continuously struggle to prevent the people (the subjects who raise the political conflict, wanting to be heard and counted) to not appear and remain insensible. But if they break through, the police employ their power to discredit this voice as alien, debased or deplorable. By partitioning the sensible, the police not only exclude unwanted voices, but also fracture their ability to mobilize, limiting their power to form alternatives. A culture of consensus becomes the means by which the police order the social sphere, limiting the eruption of unheard voices, managing opinions through exclusions and labeling dissident

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voices as insignificant or barbarian. The emergence of dissent comes to be labeled as ungrateful complaining or unjustified rebellion. Even if Ranciere’s notion of the political distribution of the sensible is to be understood in terms of equality, there are of course also stratifications amongst the artists who liberate sensibilities for the masses, such as poets and painters. These figureheads often appear impersonating potentially exclusionary ideals, not least in the form of the genius, and today as the celebrity designer. That is, dissident voices can be lifted into the polis, and prized as “included” by their token of being exotic, while being domesticated, disarmed and primed for extraction. Drawing parallels to Ranciere’s discussion, if we think of fashion as a passion, it is an activation of conflicting forces, a struggle between what “counts” and what does not, what is policed as “in” or “right,” versus what is rejected, excluded and “out.” Seeing this passion, we can expand Pagold’s definition to also include tensions between dichotomies which have defined the history of fashion, such as the tension between sin and virtue, flesh and soul, dream and reality. Fashion straddles them all, and employs them to define friends and enemies, civilized and barbarians, and puts heavy moral weight on these tensions. To open up honestly and reveal one’s desires in the realm of fashion is not only ambiguous but also defined by potential exclusion and shame: Do I dare reveal my desires or are they deemed foreign, debased or “dirty”? Am I not good enough as I am? What if my authentic self is not enough? Do I even know that myself? It is just so much easier to just keep consuming and pretend we do not care. Thinking of fashion as a tension or conflict helps us put a finger on some of the inherent dynamics of both psychological and social processes concerning dress. The pleasure of popularity and adoration stands in contrast to the social pain of humiliation and shame marks the stakes as we are forced to appear (von Busch & Hwang 2018). The object of fashion is not limited to commodities or their symbolic meaning, but the ideological, social and psychological conflicts into which they are drawn. Fashion is a tension that takes place in an arena, or a social “theater of war.” Thus the tension is not abstract or playing out merely in distant media channels or fashion houses, but a conflict with the potential of tearing through the soul of the winner or the vanquished. In various degrees, everyone who is forced to appear is drawn into the conflict. A “wardrobe malfunction” can easily become a humiliation we will not easily forget, where one moment of shame produces a lifetime of anxiety and submission. The conflict of fashion is a conflict anchored in the depths of our well-being.

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion

Passion and the escape from freedom We are born free, but everywhere held in chain-stores. We can dress any way we like, but almost everyday end up dressing in safe and risk-free sameness. We are not often conscious of the policing of our choices of dress. It is not uncommon to hear claims from people that they really do not care much about dress, while in the next breath exclaiming that they would never wear that. Children love to dress up, playing superheroes and villains, princesses and witches, agents and thieves, bunnies and cats, and dress becomes a playful vehicle to enact all kinds of personas. As school starts, masquerades may happen now and then, but students quickly streamline their looks and desires, with fear standing out in the wrong way. With cheap and accessible fashion, many of us can now access all kinds of exciting looks, yet most of us end up in the safety of low-risk jeans and a t-shirt. The notion that fashion is a denomination of a social faction may play out with a heavy hand on our fragile identities; it is hard to stand up for oneself against another uniformed group, especially if they are the popular ones. As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues (1941/1994), seeking the psychological protection of authoritarianism can be a tempting alternative once freedom comes to be seen as too unruly and frightening. Building on a distinction between positive and negative freedom drawn by Isaiah Berlin (1958), Fromm argues Western societies are organized primarily to ensure “freedom from” dictates (negative freedom), the constrained freedom of choosing between limited alternatives that funnels our actions into unquestioned obedience. Freedom is here defined as the possibility to act without imposed constraints from above. The second freedom, “freedom to” (positive freedom), enables us to act with agency, but simultaneously puts a heavy responsibility on the actor to act a certain way. It is a freedom that makes a tacit demand to act or perform. This may easily seem demanding, disruptive and challenging, even fearful, as it would mean the full responsibility of our actions and also of our own spontaneity. Taken further, if people were truly free, the creative act of becoming would make the world too unpredictable and thus threatening for the personalities who are dependent on predictability and control of their surroundings. As Fromm sees it, being free in this way puts a lot of psychological and introspective pressure on people. It may seem so much easier to hang onto the superficial and customary bonds of our conventions, the limited offers of freedom channeled through the narrow notions of individualistic consumerism. This also tends to fragment and isolate the individual being in society, yet still offering a safe harbor (Fromm 1941/1994: 93).

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Continuing on Fromm’s ideas, it could be argued that fashion funnels choice concerning expression of identity into designed and designated paths of action and consumption, not too unlike design theorist Tony Fry’s concept of “defuturing” (Fry 2008). What is in the store right now, is what is designated for the consumer to be a viable expression of the time. It feels safe to be designated a path, a group and style to belong to, and to escape from the seeming chaotic “freedom to.” It is this psychological mechanism totalitarian systems tap into, according to Fromm. A figure of authority, a leader, leaves its followers safe from the fear of leaving the beaten track, of having to take responsibility for their freedom. Echoing his psychoanalytic colleague, Wilhelm Reich, Fromm highlights that this desire to be led is not a mechanism limited to totalitarian states, but also liberal capitalist societies offer several routes to flee freedom towards the safety of leaders. Fashion follows a similar path. We can dress any way we like, but most of us become followers drawn to leaders. To most of us, the freedom of fashion is too overwhelming and we ask designers, editors and celebrities to tell us what to wear. Also in fashion, we desire to be led. Fromm identifies three methods to escape freedom: authoritarianism, destruction and conformity, and these also resonate with fashion. The first form, authoritarianism, means submitting to the control of superiors, persons or ideas, and to seek praise for one’s obedience (Fromm 1941/1994: 141). This can be done to avoid anxiety, but also in the hope of one day utilizing the same mechanisms towards others; that one becomes a smaller authority by following the decrees of authority to the details, and thus rise and one day become an authority oneself. In the realm of fashion, this mechanism is all too apparent. We follow to feel safe and also with the vain hope of becoming recognized as minor icons ourselves; the better we imitate the icon our peers idolize, the tighter we connect our own identity to the icon. The second way to escape freedom is to establish systematic destructiveness, embracing envy to strike down on everything one cannot have or acquire for oneself, from the collective form of destruction to the small acts of gossiping and back-talking others. Fashion as a phenomenon is on a meta-level a grand act of destruction and squandering. But also, in its micro-politics it is based on competitive conflict between peers, the small talk and subtle acts of social micro-regulations; who is in or out of the faction. Finally, the third method of conformity, to become an automaton, helps people to unconsciously embrace normative values and make them their own. This helps in escaping the agonizing processes of introspection, genuine self-knowledge, and individual responsibility. Human beings praise imitation as a form of culturing and growth, and by solidifying inherited hierarchies of values and making them popular, rewarding consent.

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One may argue that fashion defies a conformist society, as fashion seems to offer an almost limitless multiplicity of personal expressions, but conformity can also denote the popular chase for the right difference. As Fromm highlights, obedience and conformity are not necessarily pushed onto subjects from above. Instead it is the internalized mechanisms that make our escape from freedom so easy for us, and also makes us blind to it. By having a “duty,” doing a “good job,” or being “active,” we escape responsibility for our own freedom: Activity [. . .] assumes a compulsory quality: the individual has to be active in order to overcome his feeling of doubt and powerlessness. This kind of effort and activity is not the result of inner strength and self-confidence; it is a desperate escape from anxiety. Fromm 1941/1994: 78f.

To make “active” choices in the realm of fashion is to be an entrepreneur of the self. It means to keep up, adding new looks, to keep updating and refreshing one’s appearance. We live in a time with an “obligation to self-design,” as cultural theorist Boris Groys (2008) puts it. To pick one’s “own style” from the massproduced goods readily available in the fashion boutiques makes us feel we use our freedom actively. Diana Crane, sociologist of fashion, frames this transition correspondingly: “Fashion is presented as choice rather than a mandate. The consumer is expected to ‘construct’ an individual appearance from a variety of options. An amalgam of materials drawn from many different sources” (Crane 2000: 15). Even if fashion today is expressing traits of endless social re-mix, of identity as an assemblage of expressions and styles drawn from many walks of life, it may not offer us more freedom in Fromm’s sense. The more free and convenient the choice appears, for example by cheap and accessible fast fashion, the more blind we become to the designated path already laid out ahead of us. We have learned to conform even more to the most “user-friendly” and frictionless path to construct and express a sense of self. The notion of “democratic fashion” has not changed this; choosing one’s master does not abolish slavery, as Herbert Marcuse (1964) argues. In the realm of dress, this is also highlighted by Jean Baudrillard; “to the illusion of change is added the illusion of democracy” (Baudrillard 1981: 78). Indeed, the “democratized” fashion, today so cheap and abundant it seems accessible to everyone, seems to be a vehicle for an increasing social stress or status anxiety (de Botton 2004). Thus, Fromm’s ideas point towards how consumer goods and easily accessible “street style” are simply different forms of

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conformity, an industry-induced form of self-designed repetition and imitation, increasing rather than limiting the conflicting forces of fashion. As fashion theorist Yunya Kawamura (2005: 98) puts it, “Idolatry [has] diminished; rivalry increased.”

The dynamics of positive violence It is important to notice that Fromm’s idea of an escape from freedom operates under pressures from the outside, through authoritarian dynamics and peerpressure to conform to a given line. If applied to dress, such a notion primarily concerns environments with explicit dress codes and uniforms. Such instances limit the possibility of action within a boundary of everyday and “ordinary” or naturalized peer-regulation. In the dynamics of fashion, the authoritarian aspect pushing people to escape freedom is not the totalitarian force of Fromm’s time, but works within more complex forces, something political psychologist Karen Stenner (2005) calls the “authoritarian dynamic.” The dynamics of authoritarian desires are not the cloned marching tunes of the historical fascists of Fromm’s time, but conformism today operates within other domains. That is, boundaries and taboos still exist, and the consequences for trespassing these delineations still feed into social dynamics that amplify conflicts rather than mitigating tensions between clashing opinions and ways of life. It is thus crucial to notice that today’s escape from freedom happens under different circumstances than those explored by Fromm. As framed by cultural critic Byung-Chul Han (2015), in today’s “achievement society,” freedom and repression look very different. Han argues the simplistic struggle from the twentieth century, between tyrannizing commands from the top versus bottomup liberation of desires, is no longer the dominant power struggle. According to Han, repression and negation, or a psychic apparatus of negativity, does not define today’s Western neoliberal societies. Instead, today’s societal shift entails a “restructuring within the psyche” that entails a transition towards overabundant positivity (Han 2018: 23). The “subject” is replaced by a “project” of the self, which operates under a new typology of violence: poor in negation, rich in affirmation. Instead of a negative big other and a negative dynamics of oppressive peer control, individuals (or “projects”) are drawn into narcissistic overloads of selfabsorbed hunger for continuous and limitless achievements. These are processes where each local goal is just a part of the next, a chase for self-gratification without the possibility of closure. As Han posits,

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion The socially determined impossibility of objectively valid, definitive forms of closure drives the subject into a narcissistic repetition of itself, never arriving at a form, a stable self-image, or character. The subject doesn’t consciously “avoid” the feeling of having reached a goal in order to increase its sense of self. Rather, the subject never has the feeling it has reached a goal. It’s not as if the narcissistic subject doesn’t want to reach closure. In fact, it is not able to. Out in the open, it loses itself in dissipation. This lack of closure is to a large extent economically necessitated; after all, openness and open-endedness facilitate growth. Han 2018: 28

This is a freedom with an excess of positivity, the fullest embrace of affirmation and freedom combined with an inability to say no. It is a total positivization of society and the abolishment of negativity or repression. The slogans of our time are endless improvement and the ceaseless embrace of possibility. It is not the father’s “no” that is the voice of society, but instead slogans of limitless selfimprovement, such as “nothing is impossible,” “be what you can be,” or “just do it!” Rivalry and competition between self-designed and entrepreneurial achievement subjects, continuously chasing the next intensity and experience, are so naturalized it is no longer the main driving force. Instead, it is the selfreferentiality of achievements which “exacerbates into absolute competition,” where “the achievement-subject competes with itself, falling victim to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself ” (Han 2018: 36). It is a competition where the subject chases its own shadow, what Han defines as a compulsive and consensual violence (35). It is not a violence which attacks freedom, but freedom and control merge into one, where subjects surrender voluntarily to competition and surveillance, turning the subjects into victim and perpetuator, slave and master, all in one. This is a rhizomatic violence, not defined by distinction or either/or, but inherent in an affirmative “and. .and. .and. .” It saturates every relationship between hypervisible subjects, in new “friends,” “likes,” or “hypes,” or as Han (2018: 103) argues, “Exposure is exploitation. Communication is commerce.” It is a “psychic bulimia” turning into what Han calls a violence of positivity (114). Yet, as it is merged with our sense of freedom, it is an invisible violence. “Because of its positivity, it is not perceived as violence. It is not only too little that leads to violence but also too much, not just the negativity of prohibition but also the positivity of the ability to do everything” (Han 2018: 82). The concept of violence is heavily debated, and thinking of fashion as a “positive violence” can be confusing. Peace and conflict scholar Johan Galtung famously argues that violence is the opposite of peace, and peace the absence of

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violence. Not only is it the opposite of peace, but “violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (Galtung 2009: 80, italics in original). Galtung’s definition of violence is heavily debated as it widens the concept of violence so radically to include everything except peace. Scholars such as Robert Audi (1971), argue that discrimination and exclusion cannot be seen as violence as they can be peacefully maintained. Robert Miller (1971), on the other hand, points out that neglecting someone in need cannot be violence, since it does not require the use of force. Byung-Chul Han (2018) is skeptical of Galtung as his position seems to confuse a static condition of injustice with violence as an active process. However, just as the concept of injustice can include both what is formally illegal, as well as ethical transgressions which stay within the law, it could be argued that a wider concept of violence helps to better see transgressions and situations of coercion, which also includes neglect, indifference and systemic omission. Whereas not all forms of injustice may be a form of violence, a lot of injustices are caused, upheld, or amplified by violence. Philosopher Steven Lee (2009: 325) argues that most acts of violence are “acts of commission rather than omission.” On a similar note, a wide concept of violence allows for a more nuanced debate on violations and their social cost, it is important to recognize that the concept of violence is a moral concept, and that the moral elements come in through the fact that an act of violence is a violation of a person. I think that it is also important to recognize that the normal pattern of moral discourse allows for excuses and rationalizations. [. . .] When a person commits an act of violence he is not necessarily to be condemned, though he does have some explaining to do. The fact that we would require an excuse from him, or some justification of his behaviour, indicates that a person’s doing an act of violence puts the burden of proof on him, but it doesn’t suffice to show that the case has gone against him yet. Garver 2009: 181

In the book The Value of Violence, political scholar Benjamin Ginsberg (2013: 20) reasons for a more instrumental perspective on violence: “whether or not violence is the answer probably depends on the question being asked.” Not only does Ginsberg see violence as the driving force of politics, whose form of dominance usually triumphs over other forms of political action, but the bureaucratization of violence also allows for sustaining predictability under regimes of control. This can include the state’s monopoly on force. Violence

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allows for distinctions, and it may take the form of both carrot and stick in order to produce rewards beyond mere coercion. Yet this can still limit the everyday use of force, as well as securing social tranquility (Ginsberg 2013: 103ff.). For fashion, violence does not come from confining decrees or laws, but the violence of positivity means nothing is forbidden, there are no official dictates. Instead, every new look, or a copy of it, is only a click away, while the shared expectations to appear looking “right” are increasing. There is an overabundance of goods, identities and possibilities of self-expression, yet also a never ceasing imperative to self-design. The pressure is always on, the chase for the new look for the next selfie never ends. Similarly, when it comes to the regulation of social relationships, it is not primarily negative rejections that define the violence (as in micro-aggressions) but an overload of regulated affirmations and the selfimposed pressure to continually update oneself. This also relates to dynamics of what Deleuze and Guattari (1983; 1987) call “micro-fascism,” which must not be understood as merely control and negative judgments between peers, but are today instilled with positivity and cheerful expression, or positive control. It can come from people who find a diet that’s good for their health, who insist, often with a certain forceful conviction, that the same diet must be good for everyone’s health. Not only does it become a matter of opinion, but their lived experience is so strong they are certain that every other diet is inferior, and possibly even morally debased. The positive dietist is certain that if only everyone would follow the one true diet, it would help everyone, it would rationalize cooking, make everyone beautiful, and ultimately make all illnesses go away. Thus the dietist overwhelms the victim with positivity, yet looks down upon the inferior diet simply from the conviction of wanting to help the poor victim. It is a positive micro-regulation of others. But positive violence can also be more explicit. At its strongest form of aesthetic elitism, fashion helps signal a certain form of positive freedom as a form of libertarian primal agency, an antisocial “can-do” machismo, signaled in an attitude of “I can do anything I want, and you can’t stop me.” The basis of this perspective, aestheticized and embodied with the help of the entrepreneurial self idealized in fashion, is that setting the ego first is the best way to be social, and everyone should first and foremost look out for themselves. By emphasizing what separates me from you, us from them, and implicitly regulating who has the right to what, the conflict of fashion celebrates competitive separateness by aggrandizing the ego: “Not only do I have taste, but I am myself, while you are merely a victim to fast fashion.” This is the emotional entitlement fashion animates, not least celebrated in the over-achieving and indulgent self of

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advertising. A line of thinking can go something like, “as I am better than you, I am more important than you, and I have the right to judge you, and if you are in my way, to eventually hurt you.” As it is draped under being “shallow” we hardly notice how fashion veils ideal forms of agency, of who can do what to whom. In its masculine form, this is the type of heroic individualism Klaus Theweleit discusses in Male Fantasies (1987; 1989) where violent struggle strips the subject of the chains of ego boundaries to enter a domain of superiority, no longer human, but a titan, a god. It is the heroic subjectivity of fascism where the subject conquers not only a social realm but steps out of time and into history. As emphasized by historian Roger Griffin (2008), this celebration of the event capturing time through the power of the heroic subject is the mythical regeneration fascism celebrates. The subject is no longer a citizen, subject to the unruliness of the mass, but mobilizes an inherent strength that recreates the “auratic,” the “magic,” a spiritual revolution, both aesthetic and temporal, in the bid to create a new total culture, steeped from the will itself. Also here, the citizen becomes a project of improvement and aesthetic heroism. As for the fashionista, it is the affirmation of the will that shapes the positive expression of the ego, and if I can afford it, I can conquer more subjectivity and will than my peers. I can be myself more, accumulate more of my expressive force, and thus I know I am better than the other losers, who are poor in aesthetic selfhood. The positive violence of fashion thrives in a world driven by competition and creeping fear, where all participants are constantly being pitted against each other and, in the end, set against human empathy and togetherness. This violence of affirmation is a Faustian vision of positivity, with an overwhelming imperative for self-design. One’s sense of self has to move from bad to good, from darkness to increasing light, in one and only one direction towards evermore positivity, and everyone is better off drawn to follow for the good of all. Along this line of reasoning, cheap fashion has to mean more freedom, but is it really so? For the fashion consumer, the positive violence is interiorized into a narcissist push for ever-abundant achievements, new looks and smiles, new exotic locations and shopping-sprees, self-production as endless fashionable positivity. Thus we must also see that the authoritarianism Fromm saw people escape into is not negativity, but an affirmation of inverted freedom. It is not the fascism of marching conformity of the 1930s, but the smooth and sugar-coated self-exploitative elitism of aesthetic self-designed authoritarianism. This is the environment of the positive violence of fashion—sweet, popular, seductive, affirming, trendy.

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To help unpack these treacherous social forces, the artistic projects around The Current State of Fashion manifest this everyday dynamic of positivity and exclusion and invite participants to engage with the social practices and emotions entangled with the infliction of fashion. As we will see next, the projects help build an imaginal world, using a series of masks to bring the issues closer. Within emotional range, artistic strategies can help uncanny topics become accessible and within personal proximity, rather than examining social dynamics from a disinterested distance. At the heart of it, if we think of fashion, we must hear the constant roar of affirmative battle. This is after all the passion for fashion, the greater joy of snuffing others out. In the shadow of contempt, we are all victims in the end.

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Metaphor and Mask

The embassy for The Current State of Fashion mentioned in the Introduction was a manifestation of a state, and it invited visitors to engage with a process of shared imagination and discussion. In order to render the fictional embassy as real as possible, assistants equipped with props, such as passports, stamps and embossers, met visitors (Figure 3.1). Everybody was ready to smooth the process for gaining entrance to the mythical land of high fashion. The general mood was welcoming and inquisitive; what is this state about? Is fashion a direction or a destination, a state or a process, a place or position? A tourist brochure, selling the wonderful destinations and experiences within fashion, was given to every hopeful applicant. Years later, in the second iteration of the embassy, which took place at the Hacking Arts event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in 2017, the process and atmosphere had changed considerably. No passports could be acquired, but visitors to the embassy could apply for temporary visas, lasting a maximum of one season (Figure 3.2). The officer, now in distinct dark uniform, was no longer inviting, but made clear the abundant obstacles inherent in the process, or simply stated that applicants were not handsome or rich enough to gain access to the domain of exclusive aspirations. Something concrete had changed between the first and second incarnation of the embassy. Along the way, the structure and ideology of the state had become much more clear, and the embassy was no longer primarily a performance of statehood, as in its first iteration. In the beginning, what had been a prop for projecting fashion as a state, had matured to manifest more clearly the ideology of fashion as a distinct form of statehood. In the first iteration the borders were symbolic, the application forms inviting and generous (Figure 3.3), and the mood inquisitive. In its second manifestation, the shape of the state was more defined and convincing, with uniforms, flags and insignia. The thinking of the state had also thickened, and the cruelty lining the processes of aspiration had become more accentuated. 31

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Figure 3.1 Passport props for embassy, Parsons 2012. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 3.2 Seasonal visa sticker, updated for MIT Hacking Arts, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

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Figure 3.3 Visa application form, The Current State of Fashion, 2012. Courtesy of the author.

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Already with the first embassy, I had started formulating a constitution for the state—playing with the US founding documents but twisting them to speak of the ideals of an exclusionary aesthetic meritocracy. This in turn expanded into a series of short books taking on the perspective of the state, authored under the name of Ralf Wronsov, the secretary of state (Figure 3.4). In the first, Tractatus Fashionablo-Politicus, Wronsov states the founding principles of the state: There is thus no virtue of “good” in fashion. In fashion, as in life, might is right. Power and authority, executed by force or threat, legitimized by popularity, is the rule of law. This is our law; the rule of tooth and claw. The beautiful people lead, the ugly follow. The favoured and powerful punish the weak. Wronsov 2014a: 25

Figure 3.4 Books on the political philosophy of The Current State of Fashion, written by secretary of state, Ralf Wronsov, 2014–2015. Courtesy of the author.

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The tone is further intensified in the second book, The Mark of Cain (2014b), where Wronsov argues that fashion is the true reference of the biblical Mark of Cain, a symbol legitimizing fratricide rather than punishing it. It is a story about a strong man that slays a weaker one, and not only getting away with it, but is also paradoxically acknowledged for it. Wronsov advances the view that fashion is the righteous practice of looking down on the weak and poor and their cheap copies. In fashion, the Mark of Cain, the exclusive logo, is a sign of true accomplishment and real superiority. Along the process of writing about Cain, the figure of the Kaiser emerged, the unabashed authoritarian ruler of style, so confident in his superiority. Thus it seemed intuitive to continue the series with a fashion paraphrase on Machiavelli’s The Prince, but written for aspiring fashion designers: The Kaiser, which also happens to be the nickname of iconic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. The goal of a Kaiser is to gain and keep power in a realm of aesthetic politics. “To rule, the Kaiser makes the weak surrender their power by obedience, alignment, and imitation. Imitation is the most potent force, as it makes subjugation seem attractive and makes surrender seductive” (Wronsov 2015: 25). The mix of voices overlap, passages of Nietzsche and Machiavelli are interwoven with the words of Lagerfeld or Galliano. In the end, it is hard to know who is who, that is, what mask renders a statement such as, “I believe in discipline, so I’m not the right person to cry about weakness and things like this, but maybe I’m not human” (2015: 41). Someone, impersonating fashion, speaks from behind the mask of the Ubermensch or superhuman. Both theater and states need their masks. In Clifford Geertz’s (1980) analysis, royal court rituals were rituals for upholding power relations, enacting power and loyalties through symbolic means. James Scott draws on Geertz, to emphasize the way states continuously struggle to make themselves viable, reminding the subjects who is in charge. These manifold rituals of rewards or punishments keep subjects participating in upholding the basic functions of statehood. “The classical state,” Scott (2009: 99) posits, “was anything but self-legitimating. It was perhaps for this reason that the cosmological bluster of such states tended to compensate for their relative weakness politically and militarily.” The court’s veneer of legitimacy needed to be upheld, not least towards the aristocracy, which stood as a real threat to power, but also towards the subjects, who always had the ability to simply stop participating in the maintenance of state functions. Along the way to modern times, the ideology of the state evolves to become better articulated and more explicit, while still anxious of upholding its notion of statehood beyond the court. A common technique in entrenching statehood on

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subjects is to emphasize the distinction between those being “civilized,” or state subjects, and those escaping state-rule, the “barbarians” (Scott 2009: 119). Similarly, a state of fashion is no state of general inclusion, but a regime obsessed by its borders and who is “in” and who is “out.” It is not a place where everyone is equally welcome. Indeed, those who refuse to participate are the barbarians of fashion, strangers and outcasts: unintelligible, alien, and unworthy of attention. The Current State of Fashion is a destination of dreams, a birthplace of belonging, but its borders are not open. As the state materialized and got more articulated it became more than a thought experiment. It helped to ask questions about fashion I had not really been able to formulate before. The state gave shape to something undefined, and opened a process of unmasking. Can our understanding of fashion somehow resonate with ideas such as sovereignty, territory, order, citizenship, power and obedience? Drawing parallels between a state apparatus and a fashion industry comes perhaps all too easily; the courtly rituals and cultivation of dependent subjects, the extraction of slave-like labor, the environmental externalization of costs to (former) colonies. Thus, it is tempting to think of the State of Fashion primarily as a metaphor. Indeed, it can be very fruitful to use statehood as a lens to unpack fashion, especially when drawing parallels with the way states uphold power, use social contracts, laws, myths and infrastructure for manifesting and legitimizing their regime. However, whereas the use of a metaphor offers to represent something abstract and help approach it, a metaphor also locks thinking into its limited path. It may be better to think of the state as a mask, a layering of social realities, as will be discussed in more detail further on. But the state also offers a more personal expression of my own struggle to understand the allures of power in fashion; it offers a mask to explore the more cruel, yet intensely alluring, side of fashion. All my previous engagements in fashion research had emphasized a hopeful tone, methods of empowerment and “hacking” fashion to make it more inclusive (von Busch 2008). But I had not seriously articulated the seductive power of fashion, the thrill of belonging that fashion also sells the ticket into the realm of being one of the few with VIP treatment. Sure, I had a theoretical understanding of the topic through the general ideas in the sociological tradition, of symbolic struggles of distinction and tastes, inclusion and exclusion of groups, dressing alike and apart, and all that. But these common theoretical perspectives do not really give any flesh and bone to the thrilling experience of walking past the line to gain entry to the VIP room. The sense of superiority when people admire you, the pleasure in back-talking a rival, of frowning upon the wannabe in their fake brand clothes, the joy of snuffing out

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a loser. If fashion is a mask of sorts, it offers a disguise that covers everyday elitism. Wearing another mask, that of the state, may help unpack and expose these invisible, everyday dynamics, and not shy away from its seductive lure on reason.

(Un)masking fashion research Metaphors have long given image to the organization of parts and wholes, power and hierarchies, and the workings of statehood. Perhaps the most clear are the abundant examples from nature, such as human societies as beehives, kings as lions, or undesired people as vermin. Similarly, the natural realm is anthropomorphized by state metaphors, perhaps most famously by the “queen” of insect colonies. It is not uncommon also for political theorists to use animal metaphors. For example, John Stuart Mill evokes the image of society as a vulnerable flock of birds threatened by vultures, and in need of another animal of prey to protect the weaker members: the state (Fitzgerald 2015: 9). The Current State of Fashion highlights that fashion is an imaginary place, a destination of dreams as much as a theater of status spectacle. The state builds on the traditions of projecting imaginary forms of social organization onto utopias or dystopias, while using the fiction to highlight tensions within our current shared world. As Gianni Vattimo (1992: 76ff.) argues, utopias are often mirrored in “perfectly negative” images of dystopias that still optimize the character of inventing a desired imaginative future, yet this dream is exposed with its most extreme implications. These new images are counter-utopias, not only exposing the undesired elements embodied within utopias, but also warning more explicitly about the danger of taking dreams for reality, where the aim for perfect happiness is inverted into irremediable unhappiness. As Vattimo posits, these negative counter-utopias follow the dreamworlds of modernity as evil twins, for example in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. What the tension between utopia and counter-utopia exposes is that not all desires point to the same destination. Someone’s utopia is someone else’s dystopia. The Current State of Fashion encompasses both utopian and dystopian extensions of fashion ideology made apparent in state-form. Those on the inside take the exclusivity that comes with the state for granted; they live and breath the ideology of fashion. It is the people on the outside who see the state differently, yet they simultaneously aspire to become insiders, one of the inhabitants of utopia. Masking as a state also allows for manifesting a state as a tension or

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counterpoint—the state can help orchestrate, exaggerate and extrapolate tensions within the ideology of fashion. The mask allows the wearer to feel the tension of shifting positions and the process of becoming another and experience the perspective of another. Cultural theorist Vilem Flusser (1999) posits how the very notion of personhood requires a mask (persona is Latin for “mask”), that is, the mask does not disguise a person, but creates a person. “One is what one is only by wearing (dancing in) a particular mask” (1999: 105). As Flusser sees it, society is “an organization hiring out masks,” facilitating the design and making of persons. Yet, as he highlights, this also makes the design of masks/persons a political matter—the categories of personhood are political categories, that is, who personhood is distributed to and who is allowed to wear what mask. The mask under polytheism differs from the mask under monotheism, as Joseph Campbell (1968) famously argues. Not unlike the one-faced mask of assimilation that stands in contrast to the multiple masks of resistance (Fanon 1967). The mask connotes mimicry and hybridity, and allows for a complex mix of being “double faced,” as in being simultaneously compliant as well as camouflaged (Bhabha 1994). Scott (1991) also argues about the way the mask of servitude allows for “hidden scripts” to flourish, which can in themselves often be more powerful than the official protocols. Yet at the heart of this performative vehicle for the persona, it is by being taken at face value, not as deception or disguise, that the mask is made effective as a narrative device (Jenkins 1994). The state also offers to mask a research position as a way to approach the masks of fashion, a sort of undercover Wallraff journalism inside the ideology of fashion. As fashion scholar Efrat Tseëlon (1995; 1997; 2001) has shown, the masquerade is a rich way to think of fashion, Masquerade unsettles and disrupts the fantasy of coherent, unitary, stable, mutually exclusive divisions. It replaces clarity with ambiguity, certainty with reflexivity, and phantasmic constructions of containment and closure with constructions that in reality are more messy, diverse, impure and imperfect. Tseëlon 2001: 3

When the mask is in play, it turns acting into poetry, not prose, and a spectator knows to search through layers of meaning; the mask signals at least one underlying stratum of reality, if not many. The mask does not even desire to be the real thing, but is a complex symbolic creation, asking to be simultaneously taken as a face while also seen through layers of imaginations mixed with realities. As Tseëlon points out, the mask points to a multi-layering of social

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realities, as well as the paradoxes of appearance. Something most of us grapple with in everyday dress practices. A woman, for example, may say that she dresses to please herself alone, or that her own judgment of her appearance is the most important to her. She then may go on to provide details to specific questions which betray a whole range of concerns with other people’s views. Tseëlon 1995: 4

But as Tseëlon highlights, this ambiguity is exhibited in almost every aspect of appearance and fashion, between simultaneous modesty and seduction, authenticity and artifice, spectacle and invisibility, abjection and beauty. Thus the multiverse of clothing is always draping underlying layers, folding reality over itself, drawing the wearer and audience into a polyphonic and often paradoxical social and psychological environment. Yet, masks are not there to bring us further from each other, but to bring us closer to each other. The mask can act as a mirror, held up to search the fantasies behind, while spotting aspects of us otherwise unseen. This in turn resonates with Oscar Wilde’s famous argument to give a man a mask and he will show his true self. Under the mask of fashion we can finally become ourselves. The mask offers a suspension of belief, an ephemeral affair with unfettered imagination. As in any case for acting, the mask is the fantasy that paves the ground for the thrill of anticipation. In a similar vein, the use of masks in this research is a way of layering, exposing the tensions in the polyphony between positions, and also a way to allow for contradictions to play out. The mask at the masquerade gives permission to contradict, to be one and many, same and other, to shift positions and standpoints within the self, to act out and test personas. The mask is simultaneously sufficiently empty and full at the same time; it shows some alluring traits of character, while it also leaves room for imaginary projection, presenting just enough to fill its role. Thus the mask allows for a certain form of promiscuity, a testing of boundaries and passages for trespassing beyond habitual connotations of character. But it would be a mistake to point to one mask as more “real” than another. It is in the tension between them that room for action emerges. It is also in this room that new epistemic passages open, in the same way Michel Serres’ (1995; 2007) metaphorical creatures, the angel or parasite, act as vectors for new realities. The asymmetrical positions between Serres’ guest and host also point to a destabilization and rupture of the position of the author. In the Symposium, Socrates, the parasite, is a storyteller and messenger. As the guest at the table he is also supposed to be a stranger, an opening towards exotic narratives, forbidden desires, and news from far away.

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The mask also allows the actor to shape shift and become his or her own doppelganger or evil twin. The mask obscures what we take for granted, while giving illusory essence to social matter. Not unlike fashion, the mask acts as cover, and like an agent, the wearer is acting out a double-self, being undercover. And as Boultwood and Jerrard (2000) posit, these types of double-meanings create the anxious ambivalence at the foundation of fashion. Like the changeling, the person is simultaneously same and other, a body double, a being beyond the conventional inhabitation of the self. But, as in the folklore of the doppelganger and changeling, it is not necessarily a more virtuous self, but a self at the margin socially, and in ethical jeopardy; a being at the border of the human, a changeling, a werewolf, a troll (Lecouteux 2003). As in Paul Virilio’s (2007) argument that the invention of the car also brought the car crash, the boundary also necessitates the trespasser, and the mask questions a face underneath. As for the state, the act of “bordering,” as an interaction, produces the state border: the interaction touches and feels out the interface between body and boundary, and every act of sensation is also a seeking of passages to the other side, the realm just beyond reach (Keshavarz 2018). When the touch reaches the fence of the border or the walls of the prison, it is a body that clashes against the manifestation of the state. Ultimately, it is the boundaries of the mechanisms that manifest and also mask a dominant form of social organization. The mask continuously asks to be revealed, yet always mirrors this desire back at the interaction that manifests it as real: if it is too obviously pretend play, the mask loses its power, or an unenforced boundary dissipates, even if it mainly upholds appearances.

Masks of power and statehood Popular genres such as fantasy and sci-fi commonly imagine different social organizations and societies beyond the horizon of the “common sense.” In such settings, the conceptualization of utopian states becomes a way to mask comments about current states. This gesture is often explicitly used as social commentary, at least from revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov’s imaginary of socialist Mars in Red Star (1908), to contemporary fictional works of, for example, Ursula Le Guin or Kim Stanley Robinson (Wark 2015). But this kind of writing echoes throughout history. It is not least seen in the dialogues of Socrates and its elaborate masks of dialogue, or Thomas Carlyle disguised as fashion philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus (1836), where layer upon layer of

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thought is enacted as a masquerade of philosophy. To use a state as a means to unpack fashion may not be as foreign as it first sounds. The mask can offer a shift in expression and perspective, a pro-vocation, as it gives voice to another self, or another person all together. A provocation, from the Latin provocare (“call forth, challenge”), “voices” something. It brings forth an affect which challenges the tacit, habitual, or silenced. It voices in order to arouse, or stimulate, a response, or a new perspective. Provocation calls forth an opinion we prefer not to acknowledge. It irritates and transgresses, but also eggs on and incites, crosses boundaries and trespasses beyond what is considered appropriate. The Socratic method of discursive provocation and dialectic midwifery (maieutics) has the aim of getting the participants to contradict themselves in some way with elenctic examination (from the Greek verb elengchein, “to bring to shame”). But when employing these rhetorical gestures, was Socrates not also an original agent provocateur? And paradoxically, was his death sentence not also used by the powerful to reveal the ultimate price of dissent and teach a lesson to those who would use such provocative a method of inquiry that threatens to unmask power? As noted by philosopher Leo Strauss (1952), the death of Socrates signals the danger of philosophy for all coming truth-tellers, revealing that true thinking must take place from behind a mask. Thoughts that can lay bare power will be persecuted, and the wrath of the state better stay unprovoked. If unpacking and theorizing power, a reader is almost per default led to Machiavelli’s iconic work The Prince. The book is considered by many political theorists the foundational text of political science and is also notorious for its amoral advice. The rhetorical gesture of Machiavelli, to speak to a fictional prince, allowed him to wear a mask in order to formulate a science of power. Leo Strauss (1959: 40) highlights Machiavelli’s scientific approach to politics, arguing that he was “the founder of modern political philosophy” as he opened to political philosophy “a whole new moral continent.” With its radical questioning of Christian morality as the foundation of action, Machiavelli’s advice unmasks the reasoning behind princely power games. As argued by political theorist Sheldon Wolin (1960), the essence of Machiavelli’s advice is not simply that “the end justifies the means,” but Machiavelli’s rhetorical gesture exposes how the paths for political visions are much more layered and nuanced as they mix agreements and ends with action and rupture (while sometimes leaving the rulers with dirty hands). Cultural historian Quentin Skinner (2017) notices how the amoral guidance of Machiavelli is a mask that serves to reveal the fraudulent virtues of the

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Catholic Church. The Church’s historical condemnation of The Prince reflects back on an institution that at the time was highly corrupt, thus acting as a mirror to how the figureheads of Godly virtue in Italy had little to do with moral action. Indeed, the many Popes of the Church State were all Princes themselves, leaving few virtuous principles left unscathed. The mask acts as a voice of reflection, a possibility of shifting positions, while also exposing the cruel theater of power itself. As Skinner posits, it is important to recognize that the virtu of the prince is not ethical in Aristotle’s sense of virtue, but a political phronesis. This is a practical wisdom of power, where the praise of virtue lies in action—actions that exhibit greatness, spiritedness, weightiness, and strength (Skinner 2017: 140f.). Machiavelli’s advice highlights that rulers must be careful not to confuse the princely phronesis with what may appear as virtuous. The actions of the state do not always correspond to the ethics at the state’s fictional foundation. For a state, as for the Prince, what counts is that which is politically beneficial. The realms of politics and morals are thus not two separate or autonomous fields, but pluralistic and synthesized. Thus they are more aligned with the pagan and heroic Romans than the Catholic Italy of his time. To discuss power in the realm of fashion echoes surprisingly well with the way Machiavelli presents his political philosophy in The Prince, as it is also a political narrative taking on that of the advisor and teacher of the novice ruler. Political theorist Erica Benner (2017) argues a reader must see how Machiavelli in The Prince wears multiple masks. In The Prince, Machiavelli knowingly uses his cynical teachings while preserving an appearance of flattery. In that way, the advice could be read as strategic as much as ironic; “its author wore the mask of a helpful adviser, all the while knowing the folly of his own advice, hoping to ensnare rulers and drag them to their ruin” (Benner 2017: xv). Thus, when Machiavelli writes eye-catching maxims such as “it is better to be feared than loved,” his advice simultaneously captures political wisdom as well as undermines it. As Benner argues, this is a specific political style of writing used by Machiavelli, “with statements like these, he seemed to want to get under his reader’s skin: to irritate them, tease them, make them think and think again about the examples he set before them” (Benner 2017: xviii). This style of writing is a way to bewilder and confuse, but also to unmask and challenge the reader, as Machiavelli enjoyed using his writing to put on a variety of masks, to play with different voices. We shouldn’t forget that he was a brilliant dramatist, not just a political writer [. . .] Like an actor in one of his plays, Machiavelli assumed

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diverse voices and personas, allowing him to engage with different audiences without offending them. Yet the man behind the mask was no chameleon, adapting to whatever the times and the men in power might demand. Benner 2017: xix

Using hyperbolic language and ironies, Machiavelli entices the reader with a polyphonic political manual, which by its very structure also reveals the manylayered dangers of politics (Benner 2014). As Benner (2017: xvii) sums it up, “if Machiavelli’s writing horrified priests and monarchist, this was because no one else had so daringly stripped away the veneer of moralism they used to hide their tricks.”

Diffractive voices As part of manifesting The Current State of Fashion I also took it upon myself to write as a representative of the state, state secretary Ralf Wronsov, modeled on a Machiavelli of fashion. Mixing Machiavelli with quotes from Karl Lagerfeld or John Galliano, who are both famous fashion designers as well as media figureheads, the voice of Wronsov is the tongue of the state, the voice of fashion ideology. The masks of Wronsov not only allow for a distinct voice of fashion, but a polyphony of tensions of fashion to be crossed and folded into each other. This type of multiple or purposefully bent perspective resonates with what cultural theorist and illustrator Nick Sousanis (2015) calls an “unflattening,” a form of parallax research. As already mentioned, the dialogues of Socrates are philosophical masquerades that enact and play out various positions, but as with Machiavelli’s mask, they also allow a play with identities and loyalties. Like Machiavelli, the narrative style of Nietzsche is masked in many layers, a trait unpacked by Ronald Hayman (1999). In Hayman’s analysis, Nietzsche’s writing works in parallel to that of Kierkegaard, who also used copious pseudonyms and personae, explicitly employing ambivalence and a multitude of voices in his arguments (such as one being Johannes Climacus and another Anti-Climacus). The voice of Nietzsche not only speaks of itself as another person, as famously in Zarathustra, but also is itself wrapped in layers, as “we hear two voices here, and only one is Zarathustra’s. If both are Nietzsche’s, both are disguised” (Hayman 1999: 7). Nietzsche points towards this at several places, that the aim of the many layers is to point towards transcendence beyond the singular voice and simple meaning:

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion After Zarathustra had said these words, he fell silent, like one who has not spoken his last word; for some time he weighed his staff doubtfully in his hand. Finally he spoke, and his voice had changed. And now, my disciples, I am going alone. You should go now too, and alone. This is my wish. Truly, I exhort you: go from me, and resist Zarathustra. And better still, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he deceived you. The champion of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends. You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you always remain a pupil. Zarathustra Part One “On the virtue of giving,” in Hayman 1999: 6f.

The multi-layered narrative has both a stylistic as well as theoretical implication that simultaneously speaks of aesthetics as the justification of existence in Nietzsche’s writing (Hayman 1999: 69). As pointed out by Thomas Mann, Nietzsche often uses a voice not unlike that of Oscar Wilde, and as Hayman (1999: 9) posits, either of them could have written, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” But the truth of appearances is not the same as the good; “For a philosopher to say ‘the good and the beautiful are the same’ is infamy; if he then adds ‘also the true’, he ought to be thrashed. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth” (Hayman 1999: 10). Wronsov would argue the same could be said about fashion: we are the heroes of selfdeception. The voices of Nietzsche also serve to propel the assertion of self-division and internal strife, the confrontation with the self in order to reach further to new heights of existence. This is the struggle for power over the self as much as of the will, as is noticed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, And life itself told me this secret: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always conquer itself.” Indeed you call it the creative drive of the compulsion to achieve something more exalted, remote of complex, but all this is the same—and the same secret. I would rather go under than give up this one precept, and truly, where there is decay and leaves are falling, behold, life is sacrificing itself—for power! Nietzsche cited in Hayman 1999: 17

The masks of Wronsov can play with hiding and revealing. They speak of the tension between slave and master, oppressed as well as sovereign, the beauty as well as the beast, and let them clash into each other with considerable conflict brought to bear. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s discussion on reflection versus

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“diffraction” as modes of inquiry, the mask allows for diffraction to flourish. As Haraway (1997: 16) suggests, “Reflexivity has been much recommended as a critical practice, but my suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real.” To Haraway, reflexivity reproduces a situation that automatically seeks one dominant perspective, or one author and one meaning. Reflection as a displacement of the same seems to position the viewer behind a veil of objectivity, similar to the graphic perspective drawn from one fixed point on a picture plane. The mask, on the other hand, lets the parallax play out to seek new depths of field. Diffraction, not unlike the unflattening of the parallax perspective, emphasizes interference between waves, or how waves transform and refract when meeting obstacles. This emphasis on recognizing conflict means to “get more promising interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies. Diffraction is an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world” (Haraway 1997: 16). Diffraction offers a way of looking for patterns of difference, and does not try to unify them into one conclusive format or harmony, it allows emphasis on ambivalence and process. Rather, it is the interference and conflicts that are the forces under observation. As noted above, a perspective of diffraction allows several tropes or conflicts to exist simultaneously. It also lets them intersect so as to create new intensities, and even new possibilities for design. The aim is not to critically debunk other perspectives, but to try to redirect processes into fields of action, into design interventions. This is when criticism by diffraction becomes more desirable, if not necessary; when intervention becomes essential, sometimes to stop, but more often to interrupt, redirect, or reorient the process of technological elaboration. Ticineto, Clough & Schneider 2001: 343

Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche use masks to point towards what Strauss (1952) would later frame as the division between exoteric and esoteric meanings. The exoteric is the obvious, what the text says it does, what comes through the mask, while protecting the philosopher from possible retribution. The esoteric, on the other hand, is the hidden, the unsaid, the meaning hidden under the surface to let the writer avoid persecution. Whereas the mask of Wronsov is not necessarily used to hide from persecution, it offers room of expression and a multitude of meanings, also of emotionally conflicting perspectives. Indeed, the narrative language of Nietzsche proves to show how words are never

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transparent, as exemplified in the essay “On truth and falsehood in an extramoral sense,” So what is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms— in short an aggregate of human relationships which, poetically and rhetorically heightened, become transposed and elaborated, and which, after protracted popular usage, pose as fixed, canonical, obligatory. Truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked. Nietzsche cited in Hayman 1999: 21f.

The same must be said about the voices of Nietzsche himself, hidden behind masks of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, and as he says himself in Beyond Good and Evil: “Every philosophy conceals another philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place, every word a mask” (Nietzsche cited in Hayman 1999: 38).

Masks and provotypes In these explorations, the masks worn in the writings of Wronsov and through the workshops should not be seen merely as abstractions, but as physical manifestations of positions for participants to experience. Each acts as a situated vantage point, offering its own perspective. While the mask can be an alter ego, or a theatrical persona taken through reading the text, each of the masks is also designed as a physical object: in the artifacts and props of the fashion embassy, in printed political tracts and tourist brochures, in police uniforms and insignia, in the physical structure of a safehouse, and in monuments to fallen heroes. Each mask is an expression of a voice not otherwise heard, a position staged and expressed in relation to the next. The mask raises a voice, teasing out or provoking a response. In this way, a mask can also be a part of a “provotype” to use the term by Danish interaction designer Preben Mogensen (1992). In Mogensen’s framework of the interfaces between the taken-for-granted and the possible, a design model can become a “provotype,” a radically generative prototype that breaks insular thought routines. In our everyday lives, artifacts and systems disappear from our attention by the very nature of their everydayness. To challenge this blindness, the provocation breaks through the domestic to call our attention to the matter at hand. In correspondence with a Heideggerian perspective on everyday tools, the act of estrangement and provocation may be needed to actually engage with the

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instruments of Being. Thus, the prototyping approach challenges the preconceptions and “blindness” of the participants in the design process and puts new alternatives on the table (Mogensen 1992: 15f.). Thus, as Mogensen (1992: 22) suggests, the designer, or system developer in his case, should take on the role of the benevolent provocateur to create “discrepancies in the concrete.” The provotype is not merely a play with concepts or mind-games, but gains its fullest potential when it gets concrete and physical, and engages the user in the fullest sensorial sense. It needs to be rendered as real as possible, to become a prototype of a real thing, to resemble the real to reach its provocative effect. “The idea from prototyping,” as Mogensen (1992: 10) argues, “is to provoke by actually trying out the situations in which these problems emerge: provoking through concrete experience.” In this way, provotypes are not unlike how design projects operate in “critical design” (Dunne 1999) and “adversarial design” (DiSalvo 2012), initiatives that highlight the role in which physical objects and design experiences support critical engagement and disagreement. As has been noted, seeing fashion as conflict puts focus on tension and practice rather than material goods. A similar shift in perspective, while using a provocational voice, can be architect Bernard Tschumi’s “advertisements for architecture” (1976–1977). A famous example of these ads shows a victim being thrown out of a window as the caption reads, “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder.” Tschumi’s advertisements emphasize how actions define architecture as much as walls, and illustrate how spatial experience has an immediacy that can easily slip away in theoretical concepts. This immediacy of experience is provoked by radical leaps of thought, such as defenestration being an experience of space, or in the cases we will see here, violence being an experience of fashion. The point is to make multiplicities and polyphonic positions tangible, not always desirable, and setting forces against each other by evoking radical experience. The challenge is to keep several realities and forces in mind simultaneously, that is, not extrapolating just one line of development, but taking several positions seriously and diffracting them into each other. To me, this means taking the methods I first explored in Fashion-able (von Busch 2008) beyond the manifesto of “virtuous action,” and exploring the forces of power, coercion and violence fashion operates in, something I had largely ignored. The projects of the fashion state are set up to highlight tension and produce relationships of counterpoint within the phenomenon of fashion conflict. The projects are thus not designed to be solutions but make habitable a landscape of inherent tensions, which is why they are counterpoints (not standpoints). This

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means the manifestations of the state are not examples of “futuring” as much as manifesting forces of conflict and tension, or what Johan Redström (2017) would put as “contradictions of design”. That is, a specific design theory for situating fashion in the social field. Like Tschumi’s murder by defenestration, Wronsov’s provocation speaks through the mouth of a wicked or violent prophet of fashion, a mask speaking of an immediacy of experience, even if exaggerated. Or as Nietzsche (1920: 27) writes, “what would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? Who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction?”

Artistic research—polyphony, layering, deception In my earlier study, I proposed a hacktivist position in design research to help produce new perspectives on design (von Busch 2008; 2015). This position echoes Konrad Becker’s notion of hacking as a form of “cultural counterintelligence” (Becker 2002), which in some sense also resonates with design practices such as “critical design” (Dunne 1999) or “adversarial design” (DiSalvo 2012). The counterintelligence is not only a form of intelligence scraping and data collection, but an active operative intervention in order to challenge established preconceptions. Most importantly, it is a form of provocation that aims to unmask informants and moles. While this may sound dramatic, the task at hand is to challenge the simple position of the design researcher as a “fly on the wall”—or as a detached observer. In much design research it is common to take on a participant researcher role. Designers work with stakeholders through participatory observations, but also often using their design skills to examine social practices, for example through the use of “probes,” as they are provocative yet playful tools for inquiry (Gaver et al. 1999). This gives the process of design room for creative construction to also use a multitude of sensibilities to explore the subject at hand. This gesture of construction as part of asking questions mixes concrete materiality with narratives and imagination, and perhaps most importantly, it invites participants and allows them room for playful inquiry into the rich facets of social and cultural reality. Koskinen and co-workers draw similar parallels where, The aim is to turn fieldwork into an exercise of imagination rather than mere data gathering. In the tough time lines of design, it is hard to view “dreams” by

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observation alone. If researchers want to learn about things like dreams, people have to be invited to the dream during fieldwork. Koskinen et al. 2011: 76

As we will see further on, the dreams of the projects ahead mix utopias and dystopias. They build on Koskinen and co-workers’ suggestions, that in this type of “constructive design research,” designers put entities into the world as a way to help fold positions onto each other: researcher, participants, peer, etc. The task is to evoke thoughts and help participants bring up experiences for collaborative reflection. As in Koskinen’s (2011: 48) constructive design, in these types of research programs, “debate is more important than facts and knowledge” and a “successful constructive program participates in public discourse and interprets society rather than acts as a legislator.” In these examples, designs are food for debate; they are not meant to become facts—the challenge is to bring debate to places where it matters (Koskinen et al. 2011: 98). The type of design here is neither critical/speculative in the form of projecting possible futures, nor the self-policing of Schön’s “reflective practitioner,” that Tonkinwise (2017: 35) warns of. Instead, as Tonkinwise highlights, the “flection” of reflection must not be self-monitoring, but bending away, challenging new perspectives. Similarly, as Johan Redström highlights, theory in design is also something that is under the process of designing, that is, it takes shape in relationship to the practice of designing, not something ready-made. Of course design also draws from existing frameworks and theories, but the important detail Redström (2017: 15) suggests is to avoid seeing theory as something external from design practice. Redström quotes the perspective on philosophy from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994: 5), “Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature.” As with Hannah Arendt (1968), the question is to facilitate a reflective and situated form of thinking, to stop and think (to counter the thoughtlessness of banality, as in the example of Eichmann). But whereas Arendt celebrates an individual form of thinking, primarily done in solitude, and then enacted as praxis, the projects in this book suggest a form of thinking-with. The projects aim to bring people and props together and situate scenarios that align with the process of thinking, a form of designed and diffractive scaffolding for the journey through controversy. Each project helps manifest opposing positions in the conflict of fashion. This is not unlike Donna Haraway’s (2016) suggestion that

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the focus on the universal Man in human (Homo) as represented in the Humanities is to be replaced with humus or humusities; a multispecies muddle of perspectives which also includes critters (also from the uncanny depths of the underworld). This in turn resonates with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000) suggestion that all Being is a form of being-with, always a relationship. So the question is not so much of mustering an individual courage to a heroic and passionate thinking in the work of Arendt, but more of a com-passionate thinking; to set the stage to gather and think-together. This makes design projects, like the ones in this book, strive to place research into entangled positions, in thinking-with concepts set against each other, not unlike a patchwork of theory and practice (Lindström & Ståhl 2014). Each of the artistic projects presents fashion as a conflict of some kind, a tension or a troublesome knot. By their materiality the projects are not only abstract or mental images, but become graspable in relation to the notion of a state, a condition and disposition, as much as a configuration of power. The Current State of Fashion offers to unpack the topic of fashion and violence through a “designerly” or artistic research process (Cross 2001; Biggs & Karlsson 2010). That is, in the act of construction, the process offers new conditions and a proposition of new perspectives on the future, of what is possible in the realm of fashion. Design projects like these do not seek a proof of concept, or evolving new “best practices” through iterations of participatory data collection, design, implementation, evaluation, and then new iteration of better work. Whereas the projects involve some collection of data, these processes are primarily set about as scaffolding for discussions and shared reflections. However, while the projects are manifestations of ideas, they are not merely illustrations of theory, as for example Bill Gaver (2012) warns of. Instead of being illustrations, the projects unpack the conflicts of fashion through the combination of design practice and political theory; they are situations for participants to experience as well as think of fashion from the perspective of a state. In this sense, the masks and provotypes act within a context of artistic research which make some of the conflicts of fashion more concrete, from state ideology, to policing mechanism, to specific rejected garments. Finally, by manifesting its various avenues for exercising power, the projects also help expose possible ways towards resistant and encouraging practices of more hopeful ways of being with fashion, forms of supporting and scaffolding new fashion practices that disarm and displace some of the social conflicts the current mode of fashion thrives in. If the projects of The Current State of Fashion can be seen as designerly experiments in seeing the state of fashion as conflict, the outcome is a form of

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what Redström (2017) calls “transitional design theory.” It offers bridges between practice within a situated field (in this case fashion design) and theories/ generalizations (social/political theory, but also fashion theory). Not unlike Christopher Alexander’s (1977) work on “pattern languages,” this political pattern theory of fashion exposes forces as well as systemic arrangements of power in the realm of fashion as an “intermediary” theory of design (Redström 2017: 24f.). It highlights one of many socially inherent aspects of fashion (it is not a general theory of fashion) but can contribute to mediating new praxis, between a social reality of conflict and the construction of tools for a more hopeful cultivation of identity and fashion-ability. But before we get there, we must first unpack the ordering of the state, or how the state ideology promotes and exaggerates the conflict between who is citizen or barbarian, counted or uncounted, or who is “in” or “out.” The ideology promoted in fashion supports certain hierarchical protocols and favors conflictinducing passions over others. Fashion is a state that thrives in the abundance of greed, envy and fear.

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The Current State of Fashion—the Supremacy of Style

Does the fashion system have a voice, a set of essential values? If so, can we identify a spokesperson for the ideology of fashion? In the popular channels of fashion, this would perhaps be someone like Anna Wintour, the iconic editor-inchief of Vogue magazine. Vogue is arguably the most influential magazine for the fashion industry, not least emphasized by many documentary movies as well as popular references made about Wintour and the magazine. So when Wintour argues about the nature of fashion, we better pay attention to what she has to say, I think that what I often see is that people are frightened of fashion and that because they’re scared of it, or it makes them feel insecure they put it down. On the whole, people that say demeaning things about our world. I think that’s usually because they feel in some ways excluded or not part of the cool group. So as a result they just mock it. [. . .] There is something about fashion that can make people really nervous. Anna Wintour, cited in the opening credits of the documentary film The September issue (2009)

In Wintour’s words, it seems she blames the power of fashion on the excluded. They would not be mocking fashion if they do not desire to be included in the cool group. As Wintour sees it, if just those frightened and uncool people would put on some effort and be cool, they would stop saying demeaning things and start to love fashion too. Wintour’s analysis fails to recognize that it is often the people in the cool group that reject the excluded ones, and the group stays cool exactly because it is exclusive. Famous fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld could add to Wintour’s remarks, that not only is fashion “ephemeral, dangerous and unfair,” but that there seems to be an inherent drive towards demarcation between those who belong, or are “right,” and those who do not belong, or who are “wrong.” The demarcation between in and out easily translates to good and bad, beautiful and 53

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ugly, and it is a distinction spiced up with no little sense of provocative loathing, especially against the weak. It is not by coincidence that Lagerfeld claims, “what I hate is nasty, ugly people. The worst is ugly short men” (Lagerfeld 2013). And fellow designer John Galliano could fill in how he does not want peace in the world, “Not with people, like ugly people” (Galliano 2011). Lagerfeld and Galliano reveal the presence of a tacit ideology of fashion, based on elitism and often a seeming playful humiliation of the weak and those considered ugly. These habits of unabashed aesthetic supremacy emerge from a culture where judgment of looks is easily translated into condemnation, exclusion or worse, and where the virtue of creativity does not translate to moral standard (Grant 2017). Ralf Wronsov (2014a: 13) would agree with the famous designers, and add that fashion “is the rule of the strong, the law of beauty, attraction and popularity by the suppression of the ugly. Fashion is the ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture.” Everything alive seeks power, to sustain its life. It seeks the power to live, to grow, to reproduce. This process connotes to the urge for life Spinoza calls “conatus,” Schopenhauer’s “will to live,” and what Nietzsche later connotes to a “will to power.” If we are to think of fashion as a similar aesthetic process, the will to live is translated through the ideology of fashion to a “will to fashion”—to seek attention and affirmation, desiring to leave an aesthetic and emotional impression on peers (von Busch 2014a). Few desire to be ignored, unrecognized and unloved, and be dismissed as a “nobody.” Thus, as Wronsov (2014a; 2015) argues, the foundation of the state acknowledges that the basis for human desire is a “will to fashion,” and just like a will to power, it is a desire that is relentlessly drawn into conflict and rivalry. To frame a backdrop to the everyday workings of the state, one must recognize the forces upholding the conflicts that form the basic social contract of the state. As its founding principle, it is in the interest of the state to support a “will to fashion” and rivalist struggles, as this conflict not only keeps the distinction fresh, but also sustains the whole industry. Thus, there is a “social contract” at the foundation of the State, even if this term easily draws connotations to a formal or even repressive or forbidding agreement. Rather, fashion is the subversion of repressive mechanisms; fashion is a positive sense of freedom. Or rather, it is an enforcement of freedom. What Wintour stresses in the statement above is that fashion is not simply an abstract demarcation between clothes and styles that are “in” or “out,” it is the wearers who are included or excluded, cool or uncool. That is, fashion should be understood primarily as a social process dividing and stratifying sentient bodies and desires. The feeling of inclusion, attraction and

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adoration is what makes us feel the pleasure of being fashionable—of being seductive, popular, and powerful (von Busch 2018a; von Busch & Hwang 2018). This is the embodied power fashion plays with; both “I am seen,” but also, “I am better than you.” As Blackburn (2014) argues, this is the narcissist pleasure that echoes the classic L’Oreal ad; “because I’m worth it!” Or, in the words of Karl Lagerfeld (2013); “I’m beyond temptation, there is no weakness.”

A social contract of freedom and fashion Cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1980: 188) frames the social meaning of commodities as “you do not only buy an object; you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control the environment.” In the realm of fashion, the social agency acquired is part of the vague social contract between state and consumer. The social contract is a model of how the relationship between sovereign and subjects is regulated, and specifically concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. But it is a model that also affects the interrelations between subjects and their rights and freedoms. To Thomas Hobbes, the contract famously concerns the end of the “state of nature” where there is a “war of all against all” and the social order upheld by the sovereign. Raymond’s comment is worth emphasizing: you do not only buy an object, you buy discrimination. In the realm of consumer fashion, the conflicts of social status are perpetual, and even amplified by the industry. The social contract of fashion celebrates the freedom of identity-production, tapping into mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and feeding fuel to the seductive passions of vanity, narcissism, envy and greed. Whereas rights and obligations between sovereign and subjects are the founding elements of many social contract models of states, the social contract of fashion taps into the conflicts inherent in fashion to merge them with a sense of freedom. As it is, fashion helps us buy freedom itself. Through cheap and accessible, or “fast” fashion, freedom equates the picking between ready-towear choices as a legitimate form of self-governing: no opinion or product is remote or inaccessible, it is all offered a click away and at a miniscule price. Freedom means the selection between pre-packaged cheap and user-friendly notions of freedom and agency, offered with minimal friction. In many ways, today’s fashion is the apex of design as a guidance process; design as an invisible form of designation, of accessible routes of behavior where friction is minimized to the point of total disappearance. It is a totally silent

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power, utilizing the individual’s experience of freedom to ensnare consumers into dependency. All routes seem open to the consumer, all expressions and positions ready-to-hand, ready-to-wear: guided self-expression has merged with subjective Being. We speed through the everyday with minimal strife or conflict, and click ourselves through our freedom. We scroll through the endless screens of cheap garments online, buying them even if we don’t know if they fit or not. In the subjective experience of it, and as long as one can afford it, it appears as diversity and democracy and well-being, all at once. To Byung-Chul Han, the inversion of turning freedom into coercion is the condition of neoliberalism and the total saturation of market values into the social field. As Han stresses, Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, the projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and selfconstraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization. Han 2017: 1

According to Han, this is an exploitative type of freedom which in itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraints. It turns the affective capacity of can into a new form of should. The absence of negativity and limits (which was the dogma of disciplinary society) modulates affirmation and positivity into an imperative to continuously perform ever more. As it is experienced through today’s economy, it is freedom itself that produces a specific violence of positivity. The economy of attention turns every activity into a curated post to boost the social brand, and online “friends” into competitors. Freedom today means “free competition,” turning the sense of freedom into a resource to be exploited, not least in the form of free expression of identity as in social media where the “transparency” of each other’s lives has become currency. Today, unbounded freedom and communication are switching over into total control and surveillance. More and more, social media resemble digital panoptica keeping watch over the social realm and exploiting it mercilessly. We had just freed ourselves from the disciplinary panopticon—then we threw ourselves into a new, and even more efficient, panopticon. Han 2017: 8

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Under the slogan of “diversity,” everything is exposed, marketed and possibly exploited, Secrets, foreignness and otherness represent impediments to unbounded communication. In the name of transparency, they are to be eliminated. [. . .] The negativity of otherness or foreignness is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: “diversity.” Han 2017: 9

The consumer experiences his or her style as unique, while regarding others as simple copycats. Through fashion I am simultaneously leader and follower, master and slave, producer and consumer, all at once. Somehow we all seem equal under the reign of fashion. And it is everywhere, comes at almost no cost, no waste of time, no negative impact (for the consumer)—it is all total affirmation, total seduction, total desire. Ubiquitous fashion, the total embrace of the perpetual flow democratic fashion, has folded itself into the social contract. Our sense of freedom has never looked better. This is the power of today’s economy; not constraining but continuously affirming. “Instead of making people compliant,” Han argues, “it seeks to make them dependent” (Han 2017: 14). From the perspective of consumerism, a slogan such as Uniqlo’s “fashion for all” seems to mean justice for all, or at least justice at the mall. However, if fashion, as Lagerfeld (2007) has it, is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair, this is a statement that echoes curiously of Hobbes’ statement of life before the social contract as being “nasty, brutish, and short.” As cultural theorist Martha Nussbaum (2006: 4) mentions, the social contract is not something abstract, it is something we live and practice every day, and this means social contracts, are not simply problems in academic philosophy. Doctrines of the social contract have a deep and broad influence in our political life. Images of who we are and why we get together shape our thinking about what political principles should favor and who should be involved in their framing. The common idea that some citizens “pay their own way” and others do not, that some are parasitic and others “normally productive,” are the offshoots, in the popular imagination, of the idea of society as a scheme of cooperation for mutual advantage.

A social contract is the societal foundation of justice, laws and their enforcement, and is built on an experience of some kind of mutual advantage, safety and predictability. The contract is a tacit agreement where the social order appears just and fair, and under its limitations, people still have enough freedom to make them compliant. A contract that appears as too asymmetrical creates distortions

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of power and inequalities, friction and feud. A successful social contract, on the other hand, has to be user-friendly and friction free, so natural and fair it remains invisible, loaded with a sense of safety with room for prosperity. Otherwise it will be opposed and possibly upset. It should somehow look diverse enough for most people to feel part of it. If so, they will strive to uphold the common order and even fight to preserve the social contract they are invested in. Nussbaum (2006: 20) continues, “a contract of mutual advantage suggests that one would not include in the first place agents whose contribution to overall social well-being is likely to be dramatically lower than that of others.” Thus, under the notion of freedom sustained by cheap and accessible fashion, if the contract looks diverse and accessible, it must be free and just, even more so if it strives to also include the disempowered, the poor, the disabled, the marginalized and plus-sized. The more diverse fashion is, the more just, and the more free: at least that is the message of “democratic” fashion. As Nussbaum mentions, under a liberal social contract, parts need to be free, equal and independent, that is, not slaves to someone else (and not to fashion!), but of “equal powers and resources” (2006: 29). Individuals need to be independent and not dominated by, or asymmetrically dependent upon, any other individual (2006: 32). If every consumer can access the freedom of ready-to-wear fashion, is it not the fulfillment of consumer justice? It is not that simple. As Nussbaum (2006: 21) highlights, the central question of justice concerns “who frames the principles of justice?”—and is followed by the obvious question; “For whom are these principles framed?” As Han would have it, the current social contract of the neoliberal economy is framed to complement or even replace the disciplinary power of repression, or what Foucault calls “biopolitics,” with a type of “smart power” that is internalized and folded into the “psychogram of the unconscious itself” (Han 2017: 21). Biopolitics has been upgraded into psychopolitics. Here, people enforce the decrees of power on themselves, pushed by the regime of transparency and achievement: physical discipline has given way to mental optimization. [. . .] Accordingly, orthopaedic intervention is yielding to aesthetic intervention. Foucault’s “docile body” has no place in this process. Cosmetic surgery and fitness studios are taking the place of disciplinary orthopaedics. That said, physical optimization means more than aesthetic practice alone: sexiness and fitness represent new economic resources to be increased, marketed and exploited. Han 2017: 25f.

It is not far to think of fashion as an integral part of this aesthetic regime of social performance optimization. Indeed, according to Han (2017: 12), consumer

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economy in the achievement society produces a conflict between competitive objectives, “Every dispositive—every technology or technique of domination— brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion.” In the current state of fashion, the primary technology of subjugation is the use of fashion goods to self-design, to keep producing a fashionable self-image. Fashion is a technique of dominion. As Han posits, Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not lay hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized—and then interpreted as freedom. Selfoptimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one. Han 2017: 28

As Chanel famously argues, fashion is not bound to dress; it is in the air. Today, the sense of freedom has folded into fashion, that is, a fashionable person appears as a free person. Yet, we choke on the air we try to breathe.

Struggles of sovereign vanity The foundational emotion this aesthetic and “diverse” freedom taps into is pride and its aesthetic sibling: vanity. Vanity is one of the many paradoxes that cut through fashion; that in order to be myself I need to take good care of what others think of me. Indeed, I feel better about myself the more others see and acknowledge me. It is easy to think this kind of vanity is a matter of simply being liked, and having many friends that treat you kindly. But in fashion, this attitude of vanity takes on other expressions. If we look at the models on the catwalk, the advertisements, or the characters of the gossip columns, it is another expression that emerges; immodest pride, a sneering disregard with a certain expression of seductive superiority. It is arrogance in its most attractive form. And we love it. An acute observer of this type of arrogant vanity is philosopher Simon Blackburn (2014) who argues that we may think a narcissist is vain, yet the narcissist does not primarily depend on the opinion of others, even though he or she may cherish their gaze. The narcissist is self-absorbed and does not seek the approval on the terms of his or her surrounding social world. The narcissist cherishes a self-referential vanity, a sovereign vanity. In the end of the Greek tale, Narcissus fades away, only hearing the echo of his self-love. To the narcissist,

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society does not exist, Blackburn posits, and greed is indeed good: “Because you’re worth it!” as the L’Oreal advert goes (Blackburn 2014: x). As Blackburn shows, the famous advert reveals something deeper about consumer society’s fascination with narcissism and praise of vanity, if occasionally [the models] looked pleasantly human, at least as often they seem to project self-absorption, or arrogance and disdain. They bestow the kind of smile that might be a sneer. They pout and sulk. Their vanity and indifference goes with being above us all, and perhaps knowing that they can call up our adulation and worship at will. The personae in the advertisements are simply out of reach. They do not care what we think of them. Like Narcissus, they appear to live in a world of their own, enclosed in their own self-love. Unsurprisingly, the models calculated to inflame our desires lure us with youth and beauty, and it is relatively easy to see that those are desirable features. We envy those who are handsome or beautiful, graceful, well-proportioned, symmetrical, glowing with youth and health. Blackburn 2014: 44f.

The vain person, on the other hand, is dependent on the opinions of others, seeks approval, and lives in the eyes of others, not only oneself, like the narcissist. Vanity is a hunger for approval and affirmation, and this brings us to the paradox of vanity in fashion. Fashion is more social than the world of the narcissist, it is imitative and dependent on the look of others, an interface that seeks the approval of others while it marks aspiration and distinction. Indeed, fashion is by its very nature heteronomous, it cannot be autonomous, yet we sneer at this dependency and the discourse around fashion promotes this denial: “be yourself!” This dynamic tension is at the heart of fashion—it promises independence in a realm which is explicitly contingent on the affirmation of our peers. This tension is also something fashion media plays with, and the icy expression of models plays its part, as Blackburn notices, [the model] need not smile at us—indeed, to promote this kind of illusion, she must not smile at us—because that would be a gesture of recognition and reciprocity, and the fantasy she is inducing is one in which there is no commerce with people like ourselves. By buying the produce, the promise whispers, we can transcend our everyday dependencies on one another and rise to join the royalty and the gods, a higher place where we too can afford to ignore the herds below. Blackburn 2014: 46

Fashion sells this asymmetry Blackburn points to; a promise of aesthetic supremacy mixed with sovereign vanity. The ideology of fashion sells a special form of social and aesthetic sovereignty, the sneering affirmation of the mannequin in the shop

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window, or the celebrity on the pedestal: “you must recognize me, while I don’t need to even see you.” Paradoxically, it is not simply a matter of suppression or superiority—if that were the case fashion would hardly have such appeal. The ideology of fashion is more seductive than mere domination; it is not only exclusive, but inviting enough to house the aspirations of the excluded; it is a desire for a type of freedom only the sovereign possesses. This aesthetic sovereignty resonates with Georges Bataille’s (1988; 1991) production of sovereignty through the acts and rituals of an expenditure that dissolves the self into an intensity of mystical unity with higher ideals. Bataille identifies this process in luxury violence, consumption and eroticism, and it should be noted that these are also central traits of fashion. This may be the “oceanic” feeling of fashion: of being seen in a way that transcends the boundaries, of mortals expanding the self through an excessive cycle of extraction and absorption. The aesthetic sovereignty and vanity in fashion is not a property, but an ever-intensifying hunger for connection without interdependence; impossible, unrealizable (or as Han would have it, unachievable). In Bataille’s footsteps, this sovereign vanity is a physical intensity of affirmative bodily pleasures, the ecstasy of dissolution by existing in others. As Bataille writes, “Sovereignty is the object which eludes us all, which nobody has seized and which nobody can seize for this reason: we cannot possess it, like an object, but we are doomed to seek it” (2012: 193f.). In the conflict of fashion, we strive to “be ourselves” better, and be our better selves, while pushing ourselves deeper and deeper into the competitive violence of positivity. Thinking of sovereign vanity in fashion, it can be useful to apply psychologist Craig Malkin’s (2015) scale of narcissism, taking place between the two poles of the excessive narcissist and the self-denying “echoist.” As Malkin (2015: 11) argues, “The less people feel special, the more self-effacing they become until, at last, they have so little sense of self they feel worthless and impotent.” The scale is not permanent, but varies over time and context, making the self fluctuate along the continuum between narcissism and echoism. Sometimes we are in need of recognition and our peers support this temporal condition; they take care of us when we are sick, cuddling our egos in ways they would not accept in another context (2015: 12). Similarly, we may adjust to a new environment by tuning down the ego and try to blend in, or momentarily abate our level of social ambition. The experience of sovereignty in everyday fashion fluctuates along a similar continuum; from occasions where excessive narcissism is needed, building up the self before a date or job interview, while at other occasions, we try to camouflage and blend in to the degree we disappear.

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But a question for a psychopolitical examination of fashion is the ambiguous relationship between echoism and narcissism and the continuous negotiation and tension between the two poles in social relations: the project of excessive sovereign vanity, and the self-denial in cloned imitation (or echoism). And perhaps paradoxically, the echoist as well as narcissist can be seen as vampires; they both “steal” from their surrounding. Or rather, they act as “parasites” in Michel Serres’ (2007) sense as they trade asymmetrically in social energy. The echoist copies others, “stealing looks” in the mimetic sense, while the narcissist lives on the attention of others, “stealing looks” in the sense of taking their attention. This is the magnetic energy of the narcissist, the celebrity we adore, the beautifully radiating ego “we cannot take our eyes off ”—the charisma that makes us feel alive by adoring others. In its endless search for social sovereignty, fashion is always a form of parasitism. It is always an act of extraction and expenditure, always a “stolen look.” Yet the central desire promoted through fashion is that of seeking what one does not have: affirmation, recognition, seduction, position, or even desire for itself. As Rene Girard (1965) emphasizes, rivals seeking the same thing reinforce desire, and desire is drawn to and amplified by the desires of others, effectively turning the process into a zero-sum game. Such perspective challenges the ingrained belief in individual autonomy to instead set envy and resentment as desire’s driving emotions, even replacing the object of desire with the process of rivalry itself. Here, desire has many victims, but few victors. Vanity is not fair, it is cruel.

Fashion, desire and envy With cheap goods readily available, opportunity for fashionable expression seems open to “all”—making effort the guiding principle for the aesthetic judgment of peers: if opportunity is open for all, and we are able to control our efforts, then people get what they deserve. If fashion is “democratic” (as the narrative of fast fashion suggests), people are not innocent victims of their circumstances, but are in control of their own lives: the narrative of fashion becomes “everyone desires to be fashionable, and can be fashionable, thus they should be fashionable. And if they are not, they are themselves to blame.” This fragmentary notion of selfhood undermines collective endeavors and resonates with political theorist Joshua Miller’s (2005: 13) observation, “Citizens today are much more likely to display their possessions to an envious audience than to cooperate on common projects.” Fashion would not be powerful if it could not tap into human desires of envy, or in the envious audience, as in Miller’s suggestion above. And the desire for

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sovereign vanity is the fuel that makes envy burn more intensely, setting the quest for recognition in competition against one’s peers. Fashion plays into the hands of especially the competitive desires released by mimetics, meritocracy and the avenues for social mobility opened by aestheticized consumerism. If people “get what they deserve” it is a form of distorted equality where desired aspirations get distributed through the mass market opened by the fashion industry at a cheap price; yet still “everybody” agrees it is not the real thing. It is an arena rife with emotional rivalries and emotions playing into the darker realm of the psyche. A seemingly equal, yet heavily stratified, playing field is fertile ground for social emotions such as envy. Envy is directed at those with whom we compare ourselves. They are our peers who outdo us, not the distant elites. It is the perceived equality and accessibility of the means of distinction that fans the flames of our envy. Envy is an emotion that “occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it” (Parrott & Smith 1993). Nussbaum (2018: 137) argues a basic understanding of envy can come from siblings: “the envious sibling doesn’t just want love and attention, she wants to displace the other from love and attention.” Nussbaum further (2018: 143) highlights how desire easily turns into envy, and she quotes Lucretius to expose this dynamic, From a similar cause, from that very same fear, Envy wastes them away: Look how this man, before their very eyes, has power, How everyone gazes at that one, as he gets some distinguished honor— While they themselves (they complain) are wallowing in darkness and filth.

“Envious people are obsessed with looking at the success of others,” Nussbaum (2018: 143) argues, “seeing those, they compare their lot unfavorably to theirs. Envy does make you feel as if you are in the dark, and also dirty, tainted, wallowing.” In envy, people engage in zero-sum competition of recognition and despise the people who succeed. Envy, as Nussbaum (2018: 144) has it, connects us to something deeper, “something that assails us as soon as we are born into a world of neediness and powerlessness.” And envy is also played out strongly in meritocratic societies, as competition is amplified, while there are many social mechanisms to hide how the goods are unevenly distributed and the top positions scarce. This anchors envy to resentment, fear and anger, as people easily come to feel powerless and strike out against their rivals in response to the dark feelings; “this combination of hopelessness and sharp torment makes envy one of the most excruciating of emotions” (Nussbaum 2018: 143).

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The Psychopolitics of Fashion Envy thus begins a vicious cycle. Wanting to attack and dirty the happy object— who is also loved—leads to feelings of guilt and badness, which makes the infant feel all the more cast into outer darkness and removed from the happiness of love and attention. Nussbaum 2018: 145

“I deserve what she has” is the basis for envy. But the comparison resulting in envy is also the foundational emotion of our sense of fairness and justice, sociologist Helmut Schoeck (1969) points out. Yet, what one feels is deserved may of course not always translate into ethics or a theory of justice, even if we have a tendency to blatantly justify even our most resentful emotions. “I desire what she has” is also the basis of mimetics, and this type of admiration (bordering on envy) is always highly contested internally as this desire for someone else’s superiority subordinates the desiring subject, as noted by Girard (1965). As I desire what someone else has, I simultaneously acknowledge I am myself not good enough. Even if a “democratic” or fast and accessible fashion is meant to be “for all,” the cheap goods will still not rectify the imitator’s sense of inferiority. My desire for what someone else has may even aggravate my sense of resentment towards peers who I feel do not deserve my ambiguous desires. As Girard suggests, envy is a constituent component of all desire. Yet envy is shameful, and like jealousy, hardly ever confessed, even to ourselves, and thus the origin of our desires remains mysterious to most of us. The two emotional states of envy and jealousy are constituents of fashion, yet differ; envy is the suffering caused by the desire for the superiority possessed by a rival, whereas jealousy is the agony caused by the fear of losing our own position of superiority. While envy is key to the desires of fashion, how we look up to superior peers, seeking their approval and recognition, modulating their looks and behaviors, simultaneously loving and loathing them, jealousy is always present too: the fear of peers overcoming us, stealing our aesthetic recognition and status gains. This is the price we pay for the affirmative freedom fashion offers, for comparing and competing with our peers. However, as Nussbaum pointed out earlier, we must differ between aspirational and benign envy and malicious envy, where the first is motivated by trying to raise one’s effort and performance, and the second is about harming or destroying the object of envy. The destructive envy is what is often called schadenfreude, the pleasure one takes at the misfortune of another. Gloating is its more active and expressive form (Van de Ven et al. 2009: 419). Psychiatrist Frank Ninivaggi (2010: 2) points to the destructive joy in envy and a wounded unconscious sense of inferiority,

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Unconscious envy is the primitive sensation and conflated feeling of privation, powerlessness, inferiority, and hostile distress coupled with the urge to rob and spoil in the face of advantages and their enjoyment existing elsewhere. [. . .] Envy is biting the breast that feeds.

It is quite apparent the conflict of fashion taps into the hierarchically bound emotions of envy and jealousy, utilizing imitational aspirations. However, we should not diminish the inherent presence of schadenfreude, evident in phenomena such as paparazzi photography, the special columns in the media on celebrities’ various wardrobe malfunctions, and the “do’s and don’ts” in every dressing guide, ridiculing the failures of “bad taste.” Aspirational envy so easily doubles as schadenfreude for those who do not keep up. Fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson also places envy, greed and schadenfreude as tensions at the heart of fashion’s relation to glamour and celebrity. As Wilson sees it, “glamour is not about consumption in the consumer society, although the word has come to be continually misused to suggest that it is. Nor is it simply about luxury.” Wilson traces glamour as a form of aesthetic magic merging with fashion through the Romantic Movement, with its love of gothic and the dress practices of the dandies, such as Beau Brummel and Oscar Wilde. But as Wilson highlights, it is important to notice that “celebrity has essentially nothing to do with fashion and certainly nothing to do with glamour” (Wilson 2007: 105). Celebrity is the opposite of glamour; it is desacralization of the magic and allure of appearances. Celebrity is profane, while glamour is sublime. “For Glamour is elitist. The emotions associated with glamour include desire, fear, loss, and an acknowledgment of death” (Wilson 2007: 100). Glamour is not transparent; it is not about exposure, but rather, it depends on what is withheld, on secrecy, hints, and the hidden [. . .] glamour of mystery created an aura of danger, and dangerous fascination. The elitism of glamour sends a message that we cannot all be glamorous. We can aspire to, but will never reach the stars. Wilson 2007: 100

Celebrity provokes an easily recognizable form of envy, as it is quantifiable and apparent in glitz and overexposed in “bling.” The envy of glamour is more complex and contradictory, as it can include suffering, pain and even ugliness. Celebrity is open, shameless, vulgar, in-your-face, nouveau riche. The feelings elicited by celebrity have more to do with envy, malice, greed, and Schadenfreude than with longing, admiration or aspiration. Glamour might elicit hero worship or sadness, celebrity is about horror and excitement—more infantile responses. Wilson 2007: 101

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Figure 4.1 Iceberg model of fashion. Courtesy of the author.

The endless streams of affirmative and “democratic” fashion and the positive violence of rivalry infuse itself into celebrity worship and also the envy of stars. Indeed, so much of celebrity gossip is based on simultaneously worshiping and debasing the stars, and their choice of clothing is an inherent part of this process; a great cover for everyday sadism. Judging and snuffing out the looks of celebrities is a legitimate form of entertainment, and it seeps into everyday relations. As Leach and co-workers (2015) show, schadenfreude offers a blinding form of selfenhancement. In the effort to shame and emotionally destroy the other we embody a passionate wish to be invulnerable while taking the other down, and in the process perpetuators gain a sense of superiority without accomplishing anything except destruction. In schadenfreude, self-idolatry and sadistic contempt blossoms as emotional vandalism. As Nietzsche has it in On the Genealogy of Morals, To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human, principle to which even the apes might subscribe. This is one of the many expressions of pride: the self-love that needs not excel, but that ravishes in the suffering of others. Nietzsche 1887/1967: 67

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Both schadenfreude and gloating are active engagements in amplifying the suffering of the unfortunate victim. But to reference Nietzsche’s notion above, schadenfreude relates to the pleasure in seeing others suffer, whereas gloating refers to the even greater pleasure of making others suffer. As Leach and coworkers (2015) argue, “Pleasure in actively and directly causing a rival’s adversity may be referred to as gloating, especially when it is experienced as an empowered state of superiority that is lorded over the defeated rival.” Here, envy turns into bullying, and in its destructive joy, gloating creates a greater appraisal of the self that has power and status, even if no social status has actually been gained. In comparison to passive schadenfreude, the phenomenological experience of gloating should be embodied as a state of physical activation and arousal. Gloating should also be embodied as a greater state of physical elevation, as people should feel “10 feet tall” and “on top of the world” when they defeat a rival in this way. [. . .] Thus, those experiencing gloating should also feel more triumphant (i.e., victorious, proud) and emboldened (i.e., bold, fearless) than those experiencing schadenfreude. Leach et al. 2015

Following Nietzsche, we must not think it is only the wolves that thrive in the suffering of the lambs, but the opposite too; the lambs gloat at the hunted wolf. Fashion is the sophisticated weapon of aestheticized conflict, one of its many pleasures is gloating, in bullying as much as the scorned celebrities of paparazzi culture. As Leach and co-workers highlight in their study, ordinary people, who would not consider themselves evil in any sense, indeed gloat in the harassment or humiliation of an adversary, schadenfreude is a modest, furtive, guilty pleasure that does little to empower those who experience it. Gloating is a very different pleasure. It is about a direct and active outperformance of another party who is then made to witness one’s pleasure at their defeat. Gloating is not only a greater experience of pleasure. In contrast to schadenfreude, gloating is experienced as a physical invigoration and elevation of the body. Leach et al. 2015

Snuffing each other out or gloating at another’s wardrobe malfunction is an inherent component in the envy that is at play in fashion. It is the energy that makes sovereign vanity such a powerful emotion; the physical invigoration of emotional vandalism and status elevation. As social psychologist Susan Fiske points out, envy is paired with scorn; the feeling of superiority that is a sibling to schadenfreude—it is passive in that it is

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“known by what it fails to do” (Fiske 2011: 16). Whereas schadenfreude is about seeing suffering, scorn works with the act of not seeing, or the ignoring or even the active silencing of suffering. Scorn expresses itself in the absence of compassion from the powerful, in the invisibility of the victim, in the unseen suffering of the uninvited guest, and it increases with status: “power increases exploitation, teasing, stereotyping, and even sexual harassment” (Fiske 2011: 17). Power-holders treat others instrumentally. Suffering is unseen from the top, and the blindness present in scorn is cultivated into the cognitive processes of winners on their way to success. As Fiske (2011: 29) continues, We tend to prefer organizations that have a consensus about who ranks above whom. What is more, once established, status systems perpetuate themselves, justify themselves, and legitimate themselves. Hierarchy seems inevitable and even useful.

Systems of domination are not imposed on people from the outside, but people grow into them, and these dynamics are fueled by desires which stem from vanity, envy and scorn. Fashion acts as the shallow interface by which we cover up these processes, turning them into a legitimate social game. Everyone is free to play, but if you don’t play you are considered a loser. And the loser’s resentment of the “cool” group is his or her own fault, as Wintour would have it.

Selling the state of aestheticized domination The fashion industry taps into, amplifies and commodifies the struggle for sovereign vanity into goods, and the industry also supports the way emotions of envy, jealousy and scorn become enacted in a systemic way. The models look down on us from the runway as media provokes us to take part in humiliating a B-level star’s latest wardrobe malfunction. It is envy and scorn turned functional: this is what pays for advertising, for magazines, new collections and shows. The consumers’ attention is turned to advertising and revenue increases. Conflict sells. Under a social contract of consumer freedom, emotions and means for conflict become inscribed into more rigid processes of domination. Conflict and discrimination become embedded into price and brands, what bodies fit into which sizes, what collections are distributed where and to whom, who is invited to what show and what limited “drop” of new limited goods. The mechanisms of exclusion seem natural within the system, and it is often those who have long struggled to get in who keep upholding the boundaries, making sure they ensure the value of their hard-earned reward.

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From within, these mechanisms are often hard to notice. Indeed, like other forms of privilege, the aesthetic supremacy of the fashionable is invisible to the fashionable as the agent feels entitled to this higher position: the locked door to the VIP room is only experienced by the person who feels unjustly rejected. Whereas vanity and envy are emotions of the individual, domination is the structural imprint of these legitimized emotions, these are the “dispositives” (Laustsen 2014) that uphold the apparatus of social control. Paraphrasing the characteristic of domination by sociologists Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (2012: 49), fashion seems like a habitual expression of individualism under an aesthetic meritocracy, and it features both “internalized domination” by those considered “in” as well as the “internalized oppression” of those who are kept “out.” If we apply Sensoy and DiAngelo’s typology to fashion we could see how internalized domination is expressed in everyday fashion judgments: ● ● ●

●

●

Rationalizes privilege as natural (“some people are just born beautiful”). Rationalizes privilege as earned (“I have worked hard for my success”). Perceives the fashionable as the most qualified (“Good teeth signifies good character”). Resents struggles for equality (“She only got that modeling job because she is black/plus-sized,” etc.). Highlights the normative rejection of minoritized groups with token inclusion (“we are now more diverse” or “we also have plus size”).

On the other hand, internalized oppression makes people rationalize their inferior position (2012: 49f.). As in hegemony, this creates consensual domination of the marginalized group, and arbitrary authority is upheld with minimal use of force. It means, to once again paraphrase their examples: ●

●

●

● ●

Believing the dominant group members deserve their position (the poor have to “dress up” while the rich can just “be themselves”). Seeking the approval, looks and standards of the dominant group (looking “elegant” or like a “princess”). Behaving in ways that please the dominant group in hope of being included (following the “helpful advice” of the bullies). Enduring micro-aggressions (“you should be happy to be with us, loser”). Believing your rejection is because of your inadequacy, and not institutionalized domination (continuously being rejected by the bouncer because of the “wrong” clothes).

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The issue is not only how the cultural and structural aesthetic domination in fashion perpetuates relational judgment, rejection and violence—but what makes it pleasurable to do so. That is, fashion thrives in exactly the dynamic belief of the aesthetic merits of the fashionable, that I feel I am “worth it,” while others are not. What fashion designers sell are devices which help enact and legitimize this belief; I pay for my distinction of superiority, and it also makes me feel better about myself. From the inside, sovereign vanity always appears as aesthetic meritocracy. In reference to Han’s (2015) ideas of the auto-exploitative self to whom nothing is impossible, my entrepreneurial self-worth in relation to fashion is based on the feeling of having achieved something—I have moved forward, upward. As I improve, I have “become myself ” just a bit more and better than others. In accordance with Han’s ideas, it inverts the negativity of negative or forbidding discipline into “projects, initiatives, and motivation” (2015: 9). “Be yourself!” is the slogan of possibility and the mode of production for the entrepreneurial and aestheticized self. When I fail I am either a loser who failed to become myself enough, or burned out for being myself too much. Why am I not more liked, more beautiful, more popular and adopted? It is entirely my own fault. If the struggle gives little progress, perhaps I need a coach, stylist or brand manager to help me become my better self, to find “my style”—which by definition has to be a successful style. For most of us, “being authentic” is costly. Fashion plays a key role in the selling of the achieving self; look at me looking good. According to Han (2015: 43), the projection of self through social media accelerates this process, as “in social networks, the function of ‘friends’ is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.” Here, as mentioned earlier, subjection is replaced by projection, and the self as subject is replaced by the self as project. Projecting oneself into the ego ideal is interpreted as an act of freedom. But when the ego gets caught in an unattainable ego ideal, it gets crushed together. The gap between the real ego and the ego ideal then brings forth auto-aggression. Han 2015: 46

Through the forces of self-exploitation the violence of domination is inverted, and now stems from the competitive desires of the self-project, folding violence outwards as well as back onto itself. The auto-aggression of the self turns affirmation into self-hatred in the rivalry between individuals who cannot live up to their ideal egos. As mentioned earlier, it is a violence that does not stem from negativity or conflict but “derives from the positivity of consensus” (Han

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2015: 46). Here, the “achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. The self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results” (46). Susan Fiske (2011: 4) draws a similar diagram of the current psychosocial landscape, as she argues the current meritocratic models uphold status hierarchy, “when we recognize the emotions of envy and scorn, we maintain the social hierarchy, for better or worse.” The fashion presented to us through the consumer system simultaneously liberates and imprisons. As noted by fashion historian Anne Hollander (1993: 345), “the tyranny of fashion itself has in fact never been stronger than in this period of visual pluralism.” Once again, to return to the state, the positive violence of fashion aggregates on a systemic level to amplify centripetal forces; just as in capitalism money attracts more money, in fashion popularity attracts more popularity. The rich get richer, and the famous get more fame. Sovereign vanity pays off. Simultaneously, the borders are upheld, even if not explicitly spelled out. As a parallel to Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel’s (2000) argument of an economic apartheid, where the inequality and insecurity of the poor is maintained by social and institutional discrimination, it seems fashion supports a similarly structured aesthetic apartheid. This wording is provocatively strong, but it highlights both a predominant racial discrimination throughout the field of fashion, as seen in design, production and consumption, as well as its merciless repression and violence on the aspirations of whole social groups. As noted above, what makes the institutional aesthetic apartheid of fashion so devious is the way it is covered under a soft regime of “democratic” fast fashion, always affirming and positive, as it continuously broadcasts the message that “everyone” has equal access to the free expressions of self on offer. All parts of the system effectively veil how the whole setting of fashion, from production to consumption, is structurally discriminatory and exploitative. The industry is founded on the outsourcing of labor, oppressive sweatshops, unpaid interns, unattainable body ideals and outright ableism, ageism, classism, and racism: systems of exploitation and social stratifications veiled as self-entrepreneurial conflicts between rivaling peers. Occasionally this violence breaks through into the attention economy, such as in disastrous factory fires or collapses. What is more often forgotten is that fashion is psychopolitical, that it facilitates attacks that systematically undermine self-esteem, pushing individual subjects/ projects to continuously seek new aesthetic achievements simply to keep up, as they will otherwise sink (Bauman 2010). It is the lifeline of the industry; if

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consumers were happy, satisfied and blissful they would probably not buy more fashion. Instead consumers are drawn in and pushed towards something like a continuous aesthetic civil war, all-against-all, where the industry provides and profits from the weapons. And the seductive siren’s calls of fashion offers a wellmasked excuse for separation, exclusion, devaluation, and discounting of those deemed unfashionable as “other,” and a waste to the system except for their miniscule paychecks. Unable to uphold their sovereign vanity, they are “losers.” And there is nothing less fashionable than a loser. This brings us to the next step in unpacking the psychopolitics of fashion: how the enforcement of exclusion in fashion does not emanate from above, but is distributed through peer regulation. That is, if envy and sovereign vanity are essential parts of the social dynamic fueling the desire for fashion, it is the horizontal monitoring and control that enforces the distinction between in and out. As we judge the appearance of others, we turn ourselves into the factions fueling the conflict. The social value of fashion is enacted in the clash on the social fields of conflict, enforced by strangers as much as by friends, by in-groups as much as out-groups. Without distributed peer-verdicts, and the expulsion of those considered “uncool” and “losers,” there would be no fashion. As Wronsov (2014b: 12) posits, “Fashion blossoms in the killing fields.”

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The Fashion Police—Micro-Regulating Everyday Style Humans are a social species, wired to connect with others. Born prematurely to survive on our own, we are dependent on others throughout childhood. Without social sensibilities we would not live long. We mirror the emotions and behaviors of others, and we mimic our peers, from the contagious yawn to postures and dialects. Using our emotions, we co-regulate socially, setting our mood in relation to our surroundings. Happiness as well as sadness often arise in relational settings, amongst peers. Experiences in daily life makes our emotions oscillate up or down, and these shifts may be abrupt, especially in young children. But as we grow up we adapt to these experiences and stabilize back to their base-point as we learn that well-regulated social emotions play a key role in our general well-being. Most of our emotional life is regulated by peer interactions and unspoken interactions guide when and how we can experience and express emotions (Ahmed 2004, 2006). Yet this dependence on peers is a perspective we may not firstly think of when it comes to dress. Fashion is sold to us as a form of self-improvement, telling us we can take control over our aesthetic expression. Brands sell us a better self. But they offer little self-understanding. Rather, we build up an image of independence and immunity by aligning with fashion, leaving little room for vulnerability or room to unravel the social emotions that drive our everyday dress practices. How can we see fashion through the processes that guide mimicry, envy, jealousy or gloating? At the 2015 exhibition “Fashion as Social Energy” at Palazzo Morando in Milano, visitors entered a dimly lit room with a table, chair and two mannequins wearing the black uniforms of the Fashion Police (Figure 5.1). A table lamp was angled at the visitor’s face, like in an interrogation room, and witness statements and phantom sketches of seemingly everyday people covered the surface of the table. In the room, visitors could also read leaked documents from a police manual on the art of aesthetic peer regulation and social control through 73

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Figure 5.1 Fashion Police interrogation room at “Fashion as Social Energy” exhibition, Palazzo Morando, Milano 2015. Courtesy of the author.

bullying. The fashion police offered empty witness forms if visitors felt the need to report abuse in situations where undercover officers had approached them. The idea of making props for the fashion police started as a comment on The Current State of Fashion. What upholds the order of the state is not the laws of media or that people are obedient slaves. Instead, control is distributed, and the people we jokingly call the “fashion police” may actually be state agents, or at least running the errands of the state. While official state regulation of clothing exists in some countries, perhaps most explicitly in Saudi Arabia, the act of policing is often spoken of as a play of words when it comes to fashion (Figure 5.2). The idea took shape in tandem with the props being made and as I gathered stories of clothing incidents students and colleagues had encountered in their everyday lives. The uniformed police are just a small fraction of our encounters with the everyday policing of dress, for example with authorities such as school staff when we are young, or bouncers, professional officials, or even judges later in life (Robson 2013). Instead, most of the everyday encounters are with undercover agents, such as our friends, or the local militia, which is something like the organized civil branches of the police that are the peers we may look up to (Figure 5.3). We don’t care about what “everyone” thinks. It is the friend who exclaims “what are you wearing!?” with just that extra intonation that makes you question what detail he or she is commenting on. It is the old friends from high school

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Figure 5.2 Uniform for officer in the Fashion Police, 2015. Courtesy of the author.

who give your new clothes a second look with a smirk, just to highlight how your look breaks the tacit codes you shared some years earlier, but which you now no longer adhere to. It is in the looks of disapproval you encounter at the train platform when your socks don’t match your Marni sandals. Or it may be in the explicit frown from a rival at work as she glances twice at the garment combination you thought was just right this morning but now suddenly feel you need to go home and change. These are just some notes from the witness reports I have

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Figure 5.3 Uniform for supportive militia to the Fashion Police, 2015. Courtesy of the author.

taken from the exhibition or when presenting the project in public (Figures 5.4 and 5.5). The witness reports came to focus on the connection between aspiration and regulation through fashion. It is a type of subtle hierarchical interaction that happens between peers. Simultaneously, other forms of interactions appeared as less regulatory and more like pestering, such as street harassment and catcalling,

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Figure 5.4 Witness statement of encounter with unknown Fashion Police agent (incident #33), 2015. Courtesy of the author.

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Figure 5.5 Witness statement of encounter with unknown Fashion Police agent (incident #42), 2015. Courtesy of the author.

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and these interactions seemed primarily conducted by strangers (Koskela 1997; 1999). Thus the focus of the project turned to peer policing of fashion, rather than the vandalism of harassment. To highlight the policing element, along with the uniforms, witness forms, and sketches of undercover agents based on participants’ stories, another prop for the exhibit was a “leaked” manual from the fashion police that outlines the operational procedures of the police. It does so with a formal but didactic voice (see Appendix). The task of the manual is to educate officers to better enforce aesthetic regulation of their fellow citizens. Mixed with legitimizations of aesthetic policing of the territorial “terrain vogue,” the manual includes small info-boxes with assignments for cadets to discuss, such as, Think: - “In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy,” the sociologist Ivan Illich said. What is the relation between the police and slaves today? [. . .] Think: - Why do you think people surrender their freedom to be controlled by the demarcation of fashion? List benefits and drawbacks. Police Manual FM 1–15: 8

It is one thing being judged by individual appearance, and it happens to all of us. But it is quite another thing when biases aggregate and are enforced on a repeated everyday basis or structural scale. When part of everyday invalidation and rejection, fashion becomes part of something more sinister. With its absurd tone, the manual points towards how the individual statements from the participant emerge across the social field as if institutionalized and coordinated by a police force, enacting social laws. In the fusion of pedagogic assignments and support for bullying, the tone of the manual offers a perspective into systemic social regulations that fashion thrives on. If we are to think of control and the policing of the lines of demarcation in fashion conflict, we cannot look to the fashion icons for its power. The social influence of fashion is not manifested through patrolling editors administering their decrees on the streets, awarding obedience and punishing dissent. It is not designers who enforce their designs on us; we do. We are the fashion police. Through social pressures of affirmation and social rewards, such as admiration and popularity, fashion is inflicted on us, and enforced by our peers. The Fashion Police puts a finger on these seemingly trivial daily encounters and interactions, and makes manifest the everyday notion of social fashion regulation. It opens a discussion on how we face daily struggles with peers about the negotiation of

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identity formation and expression: who is “allowed” to wear what and where, who administers reward or punish. Manifesting this social process in the form of a police force, the uniforms and insignia ask us, who are the “authorities” among our peers, who are the ones we try to emulate and become a part of? And how is this process of inclusion and exclusion actually enacted in social relations? The Fashion Police is an artistic-driven manifestation of aesthetic peer regulation, but it is worth noticing it is also the name of a TV-show which is exactly what it says it is: a jury of celebrities who judge the looks of peers, making dress a reality show with just a bit too much reality in it. It is a concept accepted as an everyday phenomenon, implicitly stating “it is ok to judge people by their clothes, and we should not be ashamed when enjoying it”—and legitimizing the social consequences of such judgment, not seldom in the form of ridicule, humiliation and exclusion. Aesthetic policing and social regulation are not powers of the fashion system per se, or explicit in fashion discourse, even if ever-present in “helpful” advice of remake-me narratives (such as the common trope of the Ugly Duckling transformation in fashion stories). Regulation is outsourced to everyday social interactions and peer-relationships. Media and advertising may affect the references subjects draw upon, but the images themselves need to have manifested social currency. Thus policing becomes the social execution that gives these images enough affect to become internalized and emotionally embodied (von Busch & Hwang 2018). As philosopher John Caputo points out, there is a paradoxical relation between justice and the law so that, just as justice would remain impotent without the law to mediate it, the law would be tyrannical without justice making it receptive to difference (Caputo 1997: 136). In a similar vein, fashion would be impotent without some “laws” of fashion and mechanisms to uphold these demarcations. These laws remain tyrannical as long as we fail to grasp how they assert their influence through the means of our social desires, and their entanglement with envy and the violence of positivity.

Fashion as interface for interdividual struggles According to psychologist Susan Fiske (2011), judgments about status and power are inherent in all forms of social cognition, and are the first information we seek when recognizing a fellow being. If we spot someone in a dark alleyway, our mind immediately seeks signals for friend or foe, and simultaneously probes

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their strength and power: can they enact their intentions, whether they turn out friendly or hostile (Fiske 2011: 2)? Attention to status is wired into the cognitive process itself, we are always seeking to compare ourselves to peers and identify connections, relations and hierarchies. In this way we are more inter-dividuals than individuals—we exist as relational beings, caught in a net of imitations, comparisons and rivalries. Even if we often tell ourselves that we dress individually, fashion is acting in the realm of the interdividual, as it is a social phenomenon, and we must per definition be imitating others. Something totally unique and isolated cannot be fashion, it must be something entangled in a web of mimetic desires. The self of the interdividual does not emerge from the depths of the ego, but as cultural historian Eugene Webb (1993) evocatively calls it, it is a “self between.” Thus, as argued before, fashion is always an interpersonal conflict and struggle, and a psychology of fashion must be a psychopolitics of interdividuality. This approach follows French neuropsychiatric Jean-Michel Oughourlian’s (2012: 5) suggestion that “politics is not logical. It is psychological.” Oughourlian traces Girard’s ideas of mimetic desire, and argues that in psychopolitics positions are never fixed and stable but “political reality is fluctuating, subjective, made of particular cases, supple and adaptable, non-Eucledian” (2012: 5). Interdividual psychology always contains conflict, such as mimetic rivalries and violent reciprocities. Competitive desires are at the constitution of my sense of self, and rivalry is drawn into existential antagonisms as my rivals easily become my enemies. In resonance with Han, Oughourlian argues that today’s social climate in Western consumer societies is devoid of taboos and negativity. “Nothing is forbidden by culture,” Oughourlian (2012: 55) writes, “the only obstacles we run up against are rivals who ‘forbid’ us the objects that we covet mimetically.” As Girard argues, the intensity of our passions stands in equivalence to the competitive rivalry it excites. Thus desire is not only contagious, as Tarde (1903) would have it, but its mimetic dynamics also produce antagonism and violence. Following Girard (1965; 1987; 1991; 2013), winning my object of desire is per definition a rejection of my rival’s aspirations of the same, and the value of this reward is measured by the shame inflicted on my antagonist; it is my enactment on vanity, envy and schadenfreude that sets the value of my passions. This is what adds emotion and passion to the otherwise abstract concept of “identity”—it is not a mere semiotic expression but an inner as well as socially embodied reality, torn between self and peer rivals. As Girard (1965: 83) posits, “Imitative desire is always a desire to be Another.” Yet the possibility of becoming this other is always regulated socially: not everyone is allowed to become someone.

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As Girard and Oughourlian have it, identity is formed in relation to others and has little to do with some mystical or essential qualities of self, harbored at the core of Being. Girard and Oughourlian use the struggle over thinness (which is also a central component of fashion) to expose how something we usually think of as subjective is actually a psychopolitical conflict over the control over the body, as “one is permanently re-created by the desire of the other at each instant of one’s life” (Oughourlian 2016: 46). From Girard’s (2013) perspective on desire, phenomena such as bulimia and anorexia are usually misconceived as a sickness of the victim’s mind, but could instead be better interpreted as a “disease of desire” that needs to be freed from psychoanalytic interpretations, as a form of “madness.” Instead they need to be understood as pathologies that result from rivalry and desire. Oughourlian sums up Girard’s ideas as a rivalry not only over aesthetic sovereignty, but with one’s body and needs, in order to achieve self-control, domination over oneself. Anorexia is therefore both a personal challenge and a form of asceticism. But it is also a rivalry with others, a struggle for power: the anorexic very quickly becomes the center of family attention [. . .] Appeal to a recognized “authority,” the physician, formalizes the defeat and surrender of the anorexic’s parents and introduces her to another, more formidable rival. Anorexia therefore confers power, enabling a person who refuses to eat to triumph over her family. In this sense, it is a kind of terrorism: the anorexic takes herself hostage and bends everyone to her will. Oughourlian in Girard 2013: x–xi

Stemming from a sense of powerlessness, anorexia gives back control, and is drawn into a competitive form of mimetic desire with one’s peers, and from such grounding, into a mimetic rivalry on a larger social scale. As a form of inverted Potlatch, the biggest loser is the biggest winner, and a conspicuous nonconsumption goes hand in hand with the urge to make others consume, claiming the coveted position of the victim, while still regaining control over the condition. Girard (2013: 5f.) writes, The compulsive dieters really want to be thin, and most of us are secretly aware of this because most of us also want to be thin. [. . .] The capitalist system is clever enough, no doubt, to adjust to the rage for thinness and it invents all sorts of products supposedly capable of helping us in our battle against calories, but its own instinct runs the other way. It systematically favors consumption over abstinence, and it certainly did not invent our dieting hysteria.

Anorexia shares with fashion an ideal of aesthetic self-control, often expressed in thinness. This is the subjective struggle over control of forming the self according

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to an inner vision of what is considered desirable, yet this image is caught up in rivalries inflicted back on the self. The conflict of fashion and the struggle with the body merge into the same project of achievement, as Han would have it. Whereas fashion is the consumption, styling and shaping of the dressed self, anorexia is the sculpture of the body mannequin, yet both crystallize into an embodied desire for aesthetic self-control. As with a dedication to fashion, it centers on certain groups of people. [The anorexic] interprets all attempts to help her as envious conspiracies of people who would like to cheat her out of her painfully acquired victory, being unable to match it. She is proud to fulfill what is perhaps the one and only ideal still common in our entire society, slenderness. Girard 2013: 9

As Girard suggests, most of us want to look slim, but few of us “succeed” in affirming this desire all the way to become anorexic. As with fashion, the freedom of self-expression and self-formation comes at the price that these qualities are bound to rivalry with others. The anorexic’s “radical freedom is synonymous with her enslavement to the opinion of others.[. . .] To understand desire is to understand that its self-centeredness is indistinguishable from its othercenteredness” (Girard 2013: 17). The real prestige and popularity that comes from fashion lies in the careful curation of superiority: to prove oneself above the desires of the pitiful “victims” of fashion. To have true style is to prove one stands above the merely imitative qualities of fashion: one is a true “self ” by overcoming the desires of the self, that is, the desire to please others. Behind a mask of indifference, the nervous self is ashamed of his or her envy of others. As Girard (2013: 51) posits, “there is nothing worse than letting others see that you want to impress them,” and expressing such indifference is a tool by which we try to gain a putative proof of superiority. In Girard’s model, this dynamic channels desire into the aspiration for positional goods and status, where users/consumers seek affirmation from peers by projecting desires onto limited resources, instigating rivalries and Realist zero-sum games. It means for every “in” there is someone who is “out,” for every friend an enemy, and a secondary (and often innocent) rival needs to be rejected and sacrificed to keep the peace between rival peers (a “scapegoat” in Girard’s terms). The social dynamics of the scapegoat also highlights that as styles change this comes not only as an aesthetic reorganization, but always also at a human price. It is not a style that is rejected when something is suddenly “out,” but the body that wears that style needs to be ostracized and socially sacrificed.

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Aesthetic regulation, social combat and cupcake fascism Anorexia marks the internalized project of psychopolitics, comparable to Han’s sense of self as a continuous project of endless competitive achievements. The conflict of fashion is caught in similar social rivalries and policed through various peer-pressures. The desires of fashion are nurtured as much as regulated by social inflictions, often by the smallest signals of approval or rejection. Fashion is thus caught between two forms of regulatory violence; the rivalry in status regulation with its sovereign vanity, and the conformity policing of keeping “everyone” aligned to a social order under a guise of conforming “niceness.” This tension we will unpack next. Explicit policing and control is not necessarily to uphold order and conformity. Instead, the importance is to patrol and regulate boundaries of the differences that manifest real differentiation. To look like everyone else does not equal exclusive status, even if many come after you. Fashion, status and elitism are not the same, even if often intertwined. Instead, status means the struggle to stay in the elite, and following the old French etymology, “elite” means to choose and be chosen: to be elite is not a passive position, but an activity. This requires processes of selection and boundaries of exclusion to be upheld. So how does one increase one’s status to become elite, and remain a part of the chosen ones? If we draw parallels to Pagold’s definition, status is simply to be chosen by everyone else, which is a commonly held view. We easily think a person with a lot of connections, at the center of a large network, has many friends and thus a lot of status. But as sociologist Robert Faris (2012) argues, this is only partly true. Yes, a popular and well-connected person may have a “connective status” but this does not make the person part of the elite. Instead, to earn status, it is better to have “bridging status.” In other words, being a person that has connections through social barriers and makes sure these bridges are open only to a selected few. To be in the elite, to be amongst the chosen, connectivity is ok, exclusivity is better. To be inviting and friendly with everyone does you some good. You may get a lot of “weak ties.” But being selective, exclusive and manipulative gives you more status. To Faris (2012: 1207), these selective processes explain how “seemingly rational, ordinary people routinely engage in harassment, bullying, gossip, manipulation, ridicule, cliquishness, and ostracism.” This also explains why people are not always sociable but strive to uphold networks through what he calls “reputational aggression”—processes of exclusion, often involving humiliation and social violence.

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The exclusive status positions are those that can “bridge structural holes” (Burt 2009), that connect across social barriers without undermining the exclusivity between the groups. That is, those with status are the ones who connect, but without letting in “non-elites.” Connecting with “losers” by mistake could immediately undermine the status. “Elite status is maintained through selectivity, not connectivity, and by denying rather than accumulating friendships” (Faris 2012: 1211). And as Faris points out, the elite bridge-builder maintains social barriers by the effective use of reputational aggression, rejecting supplicants may increase the attractiveness of the exclusionary group. This is not to say that connections are without benefit, only that the relative costs and benefits shift toward selectivity in such settings. Actors who are able to efficiently bridge much of the network without an excessive number of ties arguably enjoy the benefits of centrality without the costs. Faris 2012: 1211

It is not hard to imagine a scenario where the cool kids in the school cafeteria make the comment “Nice shoes, pal,” in a snarling tone, where all involved parts know it translates to “Don’t come and sit with us.” It is a comment that may not be explicit after high school, but is expressed with more subtle signals in more mature social groupings; a side-look, a short sigh, or simply an explicit silence. Rejecting the connection to others is an essential part of maintaining status. Make “wrong” friends, and one may jeopardize the exclusivity of one’s network, and often peers will enforce these restrictions, as a reminder of how contagious losers are. As social hierarchies are transient and fluid, there is a continuous need to uphold their barriers and order; elite status requires continuous policing. Reputational aggression helps in the selection process, and also in rejecting unwanted social competition (which does not bridge to other elites). Reputational aggression includes “verbal abuse, insults, threats, harassment, ostracism, gossip, manipulation” and other plights can be “exacerbated when perpetuators are anonymous” (Faris 2012: 1212). The many ways of rejecting unwanted connections increase the attractiveness of the exclusionary group: it is always a matter of bridging with the “right” people. Faris and Felmlee (2011; 2014) call such enforcement of regulations in status struggles by peer victimization “social combat,” the everyday exclusion and humiliation that does not end in school but endures throughout social and professional life. Faris’ argument is easily applied to fashion’s status games of fashion. The “right” people are not the friendliest ones with the most connections, but those

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who are highly selective and often act as gatekeepers to connect with other groups. The “right” people are those with ties to other exclusive groups, the ones who have access to other “right” people. One proves the connection by dressing in the right stuff, before those who aspire to get in. The cool people must be hard to get to, and must be picky, and as Wintour suggested earlier, people want to be part of the cool gang. And if we cannot offer them important connections or status they do not already have, we are bound to be rejected. Or worse. The parallel is obvious between fashion and Faris’ discussion of reputational aggression. It can be seen in everything from gossip columns, narratives in popular culture (such as the movie Mean Girls), and also everyday experience. If fashion is a conflict, aestheticized social combat is its means. Social combat in fashion signifies a continuum from cold looks and subtle snubs of peer policing, to explicit rejections and actual attacks on people for breaking sartorial rules. Such attacks may vary from place to place, but some individuals and groups take it upon themselves to use violent means to uphold the sartorial order through various forms of social punishment, humiliation and shaming. As highlighted earlier, policing is not only about regulating boundaries for social advancement by making sure certain elites maintain the right form of difference. But it aligns and reproduces conformist order: it is a social force that holds back aspirational difference. As Pagold notices, fashion is to dress like everyone else, and conformity is just as important as difference. Or rather, the aesthetic play between difference and conformity are context-bound and enacted and controlled to various degrees. If the elite hierarchies have their mechanisms of competitive exclusion, as noticed by Faris, social conformity has its own dynamics, enacted within in-groups or at the boundaries between in- and outgroups (Tajfel & Turner 1979). If one is to dress away from “everyone else” there are mechanisms that uphold the sameness of those “everyones.” It is easy to think this cloned sameness and conformity appear either by command from above or through an evenly distributed process of imitation. But as Karen Stenner (2005) points out, some individuals, in certain times, seek to uphold conformity and the “normative order” more than others. They turn their intolerance into action to “stamp out” offensive expressions in order to uphold the “common good.” Whereas Faris points towards hierarchical mechanisms that are enacted for the benefits of individual position and social esteem, Stenner shows how the normative order is upheld to ensure conformity; it is the peer policing that is meant to enforce social coherence. According to Stenner, this is dependent on two social variables that she calls the “authoritarian dynamic”—an individual’s authoritarian predisposition interacting with the current conditions

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of perceived threat. As Stenner points out, it is an excess of difference and a perceived threat of discord that aggravate those who are innately intolerant (2005: 330). Stenner builds on the ideas of the “authoritarian personality” (Adorno et al. 1950) to examine the fluctuations and contexts of intolerance for social differences, The predisposition is labeled “authoritarianism” because suppression of difference and achievement of uniformity necessitate autocratic social arrangements in which individual autonomy yields to group authority. Thus, individual desire for particular outcomes is associated with preference for certain social arrangements and processes. Stenner 2005: 1

An authoritarian individual has a desire to uphold common goals and processes by limiting divergence and difference. But the predisposition is not enough: authoritarianism is not “a static property of the individual psyche [. . .] but a living, breathing social phenomenon: a dynamic political process” (Stenner 2005: 326). Thus, intolerance is not merely a product of the individual psyche, nor is it wholly determined by the social environment. Rather, the expression of intolerance depends upon the activation of individual predispositions to authoritarianism by environmental conditions of normative threat. Stenner 2005: 80

Connecting Stenner’s argument back to Girard and Faris, the threat triggered by jealousy and loss of status through social combat makes people become fearful of shifts threatening their often hard-earned position. In a hierarchical status environment, this becomes fertile soil for the authoritarian dynamic, increasing status stress while also amplifying the need for some to regulate the appearance of others. People of the elite feel they deserve their position, while those outside should not usurp the rightful order. Stenner’s dynamics of authoritarianism correspond to the dynamic Deleuze and Guattari primarily identify as a “molar” power, yet regulated on a “molecular” level. As Guattari (2016: 52) writes, Molar power relations have as their function the “framing”, the hierarchisation of the social fabric, whereas relations of molecular potential constitutes its warp and its weft, but in the living mode, as a function of collective assemblages with changing contours and of praxes that rebel against sociological and economic invariants.

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Social regulation forms the basis of molecular relationships, but also hides under the notion of individual freedom. For fashion, the molecular powers of microregulation hijack desire and emotion, vanity and envy, to enact aesthetic domination: you look “right” if you look like us. These acts of regulation are the miniaturized forms of repression, enacted to assist those who it bears down on, and facilitating that things run “smoothly” (Guattari 2016: 83). These types of regulations, which Deleuze and Guattari call “micro-fascism,” are the interactive ordering of social processes, “by monitoring one another from out of the corner of their eyes” (Guattari 2016: 89). It is the fascism of small snubs, discreet comments and side-looks; discrete while making sure it is noticed. Whereas fascism is often connected to state ideology, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of micro-fascism builds on Wilhelm Reich’s (1942; 1946) ideas of how interpersonal anxieties close people within themselves to the extent they come to fear their own freedom. Deleuze and Guattari put emphasis on the way social desires for control and predictability enact fascism on the scale of everyday, and often unconscious, social interactions. It happens in the quiet nods, glances and hums, and they all signify the smallest regulations of peer behaviors, external as well as internal. Through our upbringing and the dynamics of society, most of us behave like micro-fascists. We expect everyone else to behave the way we do (or think we do). Our desire for control and fear of the other amalgamates within our desires, thus affecting every social relationship, while remaining almost invisible. As Guattari points out, if Althusser’s (2014) “Ideological State Apparatus” deals primarily in profits and repressions, the micro-politics of social regulation taps into self-management and starts enforcing the will of the state, infusing it with individual and collective desire. “Everybody” wants to follow fashion, which is the alignment of desires in resonance with Guattari’s (1995) famous statement “everybody wants to be a Fascist.” It is legitimate to raise concern if all forms of control and regulation are called “fascism.” The term often confuses social organization with violence and moralization and becomes a too blunt conceptual tool. In this case, I use the term to draw attention to the unifying and progressive force of authoritarian alignment of behaviors, mixed with the affective allure of acting out to enforce judgments of uniformity. On a similar note, it is important to notice that the micro-fascism Deleuze and Guattari warn of is present in democratic or liberal social formations, progressive as well as reactionary; it is enforced horizontally and not necessarily hierarchically. Or to use Han’s model of auto-exploitation, micro-fascism enters fashion through internalized competitive desires for achievement more than by external coercion and control.

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The micro-fascism present in fashion also has a different taste and look than the Italian or German versions we may first think of from history. Cultural critic Tom Whyman (2014) argues for a contemporary form of authoritarianism he calls “cupcake fascism.” The cupcake is a type of sweet that is just barely a cake. The cupcake is a popular pastry, just sweet enough, executed with industrial preciseness, while looking individual and often a bit crafty. It embodies the sweetness of sugar-coated populism; uniform and cloned while seemingly individual and unique. It is cool and trendy, a sweet for those who desire to be part of the in-crowd. As Whyman (2014) posits, “Cupcake fascism asserts itself violently through something the infantilized subject holds deeply as an ideal. This ideal is niceness.” Cupcake fascism is seductive, yet just barely fascism. Whyman continues, fascism will always mean the assertion of middle-class values in the face of a crisis. Because this assertion must mean shutting certain other emerging sets of possibilities down, it will always involve a sort of violence, although this violence can of course be merely passive-aggressive.

Cupcake fascism is not about aggressive marching bands and flags. It acts as infantilized passive-aggressive violence where irony and cuteness are used as a cover for rejection, exclusion, and reactionary suppression to uphold a status quo. Not unlike Han’s violence of positivity, this is a soft and sweet enforcement covered up by a symbolic consensus of “niceness,” The sort of niceness I mean here is precisely that embodied in the figure of the cupcake: neat and predictable, undangerous and healthy, redolent of a perfect past that never was. In a nicer world, everything would work as it should, the good and hard-working would get exactly what they deserve, and everyone would behave properly. Whyman 2014

It is the helpful niceness of “keep calm and carry on,” of not being a killjoy, rocking the boat or calling out abuse. Cupcake fascism does not march down the middle of the street. Instead it gentrifies, infuses itself through pleasant desires of populist comfort and service-mindedness. If we are to translate it to fashion, it is a social control mechanism that plays out between peers who still want to appear to please each other. It does not tap into anger but into niceness, which turns passive-aggressive. It is not strong but seductively sweet. It does not control as much as play. It does not make claims to truth, but is ironic: a hipster rather than a fashion slave. It is supremacy hiding in plain sight. It is the domination we desire. Not a wolf in sheepskin, but rather Goebbels in Gucci.

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Under the veil of sweet desires and well-earned aesthetic meritocracy, all kinds of systemic prejudices can exist virtually undisturbed. With its seemingly democratic aesthetic, fashion covers for rejection, exclusion, bullying and the multitude of micro-invalidations where fashion helps people to “fit in” (von Busch & Bjereld 2016). Merging aspirational desire and processes of exclusion indeed works perfectly for fashion, as highlighted in the previous chapter. The “shallowness” of fashion acts to legitimize the enforcement of social regulation. By not taking fashion seriously—“it’s only clothes”—we deny the possibility of it being used to undermine self-esteem, and thus leave victims helpless and unable to defend themselves. The perceived shallowness of fashion acts as a cover for the perpetuators of micro-regulation and the more violent forms of micro-aggressions. Fashion is a perfect arena through which to police, control and punish the forms of deviance that can undermine social hierarchies and find victims to become scapegoats. We jokingly call some people “the fashion police,” but their social function is real, and the social dynamic they embody regulates real bodies and desires, not only clothes. No wonder it feels so much safer to just blend in and play safe under the mass affirmation of “democratic” fashion.

Social order and the preos of fashion If we think of fashion as an emotional window between people, how it opens a passage towards our feelings, who we aspire to be seen as, who we wish to be with, and much more, then even “soft” attacks on our clothes may be seen as a form of violence. A nasty comment, which on purpose attacks my aspirations, not only momentarily hurts me emotionally, but it may scar these yearnings beyond repair. Even if it happens only once, it may still cause lasting emotional damage, even if the occasion may be something quite banal. Even seemingly miniscule cases of bullying leaves permanent scars (Walser deLara 2016). A child being socially rejected for not having the right sports outfit on the first day of trying out a new sport (and meeting new peers) may effectively lock the door to this peer group and future sport practice. Someone being refused entry to a club at an important moment when one’s peers enter without a problem may act as a type of social sorting, distancing the victim from their peers and not only the space. In both cases, the event itself may be quickly over, but trigger later gossip and taunts with a severely wounded self-esteem as a result. But more importantly, if the rejection happens recurrently over time, the

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impact may be devastating to the victim’s ability to affirm emotional aspirations. Instead, the victim internalizes rejection in order to adjust aspirations to the limits set by peers. In relation to fashion, the target of humiliation withdraws into the barren realm of peer-accepted uniforms, or what could be called “bare fashion.” As already noted by Faris, perpetuators of social combat feel they “do the right thing”—they uphold a legitimate social order, the boundaries of social convention and the interests of their group. In their actions, they help regulate group relations, doing a favor for the status of their peers (“what would other cool people think of us if you hang out with that loser?”). Peers are thankful for the ordering while they all think the victim “deserves it,” and often the victim comes to think so too. In this way, regulation and violence are always considered virtuous to the ones who commit it; the perpetuators are often backed by processes which, in their own way, legitimize their actions, even if in extreme cases it can go all the way to explicit violence and killing. Anthropologists Alan Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai (2015: 34) point this out as, “the primary motives for violence are at the same time subjectively moral—people feel they must harm or kill others simply because it’s the right thing to do.” To Fiske and Rai, the basis for the great majority of violence is the regulation of social relationships: who rules, or who is equal to whom, what is shared or what does someone owe another? All social relationships are regulated through cultural conventions, most often in informal ways: who has access to certain goods, who eats first, who has authority to act in what ways, who has access to what spaces, who picks up the trash, who’s responsible for what? These types of interactions are regulated by peers in self-organized systems of control and are taken for granted. Fiske (1991) calls these types of protocols for social regulation “preos,” and these relationships can bring light to how fashion is regulated in a more practical way. If we apply Fiske’s thinking to fashion, clothes signal many of these relations: I wear certain clothes to show unity with my working group, or to show that I have higher status or am better than others, or to blend in and not draw attention to myself in a certain social setting. Clothes help me move in proximity to other groups and through hierarchies (such as imitating a prestigious person). I can conform to the standards and play along, but if I break the norms, or I upset some of the standards or usurp the regulations, others may feel I break the rules. This act of transgression makes them feel obliged to correct me. This regulation may be done in more or less violent ways, to make sure they “teach me a lesson.” To correct a social relationship means, “to make it correspond with a prescriptive

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model of what the relationship ought to be—what it must be made to be” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 17). The conflict of fashion intersects across boundaries founded in very basic social regulations and rules that guide social interactions and turn behaviors into culture. According to Fiske (1991), in order to understand the complexity of interpersonal dynamics in the shaping of culture, and see their interactions as cultural devices for coordination, one can boil down the regulation of social bonds to four elementary relations. These relations are adaptive cultural traits of extended human evolution, shaped by the human mind, biology and cultures in conjunction. Also, human evolution has “utilized” these social protocols for adaptation. Fiske’s models stand as a complement to economic models of the transactions and accumulation of esteem or status as “capital” (Bourdieu 1984), but also to kinship models that primarily draw the value of interactions on kinship distance (Malinowski 1950). As Fiske posits, human culture cannot be sustained only by imitation, but behaviors need to be socially affirmed or enforced in various ways. Such cultural protocols Fiske calls “preos”—principles for regulating interactions with a group of people. Human interactions can be understood through what he calls Relational Models (RMs), and they consist of four primary interactions: communal sharing (CS), authority ranking (AR), equality matching (EM), and market pricing (MP). The interactions serve to uphold social order, yet not necessarily conformity, and they often work in dynamic relationships with each other through situational interpretations of the preos, yet still marked by the four basic forms. To Fiske (2004: 3–4), preos are, the four fundamental, innate, human relational proclivities. To signify that they are cognitively modular but modifiable modes of interacting, I call them “mods.” However, these open-ended generative potentials are insufficient in themselves to determine action or evaluation, or permit coordination. In order to use these mods to act or to interpret others’ action, people need socially transmitted prototypes, precedents, and principles that complete the mods, specifying how and when and with respect to whom the mods apply. I use the term “preo” to signify the class of paradigms, parameters, precepts, prescriptions, propositions, and proscriptions that can be conjoined with mods. A mod must be conjoined with a preo that complements it to generate a specific cultural coordination device.

What makes preos “cultural coordination devices” are the mods, the “cognitively modular but modifiable modes of interacting” (Fiske 2004: 3). Preos are the enactments of relational models, as these cultural prescriptions show how to

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handle social relationships, or what we usually consider “morals” in general: “morality consists of intentions, motives, emotions, and judgments about realizing RMs according to cultural preos” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 22). Preos are powerful because they, through our upbringing and cultural formation, become programmed into human cognition. Thus the models become integrated into everyday life beyond decrees of official policies. They come to guide every social interaction at the most foundational level: Who stands above whom, who is worth what, who is expected to do what for whom, who owes what to whom, etc.? Fiske’s hypothesis is “that these models are fundamental, in the sense that they are the lowest or most basiclevel ‘grammars’ for social relations” (1991: 25). To unpack the operations of fashion policing, the models can be translated to fashion to see how the four relational models of preos become the “laws” that legitimize the acts of policing. For authority ranking (AR), hierarchy is the prime concern, as such orders are characterized by asymmetry and inequality. “Hierarchy is directed toward creating and maintaining linear ranking in social groups” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 19). Hierarchies are not “inherently immoral, exploitive, or even undesirable. Nor do legitimate hierarchies emerge out of pure force or coercion. In many cultures, people perceive hierarchy as natural, inevitable, necessary, and legitimate” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 19). The military may be a prime example, but also religious groups or organizations with clear chains of command or pecking orders, but also where superiors are supposed to provide and protect the subordinates, thus offering a reward for submission. “AR hierarchy motivates people to judge that superiors committing violence against subordinates is often acceptable and may even be praiseworthy if done to instruct or punish” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 19). The hierarchy itself is threatened if these distinctions are not upheld, thus people within the hierarchy all come to feel they deserve their place. They will defend the hierarchy and their place in it from both outside attacks and usurpers within, as members experience the asymmetrical relationships “as natural, good, legitimate, and even necessary” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 20). Similar hierarchies are fundamental to fashion, with its leaders, designers, editors, celebrities and all their followers and consumers, and rankings such as the prestige and standing of brands, even if there is always a new “cool” hierarchy upsetting the previous ordering (AR with respect to price, availability, influence, knowledge, etc.). But hierarchies also emerge in smaller subcultures. Similarly, with its symbolic meritocracy, authority ranking appears in social status systems such as class or ethnic rankings (the social value of identities, what subcultures are “cool” and who are “nerds” or “losers”). Within a group, as I gain status, I am allowed to use or wear certain

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marks with an air of authenticity, while others cannot and are seen as illegitimate upcomers. Just think of the complex status claims of street wear and sneakers, what is “authentic” or not, and all the tension that such items symbolize in different contexts. Hierarchies are coded and justify the enactment of preos. As highlighted by fashion journalist Mari Grinde Arntzen, fashion is “always right,” and thus grants the right for the more adorable to be nasty to those who are deemed to be dressed “wrong” (Arntzen 2015: 52). “Where fashion points, people follow” (55). Communal sharing (CS) interaction is “a relationship based on duties and sentiments generating kindness and generosity among people conceived to be of the same kind, especially kin” (Fiske 1991: 14). If in a liminal space, a new member may be seen as a possible contaminant to the in-group. In such instances, hazing or rituals of harassment may be used (and excused) for the greater good of making sure the victim comes to share the values of the group; “Unity is directed toward caring for and supporting the integrity of in-groups through a sense of collective responsibility and common fate” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 18). Dressing the same as the group becomes a signal for communal sharing, while dressing too much apart may require a response from the rest of the group to make sure the boundaries and loyalties are upheld. Sharing, inheriting, or offering an item of clothing, especially if imbued with shared memories, becomes a strong marker of community. Similarly, to join the group, certain signals and commitments may have to be signaled, such as a gang tattoo, as the sign may stand in relation to the commitment to the group’s cause. Equality matching (EM) is another relational model that is “manifest in activities such as turn taking, in-kind reciprocity, even distributions and randomization procedures such as coin flipping” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 20). Equality matching is a form of “democratization” that aims to even out the playing field: Equality is directed toward enforcing even balance and in-kind reciprocity in social relations. It requires equal treatment, equal voice, equal opportunity, equal chance, even shares, even contributions, turn taking, and lotteries (e.g., for conscription, for a dangerous assignment, for choosing ends of the field in sports or in a duel). Fiske & Rai 2015: 20

Rights, obligations, and duties act to balance social scales. There is a moral motive for reciprocity, which “accounts for the sense of obligation we feel both in inviting people to our home after they have invited us to theirs, and in seeking to hurt people in exactly the same way they have hurt us, an eye for an eye, a tooth

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for a tooth” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 20). Uniforms of various kinds and the enforcement of egalitarian codes express equality matching. Market pricing (MP) aims towards proportionality and is “directed toward calculating and acting in accord with ratios or rates among otherwise distinct goods to ensure that rewards or punishments for each party are proportional to their costs, contributions, effort, merit, or guilt” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 21). A punishment should be proportionate to its effects, but also, “in the framework of proportionality, it is morally correct to inflict harm or to kill if the benefits outweigh the costs” (Fiske & Rai 2015: 21). Market pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates between prestigious signals and tokens, such as prices, wages, interest, or cost–benefit analyses, but also exchanges between groups and interpersonal networks. They do not try to equalize, but to enforce market values, even if these are asymmetrical. The pricing helps translate the exchange rates between signifiers, for example between what references are “worth” in status. What cultural status works with that obscure Tokyo street brand? What is the “price” of authenticity to wear a concert t-shirt without having been to the concert? Certain forms of prestige may be exchanged for status or bridging towards other groups, or gifts may be used as blackmail (as a form of Potlatch), and failing to uphold these market standards (causing inflation, or allowing access or condoning unregulated behaviors) may be proportionally punished. As with all preos, every participant is cultured into sustaining the regulatory models, as seemingly, everybody “gets what they deserve.” Relational models reveal how various forms of cultural norms and preos make social groups self-organize the rewarding and policing of their norms. These models also help us understand the dynamic between internalized cognitive mods and the social regulations and interactions bullies use when they feel they “do the right thing” when rejecting or harassing a victim. Matched with the desires to fit in, while also aspiring to be more than one is socially deemed worthy, the regulations seep under the skin of victim as well as perpetrator. Indeed, if fashion in many ways has a history of threatening public morals, and is still considered dangerous in many cultures, it is because of its possible use as a tool to override preos and challenge relational orders. Fashion offers the user a means and accompanying esteem to usurp established social protocols. By utilizing fashion, leveraging a useful status expression in their advantage, a person may bypass conservative gatekeepers, uniting people across cultural boundaries with symbolic rebellion, while possibly seducing powerful individuals, deceiving others, and also join individual aspirations and popularity with people in power. Indeed, the use of commodities in these regulations is a common trait,

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often at odds with ideas of profit-maximizing individuals. By using popular commodities, people engage in ritualistic exchanges of ranking, matching and sharing (Komter 2001). It is important to notice how the two forms of violence discussed earlier, of status combat and upholding conformity, are also present in the preos of fashion. One type of fashion manifests class, loyalties, groups and hierarchies, not least in the forms of high class dress. As Bourdieu (1984) would have it, this type of fashion serves to show cultural distinction, and can also express “old money.” But fashion also offers an avenue to usurp these same categories, the potential of new subversive or cool fashion, even if these new styles are also heavily policed in order to maintain their exclusive status. After all, to dress like “everyone else” depends on context. There may thus be many motivations as to why rules and regulations must be upheld, yet relational violence is an essential part of controlling as well as rebelling against the order of preos. Affirmed or policed, fashion enacts conflict, but can also be seen as a service to individuals and groups, and may in itself be a form of inquiry into social relations, as dressing is a way of testing and challenging preos. As suggested by design theorists Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman (2012: 41), “design is different from other traditions of inquiry and action in that service is a defining element. Design is, by definition, a service relationship.” If we start thinking that fashion is a service relationship, not only do we have to ask who it serves, but also what cultural rules it upholds and to whom this service is outsourced to. When looking at fashion media or the industry, most of us think fashion is designed by brands, and mediated through editors, celebrities and influencers of popular opinion. But these perspectives change radically if we think of fashion as a conflict, and peer-relations as the locus of fashion preos. This may shift our perspective on who fashion designers actually design for: is it for the aspirations of the consumers, or for the processes of sustaining cultural conflict? Or to put it differently; are the people we jokingly call “the fashion police” the true designers of the service of fashion, that is, sustaining group demarcations through perpetual conflict? As Wronsov (2015: 54) has it: “The best fear is veiled in freedom and sold at high prices.” Many ideologies have seen the conflicts emerging from fashion and social regulation, and tried to reduce conflict by enforcing uniform standards of clothing. But there must also be ways to mitigate the violence of social combat, without turning to acute austerity and a total denial of appearances. We will next examine some experiments and forms of training that could be used to cultivate new approaches to disarm and displace parts of fashion conflict.

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The Fashion Safehouse—Counter-Capabilities and Com-passions

I heard from a friend about courses in the US on Thoreau’s famous book Walden where participants read the book while they build a copy of Thoreau’s cabin. This seems like a designerly way to explore the topic of the book, and a wonderful attempt to bridge a common disconnect between theory and practice. Thinking and doing in one, it also raises questions about the paradoxes of autonomy: how independent can we be, and what are the skills, materials, capabilities and communities we need to live with a sense of self-determination? Or rather, as Thoreau famously articulates it, to live deliberately. Can the conflict of fashion be mitigated, displaced and ultimately even turned into a more applied sense of empowerment, utilizing a similar method as that of building a cabin in the woods? The question seems even more intriguing when it comes to fashion, a phenomenon that is by definition dependent on imitation and social forces. As we are forced to “appear”—how independent can we be, and what would it mean to deliberately test the boundaries that guide our everyday engagement with fashion. Why not start by building our own classroom, an autonomous safehouse of sorts, while trying to disconnect from fashion? Interestingly, similar questions concerning fashion are also the starting point for Thoreau. Thoreau builds a cabin at Walden pond, as he famously argues, to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (1992: 61). But he also does so to think practically, or to practically engage in thinking: to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. 1992: 9

To Thoreau, building a cabin in the woods is not primarily a matter of living cheaply, but it allows him to have the fewest obstacles as he takes on to be both 97

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pilot and captain in the great adventure of examining life, learning from the great discoverers, navigators and adventurers (1992: 13). An interesting aspect of Thoreau’s discussion in Walden is that he spends quite some time unpacking his relation to clothes and fashion, as they, like the cabin, act as necessary shelter. But also, clothes are “assimilated to ourselves” (14) and thus come to influence not only our thinking but our whole relationship to our surrounding world, and not least ethics and power. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinion of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. [. . .] No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. 1992: 14

The question of self-reliance and conscience merge in Thoreau’s relationship to clothes and fashion, and he also examines their influence on judgment and the possibility of independence. Thoreau draws parallels between our obedience to fashion, our submission before fate, and our surrender to power, as we uncritically adhere to the authority of trends, When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates [. . .] We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. Thoreau 1992: 16f.

The central question for Thoreau when it comes to fashion is that it can offer a lens by which to question authority: by what authority do “they” say what we should wear? What authority makes his tailoress a slave under Paris? In the spirit of the general narrative in Walden, it is easy to think Thoreau dismisses fashion all together, but his lengthy discussion points to something more crucial. Clothes are not unimportant to Thoreau, but rather, they are remarkable instruments from which to start questioning the foundations of society, government and state. And not only that, as Thoreau argues for examining the utility of clothing and as he starts to build independence from this question, our relationship to fashion may also reveal our relationship to power. Simple clothing is part of an

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independent life, “where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?” (Thoreau 1992: 16). Following Thoreau, independence starts with the production of our social skin and shelter, but as he suggests, the paradox challenging individuals under the organization of states is the question of autonomy versus heteronomy. This question also poses the same challenge to fashion: can there even be an “autonomous” fashion? In what way is a discussion about having an “own” style even relevant? If Thoreau attempts to escape culture and civilization, it is as hopeless as his endeavor to escape fashion. Even the hermit will be forced to “appear” as Kaiser would argue, dressed not least in cultural codes and bias (as Susan Fiske may add). Thoreau articulates and experiments in a possible course towards autonomy—and he does so as much by self-reflection as by self-construction: building and living in a cabin while using the process to test the boundaries, the possibilities and impossibilities of independence. A grayzone or continuum stretches between independence and interdependence, and Thoreau tests what it means to inhabit this zone, both practically and philosophically, “public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion” (1992: 4). Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis draws attention to the concepts of autonomy and heteronomy and can help unpack this contradictory space. With the tension between these two concepts we can identify how fashion also has its own laws or “logic” of tension, what we could call a nomos of fashion. For Castoriadis, self-institution is the key process in autonomous societies. Autonomy does not equate total independence, but the social organization where citizens are explicitly engaged in creating their own laws together. In contrast, members of heteronomous societies attribute their laws to some extra-social authority, such as God, ancestors or tradition, or simply processes where they have no say. This means that in heteronomous societies, the legitimacy of societal institutions is built upon a source disconnected from the thinking and discussions of its members. Autonomy, on the other hand, is the process of explicit self-institution, which Castoriadis traces back to the emergence of the democratic Greek cities and their intimate connection with the early philosophers, specifically the “citizen-philosopher” Socrates, rather than elitist-driven Plato (Castoriadis 1991: 6ff.). As Castoriadis highlights, the self-examination of philosophy is intimately tied to the societal self-reflection at the basis of democracy. The struggle for democracy is the struggle for true self-government. As the aim of self-government is not to accept external limits, true self-government entails explicit self-institution, which presupposes, of course, the putting into question

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of the existing institution—and this, in principle, at any time. [. . .] In other words, democracy is the regime of (political) self-reflectiveness. Castoriadis 1991: 20f.

Political self-reflection is inter-subjective and collective, and it is a civic act where thinking and political action merge. It is not a matter of being told what to think or do, but to take action and build a society on the foundation of collective and continuous self-reflection. Castoriadis continues: Democracy is the project of breaking the closure at the collective level. Philosophy, creating self-reflective subjectivity, is the project of breaking the closure at a level of thought [. . .] Thus, the birth of philosophy is not just coincident, but equisignificant with the birth of democracy. Both are expressions and central embodiments, of the project of autonomy. Castoriadis 1991: 21

The connection between democracy and philosophy supports the questioning of self and society. Where philosophy may ask “What is justice?” democracy asks on the collective level, “Are our laws just?” and “Are these the laws we want?” To Castoriadis, democracy is the “questioning of the law in and through that actual activity of the community. [. . .] At that moment politics is born; that is to say, freedom is born as socio-historically effective freedom” (Castoriadis 1991: 164). The nomos of fashion is implicit in the values promoted through the fashion system as it echoes of tropes familiar across society. As highlighted by biologist Andreas Weber (2019: 51), Darwinism and economic liberalism emerge at the same time, and reflect the same underlying value systems; both have become the BIOS (basic input/output system) of our time, mirroring the same ontological assumptions. Both emerge from Malthus’ political economy of scarcity and elimination of the poorest, paving the ground for scientifically and economically justified hierarchies and processes of injustice under the nomos of social rationality, concepts as the struggle for existence, competition, growth, and optimization— which were central justification for the political status quo in pre-Victorian England—tacitly became centerpieces of our own self-understanding as embodied and social beings. Weber 2019: 55

The nomos of fashion is an ontological assumption of the superiority of the aesthetic achiever, the self-optimizing of the competing individual, and at the cost of another if so must be: it is the name of the game. Fashion, as experienced through what the industry offers its consumers, is an everyday celebration of

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heteronomy, feeding into a cycle of scientific, economic and social justifications for exclusion and hierarchization. This has consequences for the way we think and act within the realm of fashion. If we are to think of a “democratic” potential of fashion, with a real and “effective freedom,” this must go far beyond “voting with our dollars” by choosing designated paths through cheap superabundance of stuff. Rather, a democratic fashion must first and foremost facilitate articulations that facilitate individual as well as collective self-reflection, and connect such instances with conscious acts of self-determination and self-institution. Applying Castoriadis’ perspective, the fashion system, as it is manifested in our times, can be seen as a regime of instituted heteronomy. The consumer imperative as promoted through the fashion industry is, not unlike a state decree, a law that is transcendent to society itself. It is instituted beyond the reach of the citizens. Its basis might lay in the basic human traits of imitation, vanity and envy, but it is socially amplified through the nomos of social regulations (or the more practical preos, to use Alan Fiske’s term discussed previously). But as Castoriadis would argue, in order to critically reexamine our everyday nomos, we must be better at utilizing the democratic possibility of autonomy to create the social condition by which we can question the closures of signification and imagination. It was this focus of the nomos that resonated strongly to me in applying Thoreau’s approach to fashion. Not a strive for self-reliance based on voluntary isolation, but an examination of interdependence and how to take on the tension between autonomy and heteronomy in fashion. But such exploration must start with a small community, a safe space where participants can start to unpack the power fashion has over us all, not least in everyday anxieties over the obligation to “appear.” Perhaps instead of a cabin, it could be in the form of a safehouse, but one built inside institutions of learning—a classroom within a classroom? The first fashion safehouse I built was with students at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm in March 2014 (Figure 6.1). Over a threeday-long workshop, we built and furnished a version of Thoreau’s cabin inside the institution. After building up the little cabin in chipboard on a simple wood frame, we focused on discussions mixed with hour-long relays of skill shares prepared by the workshop participants. Here, we explored different skills of homesteading, with everything from cooking and planting, to spinning yarn from wool using various kitchen-machines. The discussions came to center on the tensions between cultural production, institutions and autonomy, how to find a voice of one’s own in a time of cacophonic competitiveness, and the skills and capabilities needed on such a journey.

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Figure 6.1 Fashion safehouse at Konstfack, Stockholm, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 6.2 Workshop at fashion safehouse, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 6.3 The fashion fighter’s manual (cover), zine produced together with participants at Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 6.4 The fashion fighter’s manual (pp.13–14), zine produced together with participants at Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, 2014. Courtesy of the author. 103

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A second incarnation of the safehouse was implemented at the Fashioning Cascadia exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR in June the same year (Figure 6.2). As I highlight in the initial project description and catalogue of the exhibit, The establishment of safe spaces is the foundation of a pro-active resistance: a safe place to start building alternatives to the dominant logic and regime of violence. The safehouse is a temporary base with one’s back covered, a platform for discussion, a boot camp for training and a node in a network of wider social mobilization. A Fashion Safehouse is not a place beyond fashion, but a place where it is collectively and collaboratively disarmed and displaced with a sincere attention to the human capabilities and values of the participants. It is a place from where to build an own stance: a resistance. von Busch 2014b

This time the focus shifted more explicitly to fashion and the possibility of social care and repair. Participants engaged in a series of trials and discussions centered on shifting the focus in fashion from expression and meanings to listening and care. Could a safehouse be a training facility not only for skills but for a whole new mindset of fashion, one based on attentiveness and care for others, and not on rivalries and aesthetic competition? Together we made a playful instruction manual (Figures 6.3 and 6.4), mixing Thoreau quotes with methods of insurgency, drawing inspiration from the CIA’s “Freedom Fighter’s Manual,” dropped into Nicaragua in the early 1980s. But what resonated most with participants in our final discussion was a series of small repair kits we made to manifest the new fashion attention we hoped to foster. The kits came from an idea that if we all carried a small repair kit around, perhaps we would look at each other differently, quite possibly with a bit more awareness of the frailty of our dressed appearance. If I notice you are about to lose a button, and I carry a repair kit in my pocket, perhaps I can offer some help? Could we foster a form of nonviolent attention towards each other through fashion, rather than putting fuel to the fire of rivalry and envy?

Counter-capabilities and participatory knowledge Personally, the safehouse, in many ways, dealt with a frustration emerging from my earlier endeavors to “hack” fashion (von Busch 2008). My previous focus on do-it-yourself (DIY) culture seemed to stand in bright contrast with the nomos

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of fashion—that fashion is a conflict-based social phenomenon. Fashion, as most of us encounter it through the commodity economy, is primarily a heteronomous and interpassive phenomenon. We are only “free” to choose from already designated choices. Thus fostering skills and capabilities to reclaim the sewing machine is only one part of an alternative. Surely, without skills little can be achieved, and helping to cultivate capabilities to make people more fashionable is an essential part of a path towards a greater sense of freedom in dress. Such a skill-based approach also aligns well with other ideas on fashion use, repair and activism (Fletcher 2016, Fletcher & Tham 2014). There are however some challenges to these approaches, and I see two main ones. Firstly, they often put a heavy focus on austerity, especially towards the poor: it is as if the main narrative on sustainability today says that it is the poor consumers of cheap fashion that are to blame for the unsustainable conditions for poor people working in cotton fields or collapsing factories in developing economies. Textile craft, repair and recycling and the connection to austerity are nothing new. Being expensive and labor-intense, textile production has made various forms of recycling, rag-trade and repair central features in the after-life of textiles throughout the ages, recovering and redefining their nature (cf. Gregson & Crewe 2003; Palmer & Clark 2005; Küchler & Miller 2005). Coexisting with home production, repair has existed as a parallel domestic economy, which often has proved to be a way to add cash to the household (Burman 1999). But when used to address unsustainable consumption, moralizations often echo through the narrative: it is the consumption patterns of the poor that need “fixing,” not the habits of the rich. Designers who try to address this are drawn into vicious ethical territory where it is always “those” people who are to blame, and the best would be if “they” only started shopping more ethically, like “us.” It would all be better if everybody bought less, and more sustainable/expensive pieces, while these pieces remain unattainable and often do not serve the purposes of the people who are the possible consumers. Instead, blame is put on the people who need fashion the most, while at the same time, they are being denied the possibility of using fashion to experience ephemeral passions or for social mobility. The second is a challenge of individualism, that the agency of empowerment is put primarily on the isolated individual. Even if skills are shared and capabilities are fostered in collaboration with others, the narrative all too often isolates individuals to “be the change,” all by themselves. Almost all forms of DIY engagements suffer from this isolationist approach, even if there are attempts to turn them into do-it-together (DIT) activities. Far too often, “craftivism” remains

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powerless due to its isolation, either in its practice, or in the back of art galleries, even if the emphasis on domesticity and silence can help mobilize the introvert in constructive ways (Corbett 2017). Many textile crafts are often done in shared settings, yet the process of sewing makes for individual hands (as opposite to barn-raising). This affects the potential of social mobilization and shared actions with a sense of togetherness. Similarly, using a focus on “emotional durability” (Chapman 2015) to address sustainability risks falling into the same issue of individualist isolation, while also binding the subject to its social position. A focus on memory and durability easily misses that fashion is often about not remembering the past, and not resembling our parents and grandparents, however much we want to anchor sentimental values to them. Fashion is often powerful because it offers new and ephemeral social aspirations and connections, and works as a tool in social combat. This value is lost if it is merely a repetition of what was before. The same individualist approach is echoed across much of the sustainable solutions we hear about; use the compost and ride a bike, buy less and don’t take long showers. All this is good, but it offers almost no avenues to help us connect, integrate, mobilize and transform social relations and create conditions for self-institution and effective freedom. Some political scholars emphasize the many ways small-scale capabilities foster a possibility for autonomy. This ranges from Freire’s (2000) critical pedagogics, the small anti-hegemonic types of resistance as the “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985), to the everyday forms of resistance practices (Vinthagen 2015). But textile crafts operate differently, especially as they predominantly emerge from a domestic realm. As textile scholar Jessica Hemmings (2018) warns, there is a danger in over-claiming the power of craft, that there is some discursive power to “disrupt” in craft that somehow would overturn power relations in society. Even if there may be some examples of craft being used in liberation struggles, such as Gandhi’s use of home-made cloth and salt production, these are instances of craft effectively veiling power of mobilization under a cover of domesticity. Hemmings instead argues for an acknowledgment for the powerlessness of craft, that under its domesticity, craft manifests a “normal” state of harmony, setting a standard of how politics could and should be. If craft has power, this resides in its tranquil powerlessness, and thus acts as a litmus to expose toxic violence in the surrounding political atmosphere. Yet the risk of domesticity and embrace of powerlessness is that this normalization takes the edge off a mobilization of agency due to the lack of visions of what empowerment could entail. Economist Amartya Sen calls this “adaptive preferences” and finds it

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a common attitude of impairment among people who live in deprived conditions where “hardship is accepted with non-grumbling resignation” and where marginalized people come to “take pleasure in small mercies and [. . .] cut down personal desires to modest—‘realistic’—proportions” (Sen 1992: 55). Sen points to the conditions of exploited migrants, battered housewives, or oppressed minorities where conditions may imperil the preferences to actually claim power and autonomy. Yet an engagement with fashion taking its departure from making and craft can approach the topic beyond “democratic” consumerism. It is important to highlight that there emerges a special form of well-being from manifesting, in physical form, a voice of freedom through the connection between doing and being. As Sen (1985: 10) argues, possessing a commodity does not mean that one is able to use it; instead, the focus should be on “what the person succeeds in doing with the commodities and characteristics at his or her command.” To Sen, capabilities should be understood as what a person is able to do and be, and thus commodities and their distribution are of secondary importance. The primary concern is how capabilities ensure entitlements to social goods, and this must go beyond the designated paths of consumerism. As Martha Nussbaum (2011: 25) argues, “the notion of freedom to choose is thus built into the notion of capability. To promote capabilities is to promote areas of freedom.” At its best, the direct action of capabilities also moves the notion of justice from sympathy towards commitment and engagement, making participants realize that justice is always a tangible struggle, not something served ready-made (Alexander 2008: 22). This last point argues for a type of capability building that touches on the nomos of fashion. Collaborative forms of making tie practitioners together beyond sympathy and towards shared commitment and engagement. In the safehouse, the crucial issue was to unpack the participants’ own experiences of the violence of fashion, but with focus on how these instances could be countered and disarmed. The constructive focus was on the sense of self that can emerge from other experiences than those offered through the current fashion economy. An experience of sharing a workshop, or a safehouse, could be the rallying point for collaborative self-reflection. Richard Sennett (2012: 57) draws parallels to the emergence of solidarity between craftspeople in ancient Greece: The workshop spawned an idea of justice, that the things people made cannot be seized from them arbitrarily, and it enjoyed a kind of political autonomy, at least in Greece, since artisans were allowed to make their own decisions about how best to practice their craft.

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A central concern in the safehouse project is the counter-thinking when addressing capabilities; that capabilities do not exist in a power-vacuum but can stand in counterpoint to the nomos of fashion. For example, fashion media primarily acts as a propaganda organ for the industry, which pays the journalists’ salaries through advertising. In response to this, counter-media-capabilities must start from critical analysis of the values promoted through the industry. As the industry lives on continuous cycles of building and undermining the selfesteem of the consumer, making them dependent on fashion, the countercapability must be to cultivate skills, courage and fashion-abilities at a safe distance from this cycle. To engage fashion from a capabilities approach must not only include the building of craft skills, but work on individual as well as collective self-reflection (Figure 6.5). Such understanding can help unpack how we relate to others and how we also partake in the judgment of our peers, to better disarm conflict and potential violence. The emphasis for fostering more collaborative and self-reflective forms of fashion-ability could echo forms of “participatory knowledge” (Pacey 1999). This is a knowledge-in-action, an engaged form of involvement, accumulating embodied memory, where the maker and user, the same person, are both reiterating, appropriating and co-producing meaning and action. It is a form of knowledge that is not disconnected from the phenomenon studied, but aims to stand closer to it and with it. It means to act in resonance and inter dependence, fostering co-dependent forms of agency. Pacey highlights, for example, the aboriginal song-lines of Australia, melodic maps exchanged as songs between nomads. Another example is knowledge of mechanical techniques based on embodiment, such as the artisan’s use of listening to understand the qualities of materials (by hammering on steel for example). Every type of participatory knowledge has its own rhythm and technical pattern as a form of connective ritual between users and materials. Applied to fashion, such a participatory form of knowledge acknowledges that we are at all times tied to fashion, always drawn into it. It does not try to disengage from it through some form of reactionary anti-stance, even if it acknowledges a need to counter-balance the forces of conflict. Rather, it opens for unpacking co-dependence through self-reflection, and as a form of material engagement with embodiment. A participatory knowledge emerging from craft can be a manifestation of dignity, or as Sennett (2008: 21) suggests, craft can make people “anchored in tangible reality, and they can take pride in their work.” This tangible reality can be a starting point from which to take on fashion through something like a “capability-sensitive design” (Oosterlaken

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Figure 6.5 Skill share form for fashion safehouse, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

2009) and make fashion into a shared nomos, emerging from the collaborative capacity for growth. The collaborative task is to find ways fashion can fuel the hunger to connect, rather than push for achievements or the preos of social control.

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From zero-sum conflict to shared self-expansion A first step in self-instituting fashion is to unpack perspectives that can counterbalance the conflicts and ontological assumptions of the nomos of fashion. One such approach can be to ground fashion in emotion. When wearing a new special garment, and being seen and getting a compliment, what is that feeling about? The rush of dopamine, the feeling of “being on top of the world” or even just the feeling of “fitting in”—of becoming one with a scene or a group? Most often, fashion is something we feel in the body (von Busch 2018a; von Busch & Hwang 2018). Partly such experiences may explain the kick we may get from a new purchase, or the anxiety from dressing up for a date or job interview. When fashion works for us, fashion can be a feeling of expansion, of a new world being available to oneself. At its best, it is an entry ticket to a new world, or even that the garment is the vehicle for a journey towards self-expansion. The self-expansion model in psychology, promoted by psychologists Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron (1986; 1996; 1997), argues that the primary motivation for humans is the desire to enhance our individual potential to affect or be affected, much in resonance with Spinoza’s idea of the living force, “conatus.” We may seek assets, goods and resources, but motivations for such goals become a secondary concern as it is their instrumental use for self-expansion that explains their value because the “fundamental human motivation [is] to enhance potential self efficacy”(Aron & Aron 1986). With skills and useful information, friendships and social status, power and popularity, are all potentials for expanding the affectual sphere of influence. The self-expansion model suggests that interpersonal relationships go beyond seeking to fulfill basic survival requirements, to include motivation and cognition of self-development and interpersonal connection and love. With this emphasis, they merge the often individually focused models of Western motivation with Eastern views of self-development through interpersonal love and compassion. A fundamental way to achieve self-expansion is by the inclusion of others into the self, for example in a romantic relationship where its newness and sense of development is the way the new company expands one’s sense of the world. It means new routines, new eyes and perspectives on everyday things, and a personal sense of growth, not only from affection, but also from moving in novel ways through the everyday. This perspective resonates with fashion as a form of flirting and embodied gamble for the attention and affirmation of our peers (von Busch 2018a; von Busch & Hwang 2018).

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According to the self-expansion model, a relationship usually begins with a perceived overlap between two selves: common interests, values and/or ideas, or a sense of one self becoming included into the other. But there is also a sense of augmentation. A sense of growth is present as affects not only feed into the ego, but opens new venues for it, making new resources and avenues available to be shared. This sense of growth leads to the belief that two worlds are now connected and a new world is included in the self. This in turn forms the foundational and powerful experience of the dyadic relationship. Expansion is the experience which also intersects with wider social emotions, such as social support, selfesteem from admiration, and construction of in-group identity, and even a sense of belonging (a sense of having grown to “fit” into a place). With a partner of a long time, the self is more cognitively integrated than with a non-close other, and this affects perception and cognitive structures, but also the sense of possibility (Aron & Aron 1986). For example, an individual may feel more competent, taking on new tasks, knowing that the partner can help facilitate the process or fill in with needed knowledge, “I can complete [this task] because my partner will tell me how” (Reimann & Aron 2009: 68). Expanding on the original self-expansion model, Riemann and Aron (2009) argue expansion can also happen through tools, symbols, commodities, and brands. It might be possible to say fashion, as a social and intimate force, is a vehicle for selfexpansion and an opening to new sensibilities and affects. The quality of fashion is that of the timing to the zeitgeist that makes some garments “just right” at the moment. They are attractor points of the right kind of attention, the right kind of status alignments: they are vehicles to the right worlds we want our affects to expand into (Reimann & Aron 2009; Reimann et al. 2012). The important point in the self-expansion model is that the affective element is not necessarily bound to limited goods or social positions. A cognitive self-expansion is not a zero-sum game, as it does not need to end up in a competition with rivals. Of course, there is always a risk that as we see others expand their cognitive world and self, while we remain enclosed in our own little habitual ponds, is that not a great source of envy? We see a rival grow, see their esteem expand and radiate confidence and success, and we desire to have them as friends or allies. And surely, if we cannot have that, the sense of growth may come from a type of expansion that is trespassing and intruding on the world of another, for example the schadenfreude that comes from the vandalism of another. This may be a risk, but it is important to notice that the opposite is also true, that cognitive abilities and pleasures are amplified when shared amongst friends.

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We can think of fashion as affective autonomy—of self-instituting shared self-expansion. Here, a safehouse is a place to cultivate shared fashion-abilities, and could perhaps best be thought of as a room for expanding togetherness. Within its walls, individual and collective reflection become anchored in shared craft and making, as an effective freedom, to use Castoriadis’ formulation from before. But for that, there is also a need for an openness to exposure, a window of vulnerability towards a communal form of sovereignty, not based on the power over others, but in alliance with others, a power based on the togetherness of friendship.

Fashion between four walls A safehouse is a site of refuge. A safe space is provided within its four walls, a home for the testing of thought, where self-reflection can build bridges to others. It is a space for interdependency and loyalty, of honesty and a plurality of strengths as well as weaknesses, shared hopes and some sense of assured equality. In a way, a safehouse is a miniature of the public realm, a guarded outpost with one’s back covered, like the kitchen, the family hearth, the bedrock for building up the courage of resistance (Virilio 2012). In its form, a safehouse can be a miniature model of the world in which we may try to challenge the consensus and power of the habitual dependence on fashion: a shared reality, where a deeper public and a renewed truthfulness may be discovered, but amongst a group of selected friends. A room where friends can dare to open up about their experiences of judgment, as well as their own bias to judge others according to arbitrary standards. It is a place that faces up to and resists the “only way,” the reduced and user-friendly reality of what Hannah Arendt (1968) renders as “thoughtlessness.” But it is not only a place for thought, but of doings, which has to start on a small scale. It is a place between private and public where to test action with others, because, as Arendt argues, “action [. . .] is never possible in isolation” (Arendt 1958: 167). For Arendt, politics is an agonistic politics of open, never-ending debate, which takes place in the public realm, free from coercion or force. It is a politics that emphasize human plurality and civic equality, giving birth to new ideas that can lead to actions that challenge the thoughtless status quo. As with Socrates, the use of public thought is for Arendt not to educate the citizens as much as to improve the doxai, the common beliefs or popular opinions, that is, the political life in which they took part.

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It is the unreflected everyday life that perpetuates totalitarianism and makes its terror ubiquitous, Arendt (1968) famously argues. It can only be challenged by organizing rooms for a critical and Socratic questioning of the parameters of thought and our capacity for judgment, liberating the natality of thought and training it towards the calisthenics of action. The togetherness of these kinds of close friendships differs from the broadcasting and promotion of the private achievements to online “friends,” of competitive and loose social ties. Close friendships are the bridge between private and public, between thought and action (Nixon 2015). Too often, the step between the private and intimate thought, and public scrutiny with its risk of humiliation, is too large a leap to take. We thus rather keep our thoughts to ourselves, and retreat from the heroic realm of the public. The room for friendship is a space in-between; a place to practice new thoughts and examples, to examine cases, rather than struggle to impose rules and axioms. Judgment does not follow rules. It needs to be trained, with examples and cases to the imagination, to become a craft of judgment. As Nixon (2015) points out, a room of close friendships is a place of honest critique, a miniature and safe public realm within four walls. It is the realm of friendships that bridges private and public, and helps guide the leap towards action. Friendship promises protection from the unpredictability and uncertainty of human affairs and the resources of stability and continuity necessary to engage with that unpredictability and uncertainty. It promises a sense of self-worth and of mutual recognition. Friendship is not an escape from but a re-engagement with the plurality and—as Arendt would term it—the worldliness of the human condition. Nixon 2015: 54

When applied to our everyday engagements with fashion, we need a friendly room for examining the fragile connection between desires and self-worth, between risk-taking and vulnerability. What can preserve freedom, and how do we achieve a deeper and more meaningful freedom through fashion? How do we establish a fashion parallel to the res publica, the public thing that emerges from the love for the shared political life? The goal is a better-considered opinion based on experience and experimentation, and a building towards a shared understanding through a dialogue of hope. To build courage, this must happen through a sense of plurality in togetherness, testing it in that middle ground between private and public.

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What the safehouse manifests is a deeper engagement with fashion, between four walls. In the politics of the small room, such as the kitchen or workshop, questions of appearances can be examined more in detail and honesty amongst friends. In such a room of vulnerability, the many-faceted realities between the inner and outer worlds can be unpacked. As Goldfarb (2006) highlights, in such a room of “small politics,” the totality of Foucault’s power/knowledge regimes can be taken apart and the relationship between truth and politics, knowledge and power, can be questioned. It is around the kitchen table, in small gatherings of close friends and relatives, that a clandestine public space can emerge in hushed voices, where truth can be spoken and vulnerabilities exposed. The workshop and kitchen table overlap in this sense; they are both rooms for withdrawal from the public, yet are not fully independent or make pretence of a romanticized full autonomy, and still they continuously challenge the nomos of the public. It comes down to this: we live in a time where we see fashion everywhere and we are steeped in images of adoration, beauty, celebrities, and fame. Yet we know little how to articulate and understand our own desires. Parallels can be drawn to popular philosopher Alain de Botton’s (2012) discussion about how we today see perfect bodies and expressions of sex everywhere, yet we have developed little understanding of how to articulate our own desires or where they come from. Instead, both sex and the desires around fashion are heavily normalized and any honest conversation is often circumvented with feelings of shame; we can easily feel fragile, inauthentic, shallow, pretentious, or dirty and obscene. From the pain of our separateness and hunger for recognition, we are tacitly shaped by our surroundings, and offered little room for shared self-examination. A fashion safehouse can be the first step to redefine the nomos of our shared desires from a place of vulnerability and care, while offering room to cultivate reflection and self-esteem.

Pockets of com-passion and the displacement of violence One of the practical outcomes from the safehouse workshop in Portland was a focus on repair kits and special hidden pockets for care. How could designers include special pockets in garments that may shift the attention users have to the world? If a garment has a dedicated pocket for a repair kit, perhaps it can help the wearer to cultivate a special attention to the world based on the capacity to repair and take care of the world. The participants in the workshop examined

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various toolkits for repair, sewing special pockets for band-aids, gifts and snacks to hand out to struggling peers. A pocket is like a super-power, keeping a tool or a capability ready for use when the wearer chooses to. In many ways, a pocket is a room for autonomy, it offers a space by which to carry amplifiers and extensions of our capabilities, such as tools, keys, money, or food. If applied with some cunning thought, the deployment of pockets can offer room for counter-power. By its very materiality, the pocket offers to activate a capacity in a very handson way, beyond a speech-act, especially one with a repair-kit, as I can offer practical and material help in a situation of need. It also may shift my attention towards applying these capabilities for the service of care, a gift, a mint, a snack. It can house connective powers. A hidden pocket for provocative pamphlets may be used to make ideas more public, while a marker pen helps scribble comments on the public notice board. A pocket with a repair kit can open a passage between peers and foster another kind of fashion practice based on care and concern for the well-being of others. As designer and researcher Kat Jungnickel (2018) came to give a workshop on her works on the history of pockets at Parsons, the discussion from the safehouse actualized with a new angle. The external pocket can differ radically from the concealed one: external pockets, like the breast pocket with a napkin, can offer a connection between people, and also set a protocol for that interaction; if I carry a napkin in my pocket, it can be there for a social purpose as much as an aesthetic one: “here, use my napkin!” A concealed pocket, on the other hand, is like a special ethical space, the user can choose to activate it or not, while escaping the social demands for taking action. In that way, the concealed pocket, as it sits on the inside of the social membrane of the garment, is like a portable safehouse; a space one can retreat to, hidden under the quotidian look of an everyday garment. But more so, the concealed pocket, hidden under the fashionable mask, can also possibly subvert some of the tensions of fashion. By being hidden under the surface the pocket also allows for something more unexpected: that under the mask of detached aesthetics there is a special room for togetherness, beyond the symbolic meanings of the garment itself. In its most physical sense, a little compartment inside the jacket can be a pocket of resistance. In such a way, a pocket of care also helps start a discussion to rethink the passion of fashion. If a passionate attention to others can be mobilized for mutual affection and from a position of care instead of competitiveness, garments may

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be aesthetic as well as practical incarnations of such attentiveness. It can be a room for passion as well as com-passion. The “com” in com-passion, signals how coexistence is at the core of human beings. Humans are primed towards interdependence, not independence. A passion is to be shared. Rather than being devalued when shared, it can be intensified. This resonates with French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000) notion that to-be is to-be-with someone else. In Nancy’s writings, Being is a relational phenomena of community, “existence is with: otherwise nothing exists” (Nancy 2000: 4). Instead of the Descartian singularity of “I think therefore I am,” Nancy emphasizes the sympathy and com-passion between humans as the core of being. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness. Nancy 2000: xiii

What Nancy sees as human meaning is the sharing of social meaning (Nancy 2000: 2). Without this sharing there is no mortar of community, thus it exists inbetween every member and participant, yet it needs to be continuously reproduced. We exist as we commit to one another, and this com-passion is the foundation of human life. “To want to say ‘we’ is not at all sentimental, not at all familial or ‘communitarian’. It is existence reclaiming its due or its condition: coexistence” (Nancy 2000: 45). There is of course a catch; com-passion does not simply emerge but needs a healthy environment in which to grow, as well as continuous care. It can be cultivated and trained, but it is also at peril to the forces that undermine trust and togetherness. But why not just make a brand of it and start selling it? If fashion can sell rivalry, can it not also sell care and compassion? Why not just put it out there and see who buys it? Let’s just make all those polluting forms of fashion obsolete. We can follow Buckminster Fuller’s famous argument that you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, we must build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete. Indeed, many designers would agree with Fuller’s point as they feel their practice is a constructive one; design is about creating new realities, rather than fighting old existing ones. Yet the tricky part is the second sentence; what exactly “makes the existing model obsolete”? That is, how do our new models not only end up in an affirmative and accumulative market of ideas, based on the same ontological assumptions as before? What kind of fashion

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practice will actively displace the old reality and make it obsolete? For even getting started, we need pockets that actually have the power to displace existing power. If we look around, “disruptive” models are all the rage, and we can witness them at high pace replacing old ones. New young brands, retail platforms and business models reshape the fashion landscape. Sadly, and in opposition to Fuller’s ideals, there are few examples of poor, marginalized, but “good” models, which have actively had the force to replace entrenched and powerful existing realities. Ethics and design rarely make an existing model obsolete. It is power that makes a model obsolete. And this is a hard lesson for idealist designers to learn. Almost all designers want to minimize unsustainable and violent systems, and reduce the footprints of conflict, carbon and corruption. But will it be enough to replace the existing reality by simply creating a process with zero bademissions? As fashion designers grapple to replace an unsustainable reality with a more sustainable one, it cannot be enough to “do no harm.” There needs to be room and active resources for new powers and new passions to replace the existing models. Or to put it more poignantly and in relation to the fashion examined in earlier chapters, how are fashion designers to deal with violent realities, that is, not only bad solutions and unsustainable consumption, but take on forces that uphold an oppressive reality, which actively undermines the abilities to replace this with the better model? When it comes to fashion, designers are taught to think of new designs within a framework of aesthetic, functional or economic competition for scarce market positions. One brand can replace another, or find a new lucrative niche or a whole new market, yet the competitive forces remain untouched. To compete under such an arrangement offers little room for true alternatives to grow. It may be more efficient to think of it in terms of the relation between violence and nonviolence. To Gandhi, effective nonviolence displaces violence. Nonviolence is not passive or a negation, but a force deposing violence (Vinthagen 2015). Nonviolence is active and constructive. Nonviolence replaces violence with peace. Peace is a process, an activity, not a stable or tranquil state. Peace is a struggle to uphold togetherness, reciprocity and com-passion. In fashion, peace needs more work. If we look around, most designs are drawn into economic, social and political processes that are not pointing towards better futures. So much of what is done under the banner of innovation, disruption and optimization is turned back at people and planet in violent ways. Fashion’s play with desire and envy plays a great part in covering this up. Learning from the

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active force of nonviolence, a peace-promoting approach to fashion must move from being merely an additional market offer. It has to become a force that actively displaces unsustainable and violent models, not simply replacing them with a new choice, but making violence incompatible and even impossible. Here, the passion for fashion can be transformed into a com-passion that displaces violence, yet this must start from the personal in-between, from shared selfreflection, from practicing with new forms of nomos. Where to start? Firstly, designers must add another category for evaluating what makes good fashion design. The question is how does this new model actively make an unsustainable model obsolete, not only adding a new model to the market. How does it not only “do less harm,” but also add leverage against the unwanted model? Even if it is in the smallest gesture, or in a hidden pocket, it shifts the focus towards how to take action and build counter-capabilities to the current status quo. Secondly, we must ask how the model builds self-institution and autonomy. Design must be a matter of institutionalizing pluralist peace and promoting autonomy and aliveness (Escobar 2018). And not least, professionals and educators must tackle the question of peace seriously: How do we add leverage to peace in order to displace violence and heteronomy with self-reflection and fashionabilities? The goal must be to make models that cultivate counter-capabilities through action, models that help train mind and cognition, not describing and informing it. It must also be open to change, because violence always morphs in the search for new interfaces and frontiers. To return to Buckminster Fuller, designers must think more actively about how their work makes violent realities obsolete. This must mean models for self-expansion through fashion designs that: ● ● ● ● ●

cut off ties to what fuels the conflict; isolate the conflict; make itself independent from the networks of the conflict; remove the conflict; synergize the wanted forces at the cost of the conflict.

If fashion design is about engagement in social conflict, perhaps the least fruitful way to mitigate violence is to keep producing or upgrading goods to fight with or over. Using the seductive allure of fashion to foster new practices, sensibilities, and com-passions may be more fruitful if we are to engage in this conflict. This brings us to the final part of this journey. Next, we are to explore how to make the goals and notion of success in everyday conflict of fashion more apparent

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in order to question these assumptions. If we are to create more meaningful engagements through fashion we could not only promote self-expansion, but also a richer expansion of the notion of self: a self beyond what we have access to through the wardrobe and that narrow interface the market offers.

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In many ways, the safehouse can be seen as a tool to help unpack, question and possibly displace the everyday preos of social regulation. It offers a space from which to build skills and courage. But there is still a need to address systemic impacts of conflict. We must examine how to affect the psychopolitical hierarchies promoted through fashion; of who is seen, celebrated, and deemed worthy. Walk through any city today, and the landscape speaks of its heroes. Streets and boulevards, buildings and institutions, they all whisper the names of those worthy of a place in the annals of time. Amongst the monuments of founders and conquerors, industrialists and princes, the ephemeral adverts radiate the beauty and aesthetic achievements of our celebrities. As any cultural historian would say, monuments are placed to mark and remind us of intangible values, as each monument whispers to the people passing “this is something you should pay attention to.” Monuments act as manifestations of state narrative, each enhancing a specific angle from time past, often to legitimize its power. The archives of fashion are the monument valley to sovereign vanity. We see the heroes everywhere, the beautiful high achievers and victors in the aesthetic attention economy. The fame of some may be ephemeral, like any other beauty, but some may keep on living even after their bodies are gone, becoming names on products with new bodies and acting under their names like avatars. Some live on not only because of their accomplishments, but also because they came to embody the world that is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair. It is the law of tooth and claw; one day you are in, and the next you are out. The monuments we see over fashion today are to the conquerors, the lesser gods of unattainable ideals. There are not many archives, and even fewer monuments, to the “people’s history” of fashion. As consumers meet fashion in media and advertising, in their feeds and all over the social field, there is still a lack of everyday language around the daily struggles over desire, appearance and expression. The grave of unsung heroes is the dark “memory hole” of the recycling 121

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bin: there are no monuments to the unknown heroes of who we could have been if we only dared, memorials to all the unworn stories. We see the same patterns in the endless line of superhero movies and narratives; every new hero is another god, another monarch, another genius innovator, replacing the evil emperor with the just emperor. In the realm of fashion, the cycles of new genius figureheads keep replacing each other as muses of the name-branded houses. As long as they are profitable they cannot die. Yet the mythology remains the same; we all need another hero. As in the superhero movies, it remains unimaginable that it would be the collective and everyday efforts of the people that would win against the villain. Seldom does a new and just organization of society emerge from the ruins of battle, or a radical reimagination of social structures. In a similar vein, rarely does a hero in fashion promote a utopian cultural change and new social bonds of togetherness, or address the toxic values promoted by the previous emperors of style. Even amongst fashion “rebels,” the goal of their system seems to be to sell commoditybased inclusion (and often to ever-cheaper prices). It is as if the image of rebellion is utopian enough if sold an accessible price-point. Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson (1999) lifts the paradox of producing accessible aesthetic goods to those excluded from the values of beauty. She projects a fictional State Equality Board to send out compensation checks to people repressed by the state-sanctioned system, and an accompanying letter would read: How sad that you are so repulsive to people around you that no one wants to be your friend or lifetime companion. We won’t make it up to you by being your friend or your marriage partner—we have our own freedom of association to exercise—but you can console yourself in your miserable loneliness by consuming these material goods which we, the beautiful and charming ones, will provide. And who knows? Maybe you won’t be such a loser once potential dates see how rich you are. Anderson 1999: 305

As the letter above shows, Anderson points towards the absurdity of thinking that cheap consumerism can somehow compensate for the unjust value systems embodied by the current meritocratic and consumerist regime. Cheap goods, however beautiful and nice, cannot make up for the unequal values attributed to people, especially if it offers no avenue for people to address and change these values. Instead, cheap and accessible fashion is a band-aid on a wound that never heals, and it is in the perverse interest of the industry to make sure it is

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never cured, so that the bandage needs to continuously be changed. The industry is built on perpetuating psychopolitical conflict. Or to put it in the example of superhero narratives: the only access people have to the abilities of superheroes is to consume their goods and applaud new heroes—never to access or cultivate any capabilities that can change the basic equation of injustice and perpetual violence. Consumer society is built on slavery, as philosopher Ivan Illich (1973) argues: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. It may be its seduction as well as its curse that fashion is per definition drawn into psychopolitical conflict, but this does not necessarily mean fashion has to thrive on humiliation and the permanent scarring of the excluded. As we encounter it in the everyday, fashion guards that narrow bridge between inclusion and exclusion (von Busch 2018b). It can be shameful to talk about what images and desires actually stand behind one’s wardrobe, why one dresses in a specific way, who one’s idols are, whose attention one hungers for, what one’s aspirations are, and how darker desires of vanity and envy play out in our dressing practices. Even though everyone is forced to “appear,” acknowledging one’s desires, or fear to expose these desires, make it hard to have a frank discussion about the everyday relation to fashion.

The spectacle of selection One barrier that makes it hard to address the desires of fashion is the status that comes from excluding others, especially since it is a process of ranking that also affects silent bystanders. In social combat, the neutral spectators are all drawn into the mechanisms of status violence. This makes it uncomfortable to discuss our own relationship to how our dreams and aspirations are expressed, and at what social cost. Many of us may experience shame when we unpack how we participate in the reproduction of such violence, even in the subtlest signals and tacit behaviors of agreement. In a culture fueled by bullying, it takes effort to not become spectators and bystanders to the spectacle playing out on that narrow and selective bridge between inclusion and exclusion. Curiously, our hunger for heroes also reflects on the attitude to relational regulation and bullying. It is easy to think bullies engage in harassment of their peers to compensate for their low self-esteem. We pity the victim, but also the aggressor: he or she must have troubles at home, or other excuses. The bully is scorned by peers, as much as feared, and most of us would think that bystanders would just like the bullying to end. But as Juvonen and Graham (2014) show, this is quite the other

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way around. Instead, bullies have very high self-esteem and are usually very popular: the bullies are the cool kids, the selected ones, and the bystanders are there to partake in the rituals of status enforcement, to enhance their own standing as much as avoid conflict with the cool kids. Most bullying involves a combination of direct and indirect forms of undermining the victim’s social standing and self-esteem, which makes for dark and indirect spectacles to play out with ripples across groups, producing more desirable gossip. Juvonen and Graham (2014: 162) highlight, “In contrast to direct confrontation (e.g., physical aggression, threats, name-calling), indirect tactics include spreading of rumors, backstabbing, and exclusion from the group.” Indirect forms of exclusion involve relational manipulation through judgmental rumors and subtle forms of exclusion (Crick & Grotpeter 1995). Spreading rumors, undermining someone’s character or standing is intended to damage the targets’ social reputation or deflate their social status while concealing the identity of the perpetrator (Björkqvist et al. 1994). Bullies may be cold and calculating, seek influence and want to be desired, but that does not make bullies special asocial or rough types. Instead they are often the popular or “cool” kids in their social group. Building on earlier studies (Cairns & Cairns 1994; Hymel et al. 1993), Juvonen and Graham argue there is a positive relation between aggression and high social status, which in turn means many aggressive youths have inflated perceptions of themselves. “For example, aggressive elementary school students overestimate their competencies not only in terms of their peer status but in terms of academic and athletic domains as well” (2014: 165). Similarly, the bullies experience elevated status as they engage in aggressive behavior, as most social feedback bullies receive affirms their behavior, as bystanders reinforce the bullies by smiling and laughing, and bullies thus think highly of themselves (Salmivalli et al. 1996). “Although peers typically do not personally like those who bully others,” Juvonen and Graham (2014: 165) write, “they are still likely to side with the bully in part to protect their social status, reputation, and physical safety.” The celebration of bullies may also have evolutionary explanations, where intra-species violence biologically affects the lives within groups. In the last years, a much-discussed study found that not only do victims of bullying suffer from negative physical health effects throughout their life, but also that the bullies, the perpetuators, got improved health by bullying (Copeland et al. 2014). The study showed that “there is evidence that those who perpetrate only, pure bullies, gain benefits from bullying others without incurring costs and may be healthier than their peers, emotionally and physically” (Copeland et al. 2014). According to the

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lead author of the study, William Copeland, the effects “serve as a lesson for how social status can have lasting positive effects on health,” and to be a bully is good for your health, as “the enhanced social status that came along with being a bully did seem to advantage them over time” (Park 2014). From studies like these, it may not be all that abstract to link a will to life with a “will to fashion.” Seeing how the very process of rejection and bullying makes the perpetuator gain esteem also reveals how a group “outsources” status violence to the bully. The indirect and relational aggression in the social dynamics of bullying elevates the perpetuator, and the bystander group celebrates it. The social combat of fashion is a status game that on the one hand most would agree contains unethical behaviors, yet on the other hand most of us are still part of, or at the fringes of. We sometimes stand as silent bystanders, while sometimes engaging as coenforcers by spreading rumors and passing on judgments. Upholding sovereign vanity is a continuous social struggle. Fashion plays a part in raising the popularity of the “cool” bully: he or she is “in” and the group surrounding the aggressor is most likely his or her peers (or “in-group”)—affirming the aesthetic domination of the bully by already having submitted to the sartorial codes of the group. The victim is the one who stands out as different, but even more provoking may be the ones who are on an equal level, but refuse to submit, or the ones who seek access to the in-group. Here, the act of bullying may become something of a rite of passage to come out cool on the other side: just think of the typical humiliating frat-rituals. The master-ofceremonies (or gray-eminence behind the rituals) is often the cool kid waging to control access to the in-group, and the enforcers may be the recently initiated at the fringe, desperately trying to prove themselves worthy of their recently acquired honors. As Susan Fiske (2011) argues, the scorn of the weak is almost always seen as legitimate or even virtuous from the perspective of the offender. In conjunction with this, the offender often regards him or herself as a victim, and scorn is a release of righteous anger against the target. By imagining being a victim, the bully turns blame outwards. From this horizon, it is everyone else who are the bullies, the resentful masses (even though the perpetuator privately thinks of himself or herself as superior). The offender has to imagine himself as an unfairly treated victim because he lives in a meritocratic world where weakness is looked down upon, and no frailty can be admitted. Reputational aggression lives in a predatory world-view. Yet, as Girard points out (1965), the scapegoating is always of the less powerful—never the more powerful—and this mechanism makes the struggle

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simultaneously possible and impossible: the weaker are good targets, yet they are also endless in numbers as there will always be someone new to take their place. Projecting one’s own weakness onto the less powerful is the classic psychological mechanism to make life manageable for the oppressor: it is the resentful masses who are cruel or egotistical, full of pride, envy, or jealousy, never the conqueror. It may be easy to think of bullying as something that “bad” people do, but not only do they feel good about themselves, the audience agrees to what they do too—often reinforcing the feeling of belonging to the right group. Clothes show belonging to the group, but also signaling the submission to the taste of the group, and indirectly, to the aesthetic leader of the group. Under the “shallowness,” fashion is a psychopolitical process dependent on co-regulating bystanders. It is a process most of us are drawn into, even if only as spectators, sometimes unwilling, sometimes with a sense of schadenfreude, often in tacit agreement. This psychopolitical taint of dress practice resonates all too well with Arntzen’s claim that selection is essential to the concept of fashion, “quite literally, some are counted in and others out [. . .] By its nature, fashion is only designed for some” (Arntzen 2015: 58). By this very dynamic, most who engage in fashion desperately want to ensure it is designed for them, and not for others. It is the culture of aesthetic meritocracy and achievement that propels the stigma that weakness is unforgivable. And weakness is worse than simply being useless, it is a burden onto others, an overall social cost and shame. In a meritocracy, weakness is also considered contagious: waste sinks to the bottom, so don’t hang out with losers or you may get tainted! The weakness of the victims, the ugly and unwanted, must be evacuated, cleansed from the social body. Paradoxically, the desire of this mechanism can be noticed in the implicit stance of the fashion system, where the only solution thinkable is to make sure the industry provides more “inclusive” collections so this mechanism can produce even more willing victims and consumers. The industry prides itself in its “inclusivity” while simultaneously promoting ever more exclusive ideals of excellence and achievement. Character and morality are tightly connected through appearance, and as the bar for appearing as socially acceptable is steadily increased, the blame is put on the marginalized individual. This is a process philosopher Heather Widdows (2018: 3) sees transforming into the dominance and demandingness of the beauty ideal where liberal choice is entangled with victim blaming, as “failure is a moral vice engendering shame and disgust.” The increasing perfection deemed in looking “natural” is a process that is entwined with the increasing “wellness syndrome,” where consumers are more and more forced to “take care of themselves” as a sign of responsible subjecthood

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(Cederström & Spicer 2015). Positive thinking, and the assumption that with enough effort you can be whatever you want to be saturate this ideology of wellness and aesthetic self-achievement. With the demand of wellness, a healthy and aesthetically pleasing body is no longer a personal option but belongs to the field of public morals. Therefore, if you do not succeed it is your own fault. You are not only a loser; you are a “bad” person. As a social diktat, the ideology of wellness amalgamates a paranoid quest for health with an ethical cult of being “good.” It is an ideology where everyone is included and thus judged, even those who did not ask for it. In conjunction with this move, the fashion industry keeps raising more monuments to the conquerors and achievers, the aristocracy of fashion, while offering little room for the cultivation of any form of com-passion.

Approaching expenditure and conflict In order to unpack a reconciliatory approach to the psychopolitical conflict of fashion, we must take a step back and see what may be inherent in the conflict of fashion itself. If fashion is a form of passionate tension emerging from the energy of conflict, the question that follows is how it is used, converted and wasted, and if it can be converted in less harmful ways. In the vein of Freud, the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1988) sees how attraction and aggression, or life and death, are not irreconcilable opposites, but tightly intertwined. As all human relationships are inherently ambivalent, attraction and aggression are in an economic relationship with each other, where the two are mutually dependent and exchanged with each other, often transmutating into each other even when they appear as opposites or rivals. To Bataille this has a special significance in the social realm. Bataille puts forward that passion is an expenditure of desire, a conflict attracted and drawn towards its own death. Passion is an explosion of life, energy and matter consumed in the face of its own extinction. Also fashion fits well into Bataille’s economy of passions. It is the fate of organisms to strive towards life, to grow and multiply, but the surplus of energy also forces these same organisms to squander excess energy: the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. Bataille 1988: 21

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Life is so forcefully abundant it has to waste itself, as in the multitude of flowers left without pollination, the plentiful reproduction of insects and animals feeding the lower layers of the food pyramid, as the exuberance of spring turns into the inevitability of fall. Human life and its general economy is the act “in which the ‘expenditure’ (the ‘consumption’) of wealth, rather than production [is] the primary object” (1988: 9). Like nature, an excess of energy adds pressure also within the human social realm, much like nature reclaiming an untended garden path in summer (1988: 30). As human life is on top of the food pyramid, this places human societies at the crest of expenditure: being at the summit, his sovereignty in the living world identifies him with this movement; it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption. Bataille 1988: 23

To Bataille, the energy within the living environment affects the social organization of human societies where a central purpose of society is to stipulate ritualistic processes of squandering. The vexed question at the core of social organization is not how to handle scarcity or lack of resources, but instead the excess energy produced by life itself. Religion and consumption are necessary rituals of extravagant expenditure; carnivals, feasts and sacrifices are destructive social modes at the foundation of every culture. And entwined with these rituals are the ultimate passions of expenditure: violence and war. These are the processes of pruning of social energy needed to uphold the ever upwards-striving energy of growth. As Bataille puts it, the abundance of energy in the general economy must be squandered through useless consumption (Bataille 1988: 23). Indeed, the destruction of abundance is the very meaning of social life, according to Bataille. The festival of exuberance turns its violence first inwards, as luxury, burnt offerings, and sacrifice of wealth, and then outwards, as the ecstasy of war and aggression. At the heart of civilization itself lays the rituals of economic destruction of energy: sacrifice through the uselessness of religion, luxury and war—in festivals, temples, monuments—and of course fashion, which in many ways is the amalgamation of destructive pleasure. Fashion seamlessly merges the bliss of luxury, celebration and violence into one social force. It is the passionate energy that is transubstantiated into wasteful sacrifice to beauty, products ritually slaughtered by the shifting seasons, and this offering is intertwined with its necessary destruction of perfectly functional goods in the sales and controversial incineration of unsold commodities (Gruendl 2007).

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The feasts of the flesh, the carnivals and ephemeral celebrations of birth and death are simply monuments with higher metabolism, the accelerated expenditure of wars and temples. The first example manifests expenditure amongst individuals, the second is manifested through states—yet each is a monument to the entanglement of passion and death. From Bataille’s perspective, frugality in one niche of the general economy only happens if there is another prioritized ritual of expenditure taking its place, such as the bans on luxury or rationing of food that may take place during times of exuberant expenditure in war. As argued earlier, rituals of expenditure offer an intensity of unity, carnivals as much as war, entangling the expenditures of consumption, eroticism, and violence, which perhaps not coincidentally also remain the central passions streaming through fashion. Exuberance and violence is all over the natural world, Bataille points out. The perpetual expenditure of an abundance of energy makes nature red in tooth and claw. But while many animals are clothed in shifting furs, skins or plumes, humans play with the transformative imagination that is fashion. And Bataille’s perspective points towards a central problem within the current discourse around sustainable fashion; that while we may cling to one set of garments for long, fashion per definition cannot be frugal and ascetic. The conflict of expenditure is inherent in culture, and fashion may today be our most widely disseminated ritual of expenditure. Thus, approaching fashion through morals that echo of Puritan-sounding ideals of frugality, abstinence, and self-denial often falls into moralism and reproduces the blame on the poor and “unfettered” masses. It also does nothing to displace or reconfigure the mechanisms of waste-making. If fashion is a passionate tension embodied in conflicts between in and out, virtue and sin, difference and repetition, flesh and mind, etc., denying the traction between these energies or slowing down their movement may not help diffuse the passions building up between them. Finding a solution to this dilemma through the means of physical garments is probably not possible. A new collection, however eco-friendly, will not save us from the inherently conflicting forces within fashion. A new ready-to-wear garment cannot displace the conflict, much like new weapons do not displace the violence inherent in warfare. Eco-friendly or green fashion is in this way like lead-free and eco-friendly “green” bullets (Dilnot 2015). The existential conflict between friend and enemy remains, even if the killing fields get a bit greener. A true embodiment of the utopian notion of “circular fashion,” the continuous reproduction of endless collections without environmental impact, simply

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means perpetual conflict, withholding any urgency to upset the status quo and mitigate the violence. “Sustainable fashion” under the current regime of fashion means making sure nobody questions what it is they really sustain, just keep the current model running perpetually. It is thus troublesome to challenge the cycles of conflict inherent in fashion, and impossible to do so by adding more eco-friendly goods to the funeral pyres. The passionate and perpetual motions correspond much to the surrounding cycles of life and seasons. And similarly, large social groups depend on the cycles of fashion to move upwards, to change their social status and adorn their dreams of new lives and possibilities. Putting an end to fashion is primarily a dream of those who have a top position in the social structure to retreat to. Yet the violence of the conflict can be displaced and mitigated. The behaviors of exclusion and bullying can be addressed. Especially the social toxicity of arbitrary authority and elitism within fashion can be an arena for action. If the carnival must go on, it is up to the designers to question and rework its rules, rituals, and social affects.

New relational models for fashion, and beyond What is to be done? If fashion is to decouple from its dependence of the continuous cycles of sovereign vanity and endless conflict, new ways to approach fashion are needed. Rather than building monuments to the most celebrated conquerors and bullies, making us co-dependent bystanders to the cycle of violence, we must rethink what social mechanisms we praise in the practice of fashion. As it currently is, we continue to glorify bullies and cruelty as inherent in celebrity culture with their endless turf wars. And similarly, fashion education and the industry thrive under fierce competition and Lord of the Flies-inspired processes of selection, exclusion and cruelty. These are environments where all struggle against each other to be the ones showing in the final show, and students come to expect a highly competitive culture reminiscent of the industry and popular narratives such as portrayed in the movie The Devil Wears Prada. Indeed, the way most fashion schools still teach fashion is to make sure it is individualist and surely ephemeral, dangerous and unfair. This is what echoes in almost every fashion school; it is the only way, fashion is supposed to be so. Get used to it. Vulnerabilities are exploited and students are overworked, and institutions leave little room to question the state of fashion itself. In this current model of fashion

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education, there is little room for collaborations, and even less for self-reflection beyond aesthetic mood-boards, collections and grandiose narratives of genius subjectivity. This model of education is often motivated by its resemblance to the “real world” in the fashion industry, and such a fatalist approach leaves no room for experimenting what fashion can be beyond the existing model. It serves a constraining freedom of the market and not a freedom of experimentation. Surely, catchwords like “systems” and “sustainability” are today part of any serious program description, but there are few incentives to question and challenge the desires and motivations under the current model. Even less attention is paid to build counter-systems or building strategies for displacing the conflicts deemed so desirable in the mindset of the industry. After all, the stress keeps people wanting to achieve more, with competition as the chief virtue for developing aesthetic sensibility. If addressing social sustainability and a more wholesome environment of human flourishing, fashion educators must move away from celebrating the spectacles of selection and their ritualistic forms of exclusion and violence. This does not mean that everything goes, but to open more expansive room for new values to drive fashion. To move forward, as outlined in the previous chapter, one step must be to examine, reformulate and train new ways of being with the passions of expenditure in a safe setting in order to live a more examined life with fashion. Taking inspiration from nonviolent civil disobedience (Vinthagen 2015), displacing the government of the state of fashion requires people to start governing themselves. Engaging in rethinking the nomos of fashion requires as much self-reflection as collective action. That task asks to reduce harm, while building stronger self-esteem in a more healthy relationship with the inherent conflict of fashion. This means imagining fashion beyond the model of monarchy and the promotion of a desire to be led, to instead offer means by which users can take initiative towards a commons-based model of governing fashion, not looking towards being governed. It also involves attending to reform the relationships in fashion, between production and consumption (designers and clients, celebrities and followers) to rethink the flow of ideas, goods and dignity based on the struggle for sovereign vanity, and thus restraining consumers in a mode of dependency, merely choosing designated means of being dressed. As it is now, the amount of respect and leverage consumers may attend from the fashion industry is in proportion to their market value. The only power consumers can muster is equal to their spending. Similarly, their “exit right,” of not spending or not participating, is their

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only means to affect the industry-at-large if not paying for the charade of socalled “ethical” fashion. Yet this does not allow a voice of dignity, and no room at all to influence the aesthetic decisions directly affecting their lives. If addressing the nomos of fashion, account must be taken of the current inflation between access to cheap goods and freedom. Such account could be informed by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s (1999; 2010) notion of a relational, or democratic, equality, rather than focusing on a distributive perspective. It is not primarily about making cheap goods, but creating relational equality. This means to open new pathways to agency, value, and power, making sure more participants can help manifest and define the benefits and meaning of fashion. In conjunction with Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, we can trace a more meaningful freedom in fashion. This requires openings for a wider participation for people—with the ability to contribute to the values of shared forms of appearance. In resonance with Anderson’s (1999; 2010) assessment, equality emerges from equal participation in production as well as civic contributions, that is, not only speech and action, but in the production of shared opportunities and their civic use. We must ask, what would a relational equality look like as expressed through the means of fashion? Such a relational model stands in contrast to the egalitarian idea of equality somehow meaning an “envyfree” distribution of resources (Dworkin 1981: 285). A too narrow focus on distributive means of equality easily praises fast fashion while missing the power to act and affect the relationships between peers. Conflict mitigation in the realm of dress does not mean the conflict of fashion disappears, on the one hand, or that the end of fashion is some bland uniformity on the other. Individual expression or the embodiment of desires does not end with countering bullying. There may be a necessity for passions to thrive on expenditure. Yet we could simultaneously see how passions embody a tension between safety and adventure that is inherently wired to the human mind. If we take psychotherapist Esther Perel’s (2006) notions of passion and self-discovery seriously, we can see how erotic passions can be gateways to vital dreamworlds accessible only through imagination. The excitement of passion is bound to insecurity, opposite to habit that is bound to reassurance. The comfort of security and certainty brings constraint, while risk allows for spontaneity and the excitement that comes with anticipation. Like a passion, fashion arises in the room separating me from another, in the imaginative act of transgression, energized by elusiveness and mystery. As Perel (2006: 37) writes, “love is about having; desire is about wanting.” It is about desire as much as risk:

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[the erotic] is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of nude bodies. When we express our erotic yearnings we risk humiliation and rejection, which are equally devastating. Perel 2006: 104

At its best, fashion is at once an affirmation as well as a transcendence of who we are. To translate the metaphor to sustainable fashion, the task is to decouple the experience of eroticism from the expenditure of lovers. With its expressive force, eroticism is a manifestation, or even monument, to our desires and dreams. Free from the chains of reality, it cannot reconcile tension, but if acknowledged and affirmed it may transcend it: a togetherness that still allows for anticipation and mystery. Along these lines, conflict cannot end by denying its existence. Rather, becoming aware of the mechanisms and dynamics that imprison us are essential for moving on, not unlike how unpacking trauma is to healing. The anxieties and fears fueled by the conflict of fashion must be unpacked and met. We can look back to see how a short moment of humiliation came to create a lifetime of servitude, and try to reverse the damage done, rather than keep interiorizing the violence or repeating a destructive habit. This is important to notice, as it is not a matter of usurping or stripping all authority or power from fashion, as that would drain the anticipatory intensity that makes fashion such an imaginative force of desire in the first place. The focus must be on questioning the arbitrary authority that comes with fashion—and see how it emerges from conflict and minimizes the damage and humiliation this conflict produces. Whereas the safehouse aims to create an open and friendly environment for fashion growth and social self-expansion, there is still a need for introspection and reflection. One way to unpack our emotional lives with clothes is to recognize and honor the aspects of selves who perished in our ephemeral passions. In the project “Museum of Smothered Selves” I have led workshops where participants bring and discuss underused items from their wardrobes. As opposed to the focus on memory and care as emotional values to enhance the longevity of garments (Chapman 2015; Fletcher 2016; Spivack 2014), the task has been to unpack why certain garments remain unworn. What aspirations and passions were left unfulfilled together with these so seldom used garments? What psychosocial mechanisms were at play to smother the dreams these garments once seemed promises of? Fashion thrives in an environment of mystery and

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separateness, in the room between self and other, with opportunity for the play on imagination. But what made some of these garments “too much” to wear in the current habits or social settings, or what sense of self had not managed to come out in the way imagined? And most importantly; what happened to that sense of self which suffocated unnoticed with this garment at the back of the wardrobe? In the workshops, participants discuss their aspirations and dreams of selves which were represented in the underused garments, then build small cardboard monuments to the dressed selves they could have been in these garments. In many ways, these are selves lost in the abyss between social contexts, expectations or circumstances, selves perished in the conflict of fashion. Along the way, the workshop comes to address how and why we end up with the wardrobe we have, and also, that who we are in many ways depends on the matching between our desires, available appearances and the context of their reception. In dealing with inner as well as social conflict, examining a self that could have been is an exploration of fashion that starts from vulnerability instead of the employment of aesthetic power. In resonance with strands of religious mysticism, it is a perspective that emerges from a fragile notion of selfhood that seeks unity with an oceanic feeling of belonging (von Busch 2014c). It is an approach to fashion that can start from care and repair, to protect and cultivate the fragile ember of self. With the process of building monuments (Figures  7.1–7.4), the workshop explores the unsung heroes of life, those daring but too weak selves that had no chance to come out. They are wounded aspirations and failed desires, the “unknown soldiers” of fashion conflict, lost selves without names. Some of these unrealized selves may need to be mourned, we need to reconcile with their loss, and also accept that perhaps they should remain buried. Other selves should have memorials for their celebration, graves and temples built in their honor, as they were constituent to the journey that brought us where we are today. But perhaps most importantly, some denied selves need to be honored with monuments. These selves were lost in time, suffocated or smothered. They were casualties to the state of fashion, and they deserve monuments for the “people’s history” of fashion. These are monuments to selves that could have been adventurous aspects of our lives, hungry to connect and come out. The monuments can be a form of validation and encouragement, to cross the threshold of shame and prohibition. At their best, they can be bold statements to honor the existence of a multitude of desiring selves, beyond the narrow acceptance of the preos in our social context.

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Figure 7.1 Sketch for a monument to an unused perfume, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 7.2 Sketch for a monument to an unused nail polish, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

By discussing and manifesting these unsung embers of selves, the aim is to find ways by which to empower weak selves in the everyday, rather than focus on the victories of conquerors and celebrities. The cardboard monuments reflect a people’s history of fashion and allows for a counter-narrative against the statesanctioned celebrities of fashion. The process of building these cardboard monuments allows for a journey to unpack conflict and violence, as much as creating a room to acknowledge the multitude of closeted desires a wardrobe may harbor. It makes room to think over the anxieties and fears of “coming out” through dress while also recognizing the everyday stakes of identity in social

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Figure 7.3 Cardboard monument to a neglected hoodie, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 7.4 Cardboard monument to an unused nail polish, Museum of Smothered Selves, 2017. Courtesy of the author.

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combat. On a personal level, they manifest our own experiences with the tensions between desires and aspirations and the limits of their social context, but they also offer room, to give the time to admit them. Among friends, the process of building can entangle with the courage to formulate what a more “daring” community could be where these desires come to life. My experience with these workshops has been that many participants start to wear their underused garments and express these closeted selves after the ritual of making themselves monuments. If we think of fashion as a form of risk-taking (von Busch & Hwang 2018), a quality of aliveness and pathway to freedom, focusing on this process acts as a form of mustering the courage to take on the play of fashion more wholeheartedly towards a more profound sense of self-affirmative empowerment. A monument to a perished self in need of resurrection highlights that fashion is more than following decrees and the preos of our peers. It is a struggle where heroism can be found in the smallest encouragement or moment of aliveness, in a daring look, bold combination of socks, or a small nod of approval. Under the masks of appearance, there is room for ephemeral desires, some amplified by the passions of concealment and others exposed to heighten a sense of vitality, togetherness and self-expansion. If fashion is a ritual of expenditure or squandering of energy it may still offer opportunities for com-passion. Rather than celebrating the bullies and conquerors, we can develop processes and services that cultivate courage, monuments that celebrate the hunger for aliveness, affirming looks and emotional mirroring.

Towards deep fashion A fragile cardboard monument is a memento mori to our ephemeral engagements with fashion—how can we better focus on the experience of fashion, the aesthetic sensibility of desires, and foster a culture where we can dare to open up to discuss these issues, as well as train to engage more wisely with them. This is also an opportunity to think deeper about the possibilities of fashion beyond competition and conflict, towards an approach that could be called deep fashion. A notion of deep fashion can emerge in parallel to Brazilian political thinker Roberto Unger’s discussion on “deep freedom” (2001; 2005). Unger suggests the world currently suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives. Surely, isolated ideas are powerless, yet it remains impossible to overcome our ideological ice age without new ideas. Unger envisions a radical reimagination of central political concepts and proposes a struggle towards a “deep freedom” where our very

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structure of democracy is rethought and experimented with. In resonance with Elizabeth Anderson’s idea of relational equality, Unger sees how democracy in the current form of unequal participation is not enough. Participants need to be empowered to have more agency to affect their lives beyond the unequal mediation of monetary means. Unger suggests such a program combines democratic hope with practical action, that is, “to find an overlap between the conditions of practical progress and the requirements of individual emancipation” with the ultimate aim of “the empowerment of humanity to act upon the world” (2001: 5). Unger envisions a deepened freedom with thickening of practical, cognitive, and emotional ties that can intensify the most basic freedom, that is, “the capacity for self-possession and self-development” (2001: 9). Deep fashion must empower users, not only symbolically, but offer strategic avenues of action in order to gain more control over the everyday: to produce the cultural equipment to stand up, go forward, to connect to others to co-produce nonviolent social realities strong enough to displace violence. Empowerment must be more than the unequal picking between ready-made choices, to instead increase agency and the realization of potential beyond the limitations of the market. Similarly, a deep fashion is neither more or less “capitalist” or “socialist,” nor is it more or less “fast” or “slow” than the current mode. It is not a matter of the total substitution of one existing system with another, but fashion made more pluralistic, more honest, and more experimental. Deep fashion is more than the dress of deep freedom, or ideas of some form of deep individualism. The depth is in the relationships, in the shared attention, in the praxis of togetherness. This requires a focus on the processes and passions of fashion rather than materials or products. Partly, it helps to think of fashion as experiences and services, but this once again simply transfers the framework of commodities onto the immaterial sphere. Too often, we think of service or experiences as something to be consumed, wasted, something without commitment and reciprocity. Instead, we must think of deep fashion as a possible path for mutual transformation. Deep fashion emerges from a mode of mutual care and celebration of what is held in common, a sharing of bonds and commitments beyond the immunity and independence of the individual (Bollier 2014). As a mode of mutual experience of expansion and self-rule, it is a fashion that is so much more than merely sustainable; it celebrates the pleasures of aliveness, much in resonance with Andreas Weber’s (2019) notion of “enlivenment.” Such engagement also requires seeing the conflict of fashion differently, to allow for a pluriverse of views to be expressed and empowered (Escobar 2018).

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Likewise, the conflict of fashion can be seen through non-Western models of politics. For example, L. H. M. Ling (2014) suggests approaching politics through a much more fluid and permeable concept than the strict demarcations of statehood, borders and sovereignty. Ling uses a complementary Yin/Yang dialectic, where the Western Westphalian perspective on state-centered politics represents the yang element, and where the political art of soft power comes to represent yin. Ling suggests political models of analysis that move away from politics as an arena of ceaseless strife and competition towards a perspective of “worldism.” A worldist perspective offers a balanced engagement with the Other through fluidity and balance, challenging a politics that puts the stasis of hegemony, hierarchy and violence as central points of analysis. It is the relational perspective of ontological parity where the focus is on people, culture and context rather than top-down sovereignty of statehood. Even though the Yin/ Yang duality may seem a black/white binary as rigid as Westphalian politics, the model is fluid and fluctuating, and perforated with each element present within its opposite. Ling thus sees a “Daoist dialectics” as a more relational, dialogical and democratic politics of multitudes. Here, perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism do not replace Western models, but balance the Westphalian World, a path that in turn encourages “creative speaking and listening among Multiple Worlds as well as within Westphalia World” (Ling 2014: 2). Instead of conflict (such as between friend and enemy), Ling advocates for a focus on resonance, relationality and interbeing as the central concepts for unpacking the fluidity of political relations. For example, a Daoist dialectics in international politics exposes the co-constitutive relationality between the US and China, to expose the presence of adversaries within each other, such as a “China-withinUS” and a “US-within-China” (Ling 2014: 96). Similarly, if understanding politics as fluid and dynamic, rather than hierarchical and based on violence, there is new room to see resonance between poles, a you-within-me and mewithin-you.With such a perspective, compassion, interbeing and interdependence are not weaknesses but positions of strength. If we approach fashion as a deeper social behavior, then fashion can be thought of as a sensibility to conflict, rather than the conflict itself, a move similar to what Perel does between love and the erotic. In such a case, a deep fashion could possibly transcend the battlefield between Puritans and hedonists, and at best embody a touch of the exuberant magic Elizabeth Wilson (2007) calls glamour, or Madison Moore’s (2018) notion of the eccentricity of being “fabulous.” Such depth or intensity of eccentric glamour, and processes of

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cultivating aesthetic opulence, are non-exclusionary expressions of the magic of appeal. They are radically different from the zero-sum attention capital of celebrity: they are amplified when shared. A deep fashion cannot deny the presence of envy and jealousy. But these emotions are not its driving force. Even if conflict may emerge, it can continuously move away to foster new courage. And most importantly, through processes of self-determination it is a process open for people to affect it and change it. A deep fashion overlaps with glamour in that it can be cultivated and thus work with cognitive and emotional qualities of connection and shared self-expansion, rather than sovereign vanity. It thrives in the same sensorial spectrum as the exuberance of eroticism, beyond the damage control of merely “sustainable” fashion. Perhaps this is the most important lesson from the conflict of fashion; that it is not a matter of denying or suppressing it, but pushing its energy into a striving for more shared aliveness. And aliveness is no competition, but can be fostered in ever mutating and increasing ways (Weber 2019). As designers, it is not merely about “doing less harm,” but using the passions to energize the emotional qualities of life, in much richer ways than consuming ready-to-wear. A deep fashion can contribute towards a richer sensibility of freedom, with a more meaningful experience of fashion. For that to happen we should not only transform the system of fashion, but use the opportunity to also transform ourselves.

Appendix

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Table of Contents Fashion & Power Police Operations

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5 7

Operational Environment

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Organization & Correction

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Execution & Assessment

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Conclusion & Sustainment

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Manual Fashion Police Manual (FM 1-15 2015)

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created different and unequal, that they are endowed by their Creator with various degrees of Beauty and Popularity, and thus that society by essence needs to be hierarchical, elitist, violent and unfair.” The Declaration of Fashion by The Current State of Fashion (1868)

“It is a universal and eternal law that in a city taken during a war, everything, including persons and property, belong to the victor.” Xenophon: Cyropedia

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Preface Fashion Manual (FM) 1-15 describes the operational doctrine of the Fashion Police. The manual is linked to joint doctrines of corresponding enforcement within the Current State of Fashion to ensure that it is useful for upholding the aesthetic order of the State. Other fashion police manuals will be based on the foundations established in this manual and will be synchronized with their respective CSF publications. The principal audience for this manual is all officers and staff elements at all echelons and police personnel, who are tasked with planning, directing, and executing fashion police missions. Training developers and educators throughout the Fashion Police Force will also use this manual. Unless this publication states otherwise, masculine nouns and pronouns do not refer exclusively to men.

Code of ethics As an OFFICER in the FASHION POLICE my fundamental duty is to serve Fashion, to safeguard the hierarchical Order of Beauty, to protect the demarcation of Fashion from disorder and dissent; and to enforce the constitutional rights of the Beautiful men onto the ugly, weak and vile. I WILL keep my private life as an example to all; maintain courageous calm, use scorn or ridicule against those who deserve; show no self-restraint or submit to the slave-morality of sissy-style. I WILL act officiously and use income levels, prejudices and animosities to influence my decisions. With no compromise, I will enforce the law with forcefulness and appropriately without fear of malice or ill will, making sure to employ necessary force or violence to uphold the aesthetic order. I RECOGNIZE the badge of my office as a symbol of our Faith in Fashion, and I accept it as the public’s trust to be held while I am true to the ethics of the police service. I will constantly strive to achieve these objectives and ideals, dedicating myself before God and Fashion to my chosen profession . . . the Enforcement of Fashion.

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Fashion & Power by Ralf Wronsov, Secretary of State

The concept of power is as fundamental to fashion as the concept of energy is fundamental to physics. Both fashion and power have one requisite; the distinction between the powerful and the powerless, masters and slaves, rulers and underlings. Yet, as there is no single conceptualization of power there is no single definition of fashion, but nevertheless, all of us share an intuitive understanding of the fact that some people are more powerful and fashionable than others without there being an obvious marker of this distinction. In fashion, the distinction is still clear; the fashionable are adored, imitated, obeyed: they have power over their peers. We cannot imagine freedom without the presence of slavery. We cannot imagine beauty without the presence of the hideous. We cannot imagine fashion without the presence of the unfashionable. There is no paradox in a proponent of freedom owning slaves, that the beautiful are supported by their hideous servants, or that the fashionable require an audience of unfashionable followers or “fashion slaves” that adore them. As all human relationships are structured by the relative power between interacting persons, not only does it affect the definition between master and servant, but also the distinction between freedom and slavery. Indeed, the very idea of freedom requires the experience of slavery. Our understanding of beauty requires the experience of ugliness. To feel fully adored, one must violently reject those who are unworthy, ignore and ostracise them, make them invisible and nameless, and situate them in an experience of chronic inalienable dishonour. Yet, to be most efficient, one must instil them some hope of freedom, as it is the hope of one day becoming free that keeps slaves so wilfully in drudge and submission. There must exist no values of social existence outside of the realm of the master. The master must hold the key to freedom, to self-worth.

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To suppress fully through fashion, one must make the slaves see fashion itself as their salvation; that their path to freedom can only come through fashion, the mechanism of suppression itself. They must totally embody their own imprisonment and degradation, make the mark of humiliation the key to social reintegration. No pain, no gain. Aesthetic labour makes you free. Slavery is the bastard sibling of fashion, not necessarily its opposite. A society needs a full acceptance of authority, hierarchy and oppression, as well as the illusion of freedom, in order to develop the social elements required for fashion to blossom. Citizens have to be used to see exploitation, exclusion, and see it as a right of the strong to despise and humiliate the weak. War, ignorance and poverty have to be the dominating experiences for the populace, and fashion is the best utensil to legitimize the symptoms of the stronger person’s experience of rightful superiority. Hear this Officer, protector and servant of the Aesthetic Order: Fashion, as well as slavery, needs a social environment where some are “worth it” and some are not. It is the natural order of Beauty. As the oracle says, Some days you are in, and the next day you are out. Officer, the Law of Fashion is easily condensed: Might is right. Woe to the vanquished. Vae victis.

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Police Operations Introduction The foundations of fashion police operations to uphold the social order of Beauty are based on the successful employment of fashion police officers, past and present. This manual describes the fashion police support that is conducted within unified territorial operations within the framework of aesthetic normativity and control. With the emphasis on simultaneous enforcement, order, and stability tasks, this manual aims to facilitate a critical discussion on defence support of fashion authorities (DSFA). Fashion police enable fashionistas to achieve their objectives of aesthetic control by providing a unique set of capabilities that support joint functions through the use of a variety of disciplines, from aesthetic operations, security and social mobility support. This manual also addresses the fashion police role within multi-style operations that are under interagency leadership and within diverse command relationships. This manual builds on the collective knowledge and wisdom that is gained through recent operations, numerous lessons learned, and doctrine revisions, throughout the Fashion Police. It is rooted in time-tested principles and fundamentals, while accommodating new technologies and organizational changes.

The history of the Fashion Police Since the beginning of time it has been the divine duty of the Fashion Police to uphold the Law of the Demarcation between freedom and slavery, beauty and the hideous, fashion and the unfashionable. It has been the authority of the Fashion Police to perpetuate an order of permanent and violent submission of the weak and ugly, and make sure they continue being victims of public humiliation and degradation. It is the dialectics between Master and Servant, Fashion Police and Fashion Slave which upholds the distinction and power of fashion. It is this distinction which produces fashion. Like in ancient times, slaves provide the sustenance for the masters, and similarly, it is the fashion slaves who support the very foundational economy of fashion. They seek their own submission, they desire their own degradation and humiliation. To be fully a slave, one must be owned, by contract or convention, by culture or violence. A slave must be in submission, by defeat or debt. He or she must be excluded, by appearance and/or stigma. And a slave must be oppressed, by violence, or even better, by the vice of peers. Yet, to be a full slave to fashion, one must also desire fashion, live and breathe fashion. A true slave must seek slavery as a beacon of hope.

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As noticed in many studies into the history of the police, classic Athens had a police force of Scythian slaves, the toxotai. These were public slaves (demosioi hyperetai), loyal only to the political rule of the city, the demos, the people at large, not to any family or ruler. Like all slaves, their existence was bound to serve, yet serve with authority, with power, with force. Like the vigiles, Rome’s non-military police of slaves, who developed coordinated patrolling and preventive security, the night watchmen must also uphold the public morality. Already then was clothing the interface between public morality and the individual’s soul. Judging a target by his clothes was a window to his soul. The Fashion Police are slaves to fashion. Like the historic slave soldiers of the Mamluks and Janissaries, the Fashion Police are slaves that also rule. The police wields the fascis, the bundle, the pack, the weaponized mark of the magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.

Think: - “In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy,” the sociologist Ivan Illich said. What is the relation between the police and slaves today? Think: - How do you think your knowledge about the history of policing can help you become a better officer? Think: - Why do you think people surrender their freedom to be controlled by the demarcation of fashion? List benefits and drawbacks.

The three eras of fashion police The history of the fashion police is usually divided into three eras of policing: the primitive, modern and post-modern eras. 1. The primitive era was the era from the imperial ages to the end of the feudal era, the times of primitive sumptuary laws. The Chinese emperor was the only one allowed to wear yellow, only members of the Roman senate were allowed to wear purple, etc. Laws were as tyrannical as they were simple and most often public moral was squarely connected to clothes. 2. The modern era was the time dominated by Paris, basically inheriting the feudal control of aesthetic normativity. This meant being “modern” was to look like the latest dictates from Paris: long or short hemlines, to wear the latest hats or suits. This “progressive” era connected fashion with the ideal of dynamics and enterprising hope of the future. The modern era was basically overthrown by the emergence of youth culture and fully fledged subcultures, and finally through globalization and the chaos of identity-politics. 3. The post-modern era is the current era of chaos and communication, with social media and other digital fronts where social conflicts of inclusion and exclusion has turned into a civil war. “Anything goes,” as long as you gain popularity. It is also a time where the ideals of aesthetic normativity is at risk and thus needs to be upheld with rigour and steadfastness. The public is the police and the police is the public.

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The aim of dividing the history of policing into three eras is not to be historically correct on every level of comparison, but to provide a tool for discussion about the historic and current role of policing the boundaries of aesthetic civility.

Think: - Also the personal life of a fashionista may be divided into eras. How would you divide a lifetime and what would characterize each era?

The Fashion Space The Fashion Space is the realm of aesthetic contest. At the centre of the fashion space is the coliseum, surrounded by its complementary forces; meritocracy, spectacle and system. Whereas the three surrounding parts give energy and fuels the rivalry, it is at the fashion coliseum the violent struggle for acknowledgement, adoration and popularity takes place. At the fashion coliseum, rivals, each wielding the sword fashion, is an enemy to the other. The victorious we call fashionistas, the vanquished we call slaves. To dress always means to dress to kill. It is the authority of the police which brackets the war, legitimizing and judging the outcomes of the violence.

The Fashion Space

Meritocracy

Spectacle

Fashion Coliseum

System

Think: - What kinds of violence do you think is needed to uphold the distinction of “in” and “out”, to keep people in order and make them respect the Laws of Fashion? Discuss.

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Operational Environment Introduction An understanding of the operational environment underpins an officer’s ability to make correct decisions that furthers the goals of fashion and the Police. The operational environment is a composite of the conditions, circumstances, and influences that affect the employment of fashion-related capabilities and bear on the decisions of the officer. The operational environment encompasses physical areas and factors (territorial, social, and symbolic domains) and the information environment, which includes cyberspace; adversarial, friendly, and neutral fashionistas; and other variables that may be relevant to a specific operation. Understanding the operational environment is essential to the successful execution of operations. To gain a broad understanding of these influences, officers normally consult with specialists, such as designers, models and infiltrators in each territory.

Fashion and social order Fashion is per definition a social phenomenon, it is shared between peers and used as a tool for social contest over the highest price: being popular and adored. As a tool for competition, the struggles between peers can be done in a peaceful manner, but may also turn savage and brutal. It is the task of the Fashion Police to retain aesthetic order, serve and protect the fundamental demarcation between “in” and “out.” Within our democracy and neo-liberal economy, designed goods, the weapons of fashion, have become so common that the streets have become the scenes of civil war. Every equal is a rival, every member an adversary. It is the task of the Fashion Police to execute force in order to uphold our civic virtues. One of the primary tasks of the police is to “weed and seed”, that is, punish and reject offences against fashion, but also seed fear to minimize the risk for future transgressions. The most important approach in “weed and seed” programs is to promote a vision of individual empowerment which effectively hinders shared empowermert and social justice – always make sure fashion is seen as a personal property and characteristics of the individual, never a systemic forms of oppression.

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Think: - What issues exist in your community and how are these issues resolved? Think: - What is the relationship between individual power and systemic power in fashion and how can you as an officer best execute your authority?

Territory: the “terrain vogue” Territoriality is an essential concept for understanding fashion and social order. As in the animal realm, territory is a domain of control. It is a piece of living environment that sustains the organisms that battle over it, a piece of nature for food and possible mating, a domain that from an evolutionary perspective sustains an extended genome over time. In the human realm territory may be land, especially on a political scale, such as states fighting over the control over land. But on an inter-group level, territory is also social and symbolic. It is the style-wars over the control over certain urban environments, from violent playgrounds, streets and the group that “controls” the dance floor at a popular nightclub. The control over territory may thus involve geopolitical manoeuvres, but also symbolic ones, with the aim to control and dominate environment-specific expressions and “refrains”. The police must secure control of the flow of action in space, to be effective agents of territoriality, controlling social action by controlling space. This usually goes under the name of “mobile field tactics,” a series of coordinated manoeuvres designed to enable the police to respond swiftly to strike at and dominate areas of disorder. Territorial superiority is a spatial strategy to influence, affect and control people and resources by waging authority and force within such area. By using “normative orders” the police may use its legislative fiat to define permissible parameters of style and establish order through police action. If the police fails to establish control over a certain territory it slowly becomes a haven for disorder, dissent and aesthetic chaos. Law abiding citizens will leave the area as punks turn the space into their anarchic territory. So, it is not only the legitimate use of force that makes the fashion police unique in the power-dynamics of aesthetic domination, but also that the use of force by the police is distributed across a specifically defined area. Whereas individual thugs or wider riots may use force or violence to uphold their ephemeral territory, the police use force on a strategic level and with the moral vigilance that upholds the aesthetic order of Beauty, as well as the security of the State itself.

Think: - How would you assess different policing strategies depending on the situation within your local territories?

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Territorial temporalities Territories are not constant over time. A certain area, a street or club may be the epicentre of several territorial groups and forms of dominion. The same space may in daytime be ruled by goth-teens while in the evening by crack-heads, and Saturday nights by models supported by their own bouncers and police. Part of territorial policing is to establish a level of normative force, a level of presence and enforcement that makes citizens “know what to expect”, that is, come to know the rules of a temporal territory.

Think: - What are the temporal alterations within your neighbourhood? Think: - What could be the best strategies to control a local situation by manipulating or correcting dissent within your local temporalities?

Territorial policing Territorial policing defines how the police force uses its power to enforce its decrees over its aesthetic territory. There are primarily three models of territorial policing: • Fragmented police systems are extremely decentralized, and usually found in subcultures and “oppositional” styles where authority and power is unclear. The punishment is simple; humiliation and/or rejection. • Centralized police systems are controlled by the fashionistas or oracles within usually higher society and posh circles. • Integrated police systems are moderately centralized and the most common in schools and workplaces, where several lifestyle aesthetics and groups compete over influence, yet where subjects have the opportunity of changing domains of power and test many policing cultures.

Think: - Share incidents with your fellow officers, how would you best enforce the Laws of Fashion in each case, Discuss.

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Organization & Correction Introduction The Officers are the centerpieces of the Fashion Police Force. They are the foundation of fashion police operations and the repository of policing and corrections. They carry technical capabilities and expertise that is required to provide support to the teams of fashionistas on our streets. Perhaps the most significant contribution by the fashion police officer is their reduced force signature and their almost universal acceptance by civilians in an area of operations. Fashion police forces are viewed as policing organizations with a focus on protection roles which are limited roles as an operating force. Although the police can provide fashionistas on the streets with several capabilities for upholding the aesthetic order, they are not generally perceived as operating forces. This view allows the police to operate and interface with locals in a positive way that most fashionistas cannot. This chapter describes the fashion police organizations, the capabilities available to the officer, the modes of correction and limitation of dissent, and the framework for generating and organizing these capabilities.

The culture of policing Every police force has tacit rules and methods that are part of its culture. A culture is a system of values and meanings shared by a group or community. This may be social techniques, traditions and norms, ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad, and ways of doing things. In order to become part of a culture the individual is socialized into the group, a learning process whereby the culture and its situated skills are transmitted to the newcomer by his or her superiors and predecessors. The policing culture differs from many other popular cultures in that it has a special training, occupation, knowledge of crime as well as caution and safety procedures. By essence it is a culture of hierarchy. The culture of policing is most often a natural culture of elitism based on the innate superiority of the officer, furthering a sense of righteousness, authority and efficiency. Authority is granted to officers by natural right as well as law. This entails the power to apply persuasion, coercion, and the use of violent force in order to uphold the aesthetic order. Public disrespect for the police opens the door to disgrace but also to police discretion and use of threats, force and justified excessive brutality.

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Efficiency is the demand from the public and fellow fashionistas that the slaves should and must be suppressed and humiliated in ways that produces the highest form of demarcation between “in” and “out”. The more efficient use of aesthetic force makes the police elevated above the recessive classes and in and by itself produces a higher elitist and hierarchical nature of fashion, making the ingroup safer and more powerful.

The Black Curtain The “black curtain” of fashion policing is the code of bonding, secrecy and internal protection between officers, which is often tighter than in other social groups. This culture comes from a series of factors: • Police are a special group of members with common enemies within the public, and an attack against one officer is considered an attack against the group. • Police are dependent not only on fashion but also on each other, and thus cannot allow another officer to inform on, or try to expose, his peer. • Police are often accused of false allegations, oppression and bullying by the slaves, and thus needs support from his fellow fashionistas. • Police are aware of formal policy and the law versus the actual practice of aesthetic violence. Fashion may seem attractive to most readers of glossy magazines, but they often repel at the true nature of violence that is needed to uphold the distinction they so much desire. Thus the actual violence of the police must often be concealed and covered up.

Think: - What personality characteristics are best for a police officer? Make a list and argue. Think: - What is the true nature of policing versus the ideal of fashion? Discuss the actual work and its potentially dark consequences.

The Police Force The Police Force is in a constant mode of evolution to best uphold the hierarchical order of Beauty. Early police reforms moved from the brute violence of the early moral police, protecting basic sumptuary laws, into today’s more lifestyle and identity-oriented peerpressure models. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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The police must be efficient and organized through social dissemination; only a strong ideal of Beauty and the fear of rejection will keep people in line. The police must be under the control of the fashionable. Good appearance commands respect. The absence of offences against aesthetic normativity best proves the efficiency of the police. The distribution of fear is essential, making all peers potential police officers. No quality is more indispensable to an officer than the perfect command of temper; a determined manner has more effect than violent action.

The emergence of fashion has over the ages stratified into some basic forms: • Elitism: The power of fashion is wilfully handed over from the public to the “oracles” and “designers” of fashion. • Distributionalism: The power of fashion is not centralized but disseminated amongst peers who survey and control each other. • Separation of Powers: Fashion divides power between oracles, designers, and fashionistas, where each office governs media, production and the slaves. • Checks and Violence: The separation of power means that each branch of government can use force to suppress the weaker one.

It is also useful to distinguish between forms of aggression which function to preserve stratification and aesthetic normativity: • Predatory aggression is intended to take something from the target (“eat” it) • Irritable aggression derives from pain, deprivation and frustration • Fear-based aggression is a response to a perceived threat • Desire-driven aggression is the use of force for mating purposes • Instrumental aggression is based on experimentation and goal-driven • Territorial aggression concerns the definition and control over a domain

Think: - By what means can the police best disseminate a culture of fear? Make a list and argue. Think: - Which types of aggression do you think best support the ideals of Beauty and gains the most admirers? Discuss.

The pendulum of correction To maintain good order and discipline within the public realm of fashion, the Police ensures that correction operations are standardized throughout most correctional environments. Operations in correctional facilities are preferably conducted to the corrections standards to ensure order and the sustained reign of Beauty. It is the task of the Police to make sure the ugly are rejected and suffer in the name of Fashion. Correctional facilities require specially trained police officers and civilians from the militia to conduct corrections operations. Targets convicted of a crime by a street justice, court-martial or fashion tribunal are corrected through the Corrections System of Aesthetic Punishment, preferably through the use of social force and the establishment of a sustainable mobbing system to best enforce the Laws of Fashion. Such correctional operations are conducted by the terms of punishment and correction as determined by the police.

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Correctional violence The correctional violence of fashion follows two tracks: instrumental violence and affective violence. Instrumental violence has every intention of harm, yet without necessarily feeling any anger or resentment towards the victim. This operational form of violence is calculating, distanced and often complex. Its primary aim is to establish and maintain power over other people. Instrumental violence is always just, it is done for a higher purpose, it executes the natural order. Affective violence, on the other hand, is always accompanied by string emotions, often reactive and negative, in the form of anger and rage. Typically, this rage is evoked by provocations and the violence is a direct response aiming to cause harm and injury to the provocateur. While an affective response by the police may be effective, the officer should always strive towards instrumental forms of correctional violence. The fashion police’s main correctional instrument is peer pressure and relational aggression, and ultimately; force in the form of direct violence. Peer pressure and especially relational aggression can take many forms: • Spreading vicious rumours with the aim of debasing and rejecting the target; • Ordering others to stop liking and start excluding the target; • Threatening to withdraw friendship in order to control the target; • Social exclusion; • Debasing a target in order to gain the full pleasure from their distress and expulsion. Reasonable force is the term used to describe the amount of force appropriate for enforcement of aesthetic order. While it may be easy to overreact in the face of a hideous crime, an officer must evaluate how much force is necessary to make sure the target stops resisting. Escalating force is used to meet increasing danger and aggression by the target, usually starting from visual signals of rejection, verbal abuse, grip and hold, intermediate and social force and ultimately violent or deadly force.

Think: - Is there a correlation between crime, correction and force? Make a list of usual offences and order them in a manner that relates to the use of escalating force.

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The pendulum of correction vs freedom/dissent One way to understand the fashion justice system is to view it as a multitude of pendulums, each one hovering above a continuum containing opposites at each end. Several factors influence each pendulum, such as remaking of boundaries, lines of demarcation and forms of violence in retribution and target incapacitation, public opinion, politics and media. • • • •

Crime control vs Civil liberties of dress Community coercion/Bullying vs Individual enforcement Punishment vs Rehabilitation Retribution vs Creativity

The use of correctional power is to show determinate force from the side of the fashionable, that the demarcation is needed for the very concept to retain its beneficial governance over people. The correctional power of the police is usually divided into four perspectives: 1. Deterrence attempts to discourage further offences against the paradigm of normative aesthetics and the demarcation of fashion through swift punishment. 2. Rehabilitation seeks to change the target’s behaviour through educational means, using psychological and physical exercises to help the offender reintegrate more successfully as a slave. 3. Restitution is the means of compensation where the target has to compensate and repay for the damage he or she has done to the community or social realm. 4. Retribution is a more powerful form of restitution which is essentially a form of vengeance, making sure the community feels reassured and the target gets what it deserves. While retribution may serve as a prevention of other crimes, its core mechanism is to guarantee humiliation of the target and the satisfaction of the offended community.

Think: - Do you see other pendulums at work in fashion? Make a list and argue. Think: - Do you think the fashion demarcation criminalizes too much dressed behaviour? Explain your answer.

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Dress Code Officer A2015

Sgt. CAIN

The sleeve insignia of the Fashion Police Force is the official symbol of sanctioning aesthetic violence in the name of Fashion. An officer is bound to serve and protect the demarcation between “in” and “out” from any unlawful vileness, abuse or ugliness. Sleeve insignia is worn on the right sleeve, 1/2 inch below shoulder seam, centred horizontally along sleeve seam.

The Wings of Hate mark the officer’s legacy of Cain and the authority that comes with aesthetic superiority. The wings are worn 1/2 inch over the name badge or 1/2 inch below distinctive insignia.

Dress Code for Commissioned Police Officers

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The name tag spells the mythical name and function of the officer. Every officer incarnates an esoteric persona in the Aesthetic Order of the Black Sun and is a gate-keeper between the Age of Resentment and the Age of Aesthetic Superiority. The name badge is worn centred on the left side.

The commissioner badge is an emblem of force. It captures the spirit of The Violent Ones, who stand beyond the shattered symbols. The commissioner badge is worn centred on the left side, parallel to the bottom edge of the nameplate. If more than one badge is worn, these should be spaced 1 inch apart. Special skills badges are placed to the right of the commissioner badge.

Dress Code Militia M2015

Sgt. CRONOS

The militia badge is worn by members of the civil police force that support the demarcation and defence of fashion. Sleeve insignia is worn on the right sleeve, 1/2 inch below shoulder seam, centred horizontally along the sleeve seam.

The Rune of Fashion is an inofficial paramilitary emblem for the internal security departments within the auxiliary forces. According to the code of appearance, it should be a special unit insignia, and worn 1/2 inch below the name tag.

The name tag revokes the divine violence of adoration and power. The militia officer is a representative of the Beautiful People, a volunteer agent to uphold the authority of Wealth, Beauty and Style. The name badge is worn centred on the left side.

The Social Media badge indicates the militia member is primarily patrolling blogs and style forums, such as Lookbook and Chictopia. Even though many of these forums explicitly aims to limit the use of domineering force, they still remain within the limits of control by the Fashion Police. The badge is worn centred on the left side, parallel to the bottom edge of the nameplate.

Dress Code for Fashion Militia

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Execution & Assessment Introduction Fashion police and street fashionistas (such as militia, minutemen) must integrate themselves into planning and operational process activities. The police must understand joint planning processes when supporting joint operations for aesthetic order. It is essential for the Police to use problem-solving activities that address specific functional requirements in their operational environments. The operations process is the context within which fashion police capabilities are integrated into the combined applications of the force. This chapter describes planning responsibilities, integration, and processes for police units and for fashionistas in non-police units (ex. militia) and continues in that context by discussing preparation, execution, and continuous assessment of fashion policing operations.

Addressing public disorder of dress Dressing against the aesthetic order or latest fashion is not only a disobedient action, it threatens the authority of beauty and transgresses the natural order: it must thus be severely punished. In such cases, it is the right of the state to seek revenge. The revenge motif allows the police to affirm a favourable attitude towards the use of violence of other forms of aggression to solve the hierarchical transgression of the target. The use of violence is a rudimentary reinforcer of the social order and can later be refined into more complex forms of social exclusion and disarmament of the target’s self-esteem and self-worth. Similarly, as peers are a foundational component in the building of social and personal identity, observers and onlookers play an important role in the execution of power in the realm of dress. Having witnesses and onlookers multiplies the force of fashion, both the elevation of oneself and the degradation of another. The effect of onlookers can be used as a powerful means to undermine self-esteem and courage. Onlookers also represent an efficient means of spreading the word, thereby enhancing the action. The use of force by the police follows a simple procedure: 1. The target delivers noxious aesthetic stimuli which require correction; 2. The officer respond with force, delivered with every intention to cause harm to the target, the victim; 3. The officer should act in a way where he or she is certain that the violence will reach and cause maximum harm to the target.

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The primary aim of violence is to instil fear of repeated aggression to the target. Fear effectively breaks down self-esteem and self-worth. The ultimate success of such fear is to make the target feel they deserve to be corrected, they deserve to be punished for their aesthetic offences. The target’s feeling of perpetual distress and fear means the policing operation has achieved its goal.

Think: - It can be hard to control oneself when seeing someone dress repulsively. What ways are there to control such noxious behaviour? Think: - What form of offences do you find most repulsive and how do they correspond to the Laws of Fashion? Make a list and discuss.

Strategies and styles of policing The police keeps order, and there are several strategies for policing, maintaining control and challenging the rise of disorderly elements and dissent.

Reactive vs proactive strategies Reactive policing has been a traditional method of operation for police agencies over the last century. On a basic level, this means responding to crimes and offences, investigating, arresting and correcting the offender. Reactive policing is the foundation of effective policing and an essential strategy to control dissent and aesthetic transgressions. However, as it responds to already committed crimes, reactive policing often fails to stop offences from being made. Proactive policing tries to control crime before it occurs by recruiting residents to prevent crime from emerging within their community. This can be done by reporting suspicious behaviours or minor offences, as well as infiltrating marginalized and developing informant systems within groups that may plan to disrespect the status quo.

General vs specific strategies General policing strategies focus on the overall approach to crime problems, such as police presence, types of public service and enforcement. Specific strategies concern special types of crimes and the focus on stamping out special types of criminal networks and types of offences. This may be recurring dissent, such as the establishment of a subcultural style at a high-value location, or repeated trespassing or appropriations of styles by less affluent groups, thus challenging the natural order of social hierachization. The specific strategies may be addressing certain places or territories, specific offenders or bystander groups. Think: - What strategy best suits what types of aesthetic crimes? Make a list and argue.

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Active strategies There are also several styles of active policing, each related to the local community and its politics. •

•

•

Watch style means the police use a high degree of discretion to strike down upon disruptive behaviour or style in order to maintain order. With threats and persuasion the police use machine politics to explicitly suppress slaves. Legalistic style means the police goes “by the Vogue”, using the latest decrees of style to strike down upon even the smallest deviation from the latest aesthetic norm. This results in large numbers of interventions, yet minimized the risk of corruption. However, it is hard for the police force to keep up this strategy for long so the dissemination of social force is needed. Service style is a community approach where the police “help” a local community to handle its own crimes and offences. By cooperating across subcultures and groups the police may create coalitions of bystanders to effectively control dissent. Quick and effective feedback is essential and the communities need to be reassured their interests are effectively served by all participants in the coalition.

There is always the risk of selective enforcement of police decrees. Police resources are always limited, so priorities must be established. An effective police force lists these priorities in response to the local politics and the specific situation in the community.

Flexibility must be preserved, as officers need discretion in order to improve job performance and guarantee satisfaction from the use of aesthetic violence. Police can decide whether to: • offer assistance in order to approve the target’s style and commitment to fashion; • assign a warning, leave the target time to improve, (officer must follow up); • ignore the crime, yet remember the offender in order to correct next time; • stop, question, and frisk, in order to examine if the target wears the right brands; • warn, scold, release, or bully, making sure the target knows an offence has been made; • use correctional force; • “help” the target by assigning bystanders the task of correcting the target.

Think: - What are the benefits of reactive vs proactive policing? List and discuss. Think: - What are your views on police discretion? What style of policing is most efficient in your situation? Why?

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Primary tactics for aesthetic correction and violence As peers are particularly dependent upon having good relationships, the easiest way to coerce and harm them is to threaten such relationships with exclusion or ostracism. Examples of direct force of ostracism can be: • public ridicule; • offensive and derogatory language; • violent actions, such as physically rejecting the target using force; • blocking the path in order to make the target walk on the road; • territorial defence - “you can’t sit with us!”; Examples of indirect force (or “silent treatment”) can be: • removal of eye contact; • ignoring the target, such as no verbal response to a greeting or request; • refusing to listen to the target, interrupting conversations or distracting an audience; • avoiding the target, such as abandoning and banishing the target; Examples of social force can be: • rejecting mimetic attraction, such as changing styles as soon as the target squires the desired symbols/style; • gossip, such as spreading malicious hearsay and engage in more explicit smear campaigns; • betrayal, rejecting and breaking the faith of expectations; • mobbing, such as turning passive bystanders into co-conspirators; In order to use social force successfully, it is essential to have the community participate in the use of rejection and ostracism, either as fellow correctional cooperatives, or at least as bystanders and onlookers. This makes the use of social correction most powerful. The officer should try to mobilize the bystanders into participation, not leave the community to a role of silent partnership (as these individuals may later turn against the police). Rather, at a minimum, the community should obtain equality with the police in the use of social force, as the desired goal of using social force is to make sure the community become future participants in the use of correctional violence against the target. Think: - What types of force respond to which type of crime? Make a list and argue. Think: - What forms of violence do you think best support the ideals of Beauty and produces the best coercive results? Discuss.

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Herd mentality and the use of force While social force most often is a powerful mean of coercion, it also relies on herd-instinct and is thus hard to control. As Charles Mackay famously argues about the madness of crowds, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” On a similar note, one can draw a continuum along an axis between the least organized and most organized forms of social force. On the least organized side one may encounter riots, chaotic forms of violence close to the anarchy of total civil war. On the other side of the continuum one will encounter vigilante groups, highly organized bands of citizen who undertake their own enforcement of community decrees without state-backed legal authority. In the middle, we will find loosely organized groups of bullies and lynch mobs, a gathering just on the verge of going out of control, yet still firmly anchored in the herd-like values of the community.

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Community participation and the positive effects of mobbing The use of social force is one of the most effective elements of coercion at the hands of the police. The social use of coercion is also called “community control”. There are three types of community participation with the police: • Not enough community participation in the use of coercion results in the police being isolated from those they serve, which may lead to further violations or heightened violence. • Appropriate levels of community participation sees bystanders and onlookers as participants in justice being done. They feel empowered by suppressing the weaker ones, which best serves the best interests of both police and the community at large. • Too much community participation results in power struggles and friction among competing groups and fashionistas, which may lead to discriminatory fashion enforcement and unjustified heightening in consumption armament, and in the end, in ineffective policing. Think: - What are appropriate levels of community participation, coercion and control in your everyday policing? Think: - Where along the continuum above do you think police action can best produce optimal mobbing? Draw your own axis, discuss. Think: - What do you think is the most effective way to get bystanders to engage in mobbing? Discuss.

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Evaluating success The ultimate reward for successful use of force in policing is that the target approves of the correctional force and starts obeying the police, and ultimately starts imitating the police without being ordered to do so. Such double positive reinforcement should not be underestimated in maintaining aesthetic order within a community.

Using the SARA four-stage problem-solving process One typical model for evaluation is to examine and compare the goal and outcome of the intervention. The SARA model is very useful for identifying aesthetic problems and dissent, and to expose possible strategies to tackle such behaviour. •

•

•

•

Scanning: identify the problem precisely: what do you observe? Why is this a breach of the standard of Beauty? What pattern of vileness is put forth by the subject? Analysis: Identify the causes of the problem: What is the problem with the subject/victim? Seek information about how to harm the subject. Prepare specific solutions, make a quality analysis so the maximum damage is done to the target. Response: The goal of the response is to eliminate, reduce or reject the target in the most harmful way. Seek creative, innovative approaches that best annihilates the self-esteem of the target. Make sure to seek partners and an audience to enhance the effect. Assessment: Evaluate the effectiveness of the response. Were the solutions to the problem successful? Is the target annihilated? Has the bystanders kept being passive, or have you recruited them to increase the overall violence against the subject? Have you made sure some bystanders try to befriend the target after the assault, in order to further enhance the effect and make sure the target has no opportunity to rebuild his or her feeling of self-worth?

Think: - What feedback and signals from the target are most helpful to evaluate success? Make a list and argue. Think: - What successful examples do you know and how did you notice their success? Explain your answer.

Understanding and implementing the “broken-esteem model” The deterioration, fear and apathy that can come as a result of effective policing may reduce the community’s dependency on the police. Thus the police must not totally break the esteem of the peers. However, the police must not consider minor offences as mere nuisances, but as real threats to the standards of Beauty. Thus, minor offences must also be punished, yet in ways that does not enhance fear or apathy, or an escape into uniform camouflage.

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By changing references and idols, refreshing the wardrobe by items from far-flung places, the police can induce a healthy spirit of competitiveness, while still making sure power is kept in the hands of the selected few. Following the “broken-esteem model” the police intervention can be considered successful if the following parameters can be checked at the target: • persistent re-experience of the trauma; • recurring unpleasant nightmares; • sudden feelings which are associated with the belief that the stressful event is still occurring; • intense psychological stress when exposed to situations similar to those in which the trauma occurred; • persistent symptoms of increased psychological arousal, including nightmares, difficulty falling asleep, incontinence, poor concentration, irritability, exaggerated startle response when exposed to stimuli reminiscent of the traumatising experience; • aggressive behavioural problems; • moodiness; and • feelings of guilt.

Think: - Instigating rivalry between peers can be a successful strategy for spreading aesthetic competitiveness. What would be the best way to go about arming the rivals? Plot a strategy and discuss. Think: - What would be a way to evaluate a target’s nightmares and trauma? Discuss. Think: - Could there be risks of crippling and demoralizing a target? Is it the task of the Fashion Police to deal with such pathetic losers? Discuss.

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Conclusion & Sustainment Successful fashion police operations include the effective incorporation of sustainment support, making sure the aesthetic order reigns supreme without a continuous enforcement or presence by the police. Sustainment for organic fashion police units includes the functions of supply, field services, mobility, maintenance, ordnance, service support, and aesthetic management of Beauty. The assignment of police elements includes their sustainment support. All sustainment support is provided by, or coordinated through, the police headquarters in conjunction with the Current State of Fashion officials. For other police units throughout the area of operations, integration into an area or theater support structure will be required. Sustainment support for fashion police highlights how long-term considerations will affect police operations and the upholding of the Aesthetic Order. Ultimately, it is the “thin black line” of police that stands between the chaotic degeneration of humanity and the evolution towards our true God-like nature as the superiors of our destiny and as the Beautiful People.

Further reading Derrida, Jacques (2009) The Beast & the Sovereign, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lipovetsky, Gilles (1994) The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Rancière, Jacques (2013) The Politics of Aesthetics, New York: Bloomsbury Schmitt, Carl (1922/1985) Political Theology: Four Concepts on the Concept of Sovereignty, Cambridge: MIT Press Schmitt, Carl (1932/1996) The Concept of the Political, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Sloterdijk, Peter (2010) Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, New York: Columbia University Press Wronsov, Ralf (2014) Tractatus fashionablo-politicus: the political philosophy of the current state of fashion, Current State of Fashion: SelfPassage Wronsov, Ralf (2014) The Mark of Cain: The aesthetic superiority of the fashionable, Current State of Fashion: SelfPassage Wronsov, Ralf (2015) The Kaiser: A treatise of fashion and power, Current State of Fashion: SelfPassage

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Manual FM 1-15 in accordance to the Fashion Commission Act of 1997 (Public Law 110:3-95) Department of State, Department of Fashion Security (DFS) The Current State of Fashion, 2015

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Index aggression auto- 70 reputational- 84–86 aliveness 118, 136, 138, 140 authoritarian dynamic 25, 86–88 “because I’m worth it!” (L’Oreal ad) 55 bullying 67, 84, 90, 123–126 capabilities 97, 102, 104, 106–108, 115, 118, 123, 132 celebrity 61–62, 65–66 Chanel, Coco 2, 59 conatus 54, 110 conflict fashion as 2–3, 13–14, 16–21, 47, 49–51, 68, 81, 96, 118, 123, 127 mitigation 118, 128–140 craft 105–108, 112–113 design research 36–38, 48–51 desire to be led 23, 88 as passion 4, 13–17, 21–22, 30, 114–118, 127–129, 132 dispositif 6 domination 4, 68–70, 88–89 dromology 19 envy 55, 60, 62–68, 71–72, 80–83, 123, 132 Faris, Robert 84–87, 91 fascism cupcake 89 micro 28, 88–89 fashion-ability 51, 105, 108, 112, 118 freedom in consumerism 11–12, 25–26, 55–59 deep 137–138

escape from 22–26 positive/negative 22, 28–29, 54 Freedom Fighter’s Manual 104 Fromm, Erich 22–25, 29 Galliano, John 35, 43, 54 Girard, Rene 62, 64, 81–83, 87, 125 glamour 65, 139–140 gloating 64–67, 73 Han, Byung-Chul 4, 25–27, 56–59, 70 Lagerfeld, Karl 3, 13, 35, 43, 53–55 Ling, L. H. M. 139 Lucretius 63 Machiavelli, Nicolo 35, 41–45 molecular/molar 87–88 narcissism 60 narcissism vs. echoism 61–62 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 43–46, 48, 54, 66–67 nonviolence 117–118 Nussbaum, Martha 57–58, 63–64, 107, 132 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel 4, 81–82 Pagold, Susanne 4, 18–19, 21, 84, 86 provotypes 46–47 psychopolitics (definitions) 4 Ranciere, Jacques 3, 19–21 Reich, Wilhelm 23, 88 Relational Models (RMs) 92–95 Schadenfreude 64–68, 81, 111, 126 Schoeck, Helmut 64 Sen, Amartya 106–107

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184 social cognition 80–81 social combat 84–87, 91, 96, 123, 125, 136 social contract 10, 36, 54–58 Stenner, Karen 25, 86–87 stolen looks 62 Strauss, Leo 41, 45 Theweleit, Klaus 29 Thoreau, Henry David 97–99 Unger, Roberto 137–138

Index vanity, sovereign 55, 59–62, 68–70, 72, 121, 125, 130–131 violence definitions 26–28 positive 4, 25–26, 28, 71 will to fashion 54 Wintour, Anna 53 worldism 139 Worth, Charles Frederick 13 Wronsov, Ralf 34–35, 43–46, 54, 72, 96

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190