Eleven years later, there is still little justice for the victims and their families. The 41 people accused of murder in the collapse of Rana Plaza are still awaiting trial as of January 2024. Only a few people have been granted compensation by companies that outsourced labor from the Bangladeshi garment factory. Families who could provide DNA evidence of their deceased relatives were given a mere $200 from Primark, and only seven of the factory's 28 international retailers contributed to the Rana Plaza Donor's Trust Fund within the first year following the collapse.

This imperial fashion system heavily relies on what Karl Marx described as commodity fetishism – a consumer's perception of a product that is completely alienated from the labor, and thus laborers, that it took to make said product. It's what makes the commodity desirable. For the very same reason the upper class slept on a higher deck away from the proletarian servants and steerage on the Titanic, so does the fashion industry create this laborless illusion to put our minds at ease in consuming one's exploitation. However, this infrastructure, too, is a sinking ship, and whether you can see the laborers or not, blood and sweat will stain white fabric.

Where previously Western companies were able to hide their sweatshops and garment dumps in the Global South away from the vision of their domestic consumers, the age of social technology has made it an impossibility to look away from labor exploitation. Organizations such as Fashion Revolution have started global campaigns to end human and environmental abuse in the fast fashion industry and educate consumers on garment traceability. Digital fashion communities on TikTok and Twitter have dedicated voices who strive to hold both the fashion industry and fashion consumers accountable for their unethical means of production and consumption.

However, this community-led exposé has created a cultural phenomenon where the internet adopts the language of accessibility and democratization as a means of morally absolving itself from its contribution to the fashion system. In a world where you are not given the choice to ignore the victims of the fashion industry, the only way to remain complacent in your contribution is to convince yourself that you are one. 

Anti-capitalist phrases like "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism," once serving as a reminder only to consume what is necessary, have been bastardized into a shallow rationalization for every excessive purchase — whether you are spending a paycheck on groceries or a Zara haul, the likelihood that underpaid farmers and factory workers produced both commodities is high, so you might as well buy both.

False dilemma fallacies like "I am working class too, and I cannot afford luxury fashion, so clearly my only option is to buy dupes from Fashion Nova" have also become increasingly popular. These statements parade as an act of democratization, but they are nothing more than a wolf in Shein's clothing. Entitlement to fashion, specifically pieces that fast fashion retailers stole from luxury brands (which frequently means independent designers with fair pricing), is far from class rebellion; instead, it is an illusory way of inserting oneself into a higher status in the preexisting class system.

This superficial form of online democracy starts and stops with the self. Much like the ongoing antitrust Hermés Birkin lawsuit, this outrage is based on one's own position in the exclusivity that drives the fashion industry – it is a bad thing until someone names the right price. But this markdown cannot forsake its social semiotics; after all, that's what makes the product desirable. Whether it is a Birkin or a convincing designer dupe, both commodities exist to convince the world that the person wearing it is worthy of doing so. 

But the harsh reality is that no one is worthy of fashion. So long as fashion's desirability is tethered to status performance, democratization is an impossibility. And if you cannot pay to perform with your paycheck, why should someone else pay with their life?

The term fashion victim, as coined by Oscar de la Renta, is used to identify one who gets caught up in the excess of fashion, whether they are fad followers or hyper-materialists or that secret third thing… me.

Though I do not monetarily invest in fashion in the way one would define a fashion victim, I do frequently find myself cashing in the entirety of one of my most valuable assets — my time. Fashion victimhood has always been used to identify someone who engages with fashion on a consumerist level, but I view temporal investment as capital that holds equal value to tangible wealth and frankly, for the better part of this year, I have wagered the full extent of my time getting caught up in this ambiguously defined excess of fashion.

What they don’t tell you about fashion victimhood is that it is an inevitability. To make an intentional effort in not being a fashion victim, is to be a fashion victim. Even if I were to subvert materialism and faddishness by adhering strictly to a minimalistic antifashion wardrobe, I’m still trying to chicly signal to a different subculture that I am a part of their more educated and more worldly group; all while ignorantly overlooking the fact that I continue to be controlled by fashion victimhood by completely altering my taste to fit the more enlightened mode du jour.

Getting caught up in the excess of fashion is also an inevitability to everyone who tries to subvert it. Not necessarily in terms of materialistic overconsumption, but rather in the intemperance of information — this is where my fashion victimhood resides.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have an opinion on everything that has happened since the beginning of time. Ask me about my opinions on quantum cosmology or Scandoval, I will answer both with equal diligence. Anyone who knows me vaguely knows that I seemingly hate everything that has ever happened in fashion. Both are true to different extents.

If you follow me on Twitter1, you might have noticed or possibly even wondered why my bio is “loves fashion, hates Fashion.” I’ve always told myself that I wanted to go into fashion purely for the love of it. Even the hatred I hold towards the capital-F fashion industry comes from a place of love and longing to make it a safer and more equitable place. But the reality of it is, it’s not, nowhere close, not even a little, and I have opinions on it all, thereby contributing to the excess of fashion in my attempt to resist it.

I’ll be the first to admit that I started this Substack incredibly overzealous. I had plans to post thoughtful essays 3 to 4 times a week and I still have lists in my notes app of hundreds of topics I would like to write about, but I quickly learned that the rate in which the fashion industry exploits vulnerable populations is much faster than my ability to appropriately and thoroughly address them with the attention that the industry deprives them of.

I first started to lose momentum for writing during the antecedent events of the Met Gala. The HFTMG team and I were the first to publicly condemn the theme celebrating the legacy of Karl Lagerfeld. We were quickly met with a sea of backlash spanning everyone from internet trolls to established industry professionals for our attempts to “erase fashion history.” However I rather ignore history entirely than celebrate a rewritten one.

My team was never even calling for the erasure of Lagerfeld’s contribution to fashion history, but rather asking for a transparent exhibit that included the dangerous rhetoric he spread during his 50-year career.

Art is anthropology, to try and disingenuously portray the ideology that shapes it devalues it of any meaning. If I wanted to just look at clothes I would go to Saks Fifth Avenue, but museums have the moral responsibility to teach the public of how said clothes are contextualized within a sociological landscape — that was my argument from the beginning.

Watching the work that the HFTMG team and I did quickly get buried by the celebrity fanfare was incredibly disheartening. I don’t want this to come across with a semblance of narcissism because this work was never about us as individuals. It was about us being members of every disenfranchised group that Karl Lagerfeld directly targeted: queer people, Muslims, plus-sized individuals, people of color, women, survivors of sexual assault. It was about us discovering that Numéro Magazine allegedly deleted any remanence of Lagerfeld’s interview defending Karl Templer by telling his victims “If you don't want your pants pulled about, don't become a model! Join a nunnery,” a mere few days before the Met Gala’s theme was announced to the public. It was about the most prestigious institutions in fashion knowing all of this, actively concealing it, and then watching every single person who had no other choice than to remember it be accused of erasing history.

It was about systemically becoming a fashion victim.

My fashion nihilism culminated last month when Sean McGirr replaced Sarah Burton as creative director of Alexander McQueen, in turn, making 100% of Kering’s creative directors white men. Later through researching the statistics of other fashion conglomerates, I learned that this statistic should’ve surprised no one and frankly I felt stupid for expecting any different outcome. My findings were as followed:

LVMH:

• 22% of creative directors are white women

• 16% of creative directors are men of color

• 0% of creative directors are women of color

Kering:

• 0% of creative directors are women and/or designers of color2

Puig3:

• 20% of creative directors are white women4

• 0% of creative directors are designers of color

Richemont:

• 0% of creative directors are women and/or designers of color5

But again, after posting these statistics on Twitter, I was met with backlash. People condescendingly asked me “why can’t you just focus on good designs?” and again my response was, art is anthropology. If you can overlook the fact that the overwhelming majority of creative directors are favorable within the eyes of patriarchy and white supremacy, I can draw the conclusion that you overlooked the fact that for centuries these same systems of oppression have defined what qualifies as artistic goodness.

As a woman in the arts and an intersectional ally to all fashion victims, when I see these statistics I am physically incapable of “focusing on good designs.” I’m far too busy thinking about Guerrilla Girls' posters that read “Less than 5% of the artists in the Met’s modern art section are women, but 85% of the nude paintings are female.” I’m far too busy thinking about how Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, the essay that radicalized me as a preteen, was bastardized into a graphic t-shirt by Dior only for its sales to line the pockets of their brand ambassador who was convicted of 12 counts of domestic abuse. I am far too busy thinking about the communities of Accra, Ghana and Panipat, India who have designer clothing clogging their water supply, since they are victims of the colonial practice of garment dumping because, by no mistake, the fashion industry has ruled that the West’s excess of fashion is more valuable than the quality of life in the Global South.

And nowadays I am far too busy thinking about how less than five years ago, every major fashion company was having a pissing contest over who could donate the most money to restore Notre-Dame, all in the name of “preserving art history,” but now, not only are many of these same brands complicit in the genocide of Palestinian artisans and the cultural erasure of Palestinian art, several are actively funding it.

Refusing to view art as anthropology and ignoring the hands that either created or destroyed it makes you complicit in art imperialism. Refusing to critically analyze the history of artistic goodness makes you a cosigner in deciding which cultural arts are worthy of preserving and, by extension, which cultures are worthy of living.

Over this past month, I have been trying to learn as much as possible about Palestinian fashion and its artisans. I feel like that is where I can contribute and communicate best considering my given skill set and platform. And seeing that many fashion writers have been threatened by their employers for speaking out about Palestine, I figured, might as well talk about what we are all allowed to talk about: fashion. Because what are you going to do? Accuse us of erasing fashion history? Accuse us of not focusing on the right good designs? Blacklist us from an industry that never made space for us in the first place? You have given us power in having nothing left to lose.

Like I said in the beginning, time is capital that holds equal value to tangible wealth. But while the Western fashion industry has been basking in their excess of fashion, they have simultaneously made time a limited resource in the Gaza Strip. Using the fashion industry’s own capitalist praxis, scarcity drives demand, so there is no more apt time than now for us to talk about Palestine.

So let’s talk about Palestine.

Palestinians have sartorial rules of their own. Found stitched into their thobes, the form of cross-stitching known as tatreez was not born out of faddishness or materialism, but rather necessity. This ancient craft, primarily practiced by Palestinian women, serves as a multifunctional visual history of Palestine and a reminder that each and every wearer has a unique identity and ancestry worth preserving.

Tatreez is heritage. Each city in Palestine has their own unique symbols and color schemes that represent where they hail from. The cypress trees found on Gazan thobes represent the plants that border the agricultural fields in Gaza that functionally serve as windbreakers, while cities further inland such as Hebron and Ramallah have threads of deep purple and red as they are dyed in the climates where pomegranates are in abundance.

Tatreez is adaptation. It evolves in response to the social climate of its wearers. During the first Intifada (1987-1993), after a series of Palestinian uprisings broke out in response to the occupation, the Israeli government banned all displays of the Palestinian flag. As stated in Military Order 101: Article 5, "It is forbidden to hoist, wave or place political flags or symbols, except by permit of the military commander." But since the colors of the flag themselves were not banned, Palestinians used the art of tatreez to incorporate the country’s colors into their clothing. Creating what is known as the intifada thobe, tatreez artisans wove red, white, black, and green threads into thobes alongside maps, olive trees, oranges, and other innocuous symbols synonymous with Palestinian culture.

Overtime, as the definition of “symbols” became more strict, Palestinians adapted by creating new ones that covertly displayed allegiance to their homeland; one of the most recognizable symbols being that of a watermelon. The green and white rind, red flesh, and black seeds were a discrete display of Palestinian colors that quickly became a reoccurring theme that marked the literal and metaphoric social fabric of Palestine.

Tatreez is perseverance. Even after the 1948 Nakba, where 531 Palestinian villages were leveled and buried, 15,000 Palestinians were murdered, and 700,000 Palestinians were placed into exile, this art form sustained. From inside the walls of refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, Palestinian women have built thriving art collectives teaching a new generation of artisans how to keep this craft alive. These art collectives have enabled Palestinian women to provide for their families and to rebuild.

In a way, Palestinians have a sort of symbiotic relationship with their cultural dress. They stand just as much a symbol of it as it does a symbol of them: heritage, adaptation, perseverance.

because Palestinian art is anthropology.

American cultural institutions might have the ability to rewrite history or ignore unfashionable legacies, but the rest of the world does not have the luxury of existing within a vacuum. The rest of the world is clinging onto an ever-dwindling representation of their humanity as it gets buried in the West’s excess of fashion.

Ignorance is not bliss, it is privilege.

So, yeah, sartorial rules are simple: wearing white after Labor Day or business casual to the club makes you just as much a fashion victim as the person who rejects both on the simple premise that an arbitrary system of authority told them to do so. It’s also no coincidence that these fashion faux pas have roots in classism and white supremacy; you are inevitably and systemically made a fashion victim before you even have the chance to get dressed. It no longer matters what you wear, so long as you wear it on the right side of history — the same side of history you’ll be accused of erasing.

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Disclaimer: 

I do not condone antisemitism in any way, shape, or form. It is my own relationship with antisemitism and being the granddaughter of a first-generation American Jew whose parents were holocaust-surviving refugees that shape my opinions on Zionism.

My firm stance on Zionism is that it is an axis of the same Western imperialism that created the Holocaust. Western nations have militarized the same Jewish grief they inflicted and capitalized on the abundant antisemitism in their own nations in order to colonize Palestine. 

Zionism is not exclusively a Jewish ideology. In fact, Jewish people do not even make up the majority of Zionists. The largest Zionist organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel; their membership extends 10 million in the one organization alone. There are only 7.5 million American Jews in existence. According to geopolitical expert and Queen’s University Belfast professor, Tristan Sturm, there are over 30 million evangelical Zionists in the United States. The global Jewish population is 16 million. That is almost two American evangelical Zionists for every single Jewish person alive, Zionist or not. 

It’s incredibly frustrating to watch these historically antisemitic governments and corporations fund other governments and corporations in the name of helping “the Jewish cause” when antisemitic hate crimes are at an all time high in their own backyard. 

There’s a reason why the United States Federal Government pays for the healthcare and extended education of American Jews who relocate to Israel, but does nothing to financially assist the 1/3 of all Holocaust survivors who live below the poverty line in the U.S.. When you disenfranchise people for generations and financially incentivize them to leave, they will have no other choice than to leave. 

The West’s unwavering support for Zionism isn’t out of love or even guilt, but rather in attempt to dissolve the Jewish diaspora, kill or displace the indigenous population of Palestine, capitalize on for-profit American missile companies, and place all blame back on the Jewish people. 

When I say Zionism, I am and always will be using it synonymously with Western imperialism. And when I call myself an anti-Zionist, it is and always will be because I refuse to recognize it as a Jewish cause. 

References:

Embroidering Resistance: Palestinian Tatreez by Ruofei Shang (Atmos)

Heart, Mind & Spirit: Some Advice on Choosing a Color Palette by Wafa Ghnaim (Tatreez & Tea)

The Secret World of Tatreez: From Orange Blossoms to the Nakba by Pink Jinn

Tatreez and Development by Saniah Naim (Anera)

Tatreez & Tea’s Tatreez Introductory Model and Masterclass Series by Wafa Ghnaim (Truly one of the most thorough folk art databases I’ve ever seen, Wafa Ghnaim is incredible.)

This Is Artful Resistance: The Power of Tatreez by Erin Quinn (SOAS University of London: Gender Studies)

Woven Legacy, Woven Language by Jane Waldron Grutz (Saudi Aramco World)

Seminal Works on Palestine:

• The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah

• Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System by Nahla Abdo-Zubi

• Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis

• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance by Rashid Khalidi

• The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination by Edward Said

• Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan

• The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

Anti-Zionism by Jewish Authors:

• Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History by Norman G. Finkelstein

• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

• Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick

• Gaza in Crisis: Reflecting on Israel’s War Crimes Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

• On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

For further reading, visit Decolonize Palestine’s Complete Reading List.

In the early 2000s, luxury brands such as Oscar de la Renta and Isaac Mizrahi began producing clothing lines at department stores such as Dillard’s and Burdines, respectively. In fact, H&M was among the first retailers to jump on this trend in their 2004 collaboration with, at the time, Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld. As this marketing strategy made headway, there were growing concerns with how these once elite and exclusive brand names would look sewn into blue-collars.

“At one time, designer slumming was inconceivable. The point of the fashion enterprise was to create a symbiotic aura of aristocracy and exclusivity between couturier and client, so that both could look down on the (poorly dressed) hoi polloi.” - Mimi Schwartz, Cheap or Chic: The new lines by Isaac Mizrahi and Oscar de la Renta are inexpensive, but how do they look?, Slate Magazine, Dec. 2004.

However, when the news about H&M x Mugler made its rounds, the court of public opinion simply nodded their heads, muttered “makes sense,” and kept moving forward.

Some might chalk this up to personal grievances with how Casey Cadwallader is handling his position as the creative director of Mugler. However I, with Cadwallader grievances of my own and an innate ability of reading too far into things, see this as just another piece in a sociopolitical puzzle looming in the fashion zeitgeist.

As a generation of digital natives relying on an algorithm to perfectly curate our personal styles, we have to adapt to its own unique language. This often comes at the price of shoving ambiguous ideas into much smaller boxes. One popular way of doing so is by tagging on the internet colloquialisms “aesthetic” and “-core” to the end of our Pinterest search bar to indicate that we are, in fact, demanding a perfectly wrapped artistic selection of style inspiration. However, by doing this, said styles are completely stripped of their individual contexts and shoehorned into those more digitally desirable.

One of the front runners of this form of keyword searching is the aspirational trend known as the “old money aesthetic.” This style, heavily coded by the wardrobes of 1960s jet-setters and Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, allows the opportunity to dress as though we have a vacation house in The Hamptons without committing to the tax bracket that comes with it.

However, the internet was quick to call out the visual inconsistencies between this aesthetic and the real wardrobes of modern aristocracy. This, of course, is because of that precious context excluded from Pinterest vision boards.

One of the largest influences on the old money aesthetic comes from the portfolio of American photographer, Slim Aarons. Known for his candid photographs of the daily lives of high society, Aarons’s camera lens acted as a fly-on-the-wall in the resort hotels and vacation homes of the world’s most famous socialites. What cements his legacy as one of history’s greatest photographers was his ability to show the working class a crack in a very, very narrow door. However Aarons’s portfolio can only act as a time capsule of this aristocratic aesthetic because in the 1980’s, when the esteemed photographer retired, that narrow door was then sealed shut.

So for more modern examples of this aesthetic, we must turn on our televisions. For as long as I’ve been engaged in internet fashion discourse, one name consistently remains as part of the discussion: Blair Waldorf. This main character from the 2007 teen drama, Gossip Girl, lives eternally in High Fashion Twitter moodboards and, for many 20-something year olds, served as the initial interest in the world of fashion.

This means our options for dressing liked the “old money” are slim (pun intended). One must wear clothes that are 50 years out-of-date or dress up like a character on TV, however, both are merely costumes.

And while a select few are masquerading as the upper crest, another group of the working class are actively trying to hunt them down.

With the constant threat of an impending recession, the general tolerance for opulent displays of wealth are becoming lower and lower, thus ushering in recession-core or, as Roisin Lanigan puts it, revolutioncore.

“As many have pointed out in online coverage of so-called recessioncore, there’s no authenticity to this as a fashion trend. It’s simply ‘an opportunity for celebrities to cosplay being poor’. The term is obviously catchy enough for us to project our economic and sartorial worries onto; under the hashtag ‘recessioncore’, TikTok creators are using it to talk about the decline of post-pandemic ‘dopamine dressing’, logomania and the un-ostentatious displays of wealth through fashion — but it’s ultimately a misnomer. Recession doesn’t come for the uber-rich and famous the same way it comes for us normals, but by pretending it does, they can try to save some face during the looming collapse. So we don’t eat them. Or at least cancel them.” - Roisin Lanigan, It's not recessioncore, it's revolutioncore, i-D, Feb. 2023.

We see this witch hunt in real-time as the internet turns their back on some of their most beloved influencers who have gained upward mobility in the fashion industry. This is demonstrated in the Instagram comments of content creators like Emma Chamberlain and Ashley Rous, better known as bestdressed. The truth of the matter is, this resentment doesn’t even have to come from a direct display of wealth, but, since social capital is its own form of currency, a mere association with it will suffice.

So if proximity to the fashion industry is enough of an excuse for persecution, what does that mean for the fashion industry itself? More costumes, of course.

For Prada’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection, Taking Care, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons drew inspiration from the uniforms of nurses, the military, and the working woman. As the show’s title suggests, this collection is a way of honoring those who “take care” of our society - members of the working class.

But how much of an honor is it to replicate the uniform of those who cannot afford to wear your clothes? and if the target demographic isn’t the people you are parroting, it must be someone.

Which brings us to the era of inconspicuous wealth or, as Matthieu Blazy defines it, Stealth Wealth, with his new technique of disguising leather as other textiles acting as a literal example of something pretending to be something else it is not.

“‘Viewing clothing as a dialogue between maker and wearer rather than a spectacle to be beheld by the public, Blazy’s Bottega (the newNew Bottega, if you will) taps into the more private pleasure of “quiet power”,’ according to the press notes. Some of Blazy’s most impressive creations for Bottega Veneta are the most innocuous-looking. Embodying the notion of stealth wealth, the opening look appears at first glance to be a simple pair of dark low-rise blue jeans teamed with a white tank top. However, bestow it with a second look and you’ll see that both the jeans and tank are crafted from leather, a key element of Bottega Veneta’s heritage.” - Theo Rosen, Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta FW22 Collection Puts Forward A Unique Take On Stealth Wealth, Albert Review, Mar. 2022.

Some (Demna Gvasalia) people take it to new extremes by financially exploiting the appearance of extreme poverty. Balenciaga, a brand that continues to be adored by celebrities despite its recent controversies, is the loudest voice in a movement that can only be bluntly defined as poor-core.

Poor-core, otherwise known as “homeless chic”, exists not in necessity, but in its ability to be nonexistent. In other words, it exist because it can. It exists because of the upper-class’s obsession with self-actualization and justifying (or apologizing) for their wealth, so they pay a hefty price for their assets to look like yours.

“Homeless people, totally without a safety net, are living at the very bottom of that pyramid. People who live at the very top, in the heady realm of ‘self-actualization,’ can only see the homeless through their own extremely privileged lens. It’s a phenomenon akin to cultural appropriation.” - Leeann Duggan, Why Fashion Needs To Quit It With “Homeless Chic”, Refinery29, Jan. 2015.

While these designers play defense, others rely on hanging their universally recognizable logos and motifs on the affordable racks of H&M. This is a last ditch effort to blur the lines between us and them and, since the fashion industry is always multiple seasons ahead of the general public, they have been doing so long before there was talk about a global recession. But of course they knew it was coming, because they are partially responsible.

So, again, this H&M x Mugler collaboration really comes as no surprise. Because, in this economic crumble, the only way for the working class to thrive and for high society to survive is to become reflections of each other.

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but most of all, why does any of this matter?

Over the past three years, as the fashion industry worked to maintain its relevancy both during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, there has been a growing interest in the audiences of fashion shows. Perhaps its a desire to be among the few whose social capital made them immune to lockdown protocol, the growing accessibility of runway livestreams, or good old-fashioned stan culture. Regardless of what prompted it, as the majority of people invested in fashion week switches from those physically in attendance to those tuning in via Instagram Live, the focal point of the show is forced to adjust with it.

Livestreams introduce an entirely unique approach to fashion. Prior to the age of live social technology, viewing a fashion show meant sitting in the physical audience or catching the photos an hour later on Vogue Runway. In both scenarios, the perspective shown is one that is entirely human, either from your own perception or an individual cameraman’s. However now in the era of the livestream, we are digitally handed an omniscient eye that not only sees the runway in real time, but also everyone in attendance. The discussion is no longer between the show’s attendees and the runway but now, with this electronic panopticon, the conversation is split between those in front of the screen and those behind it, ultimately leading to physical audiences being grafted into the show itself.

This can be explicitly seen during Mugler’s Fall 2022 Ready-to-Wear collection where celebrities on the runway were directed to interact with other celebrities in the audience. The Showtime talk show host, Ziwe, walked the runway while holding a call-and-response with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills veteran, Lisa Rinna, who was seated in the audience. Arca also walked for the show and briefly stopped to fight with JT from the City Girls over one of Mugler’s spiral curve handbags.

However one of the more subliminal ways the adoption of the audience is demonstrated is through the growing amount of celebrities and influencers who attend fashion shows wearing designs that are a mere few minutes away from debuting on the runway.

In fact, this marketing strategy entirely changes the idea of what it means to “debut on the runway.” Since many of these designs are captured by photographers before the show starts or even voluntarily posted to Instagram by the celebrities themselves, there is nothing really to debut on the physical catwalk. Instead “the runway” becomes a much more ambiguous concept consisting of the brand, the audience, and their collective social media presence.

An audience member’s ensemble doesn’t even have to appear the way it looks on the runway in order to be grafted in as part of the show. This phenomenon has recently been demonstrated through Doja Cat’s attendance at Paris Couture Fashion Week.

Although these looks are directly from the runway, they deviate from the overall theme of the show. This is not inherently bad, in actuality in adds an entirely new dimension to fashion presentation. Fashion shows are now able to simultaneously exist through a carefully curated collection of designs while also deviating from itself through the presence of celebrities with their own unique brand identity. This sort of Schrödinger’s catwalk allows the collection to exist in a vacuum while also taking credit for the creative liberty of the show’s attendees.

But what happens when we open that box?

As the omniscient eye in this newly emerging cyberspace that is still working out its rules and regulations, we as the digital observers currently hold the power to decide what is grafted into the shows and what is excluded entirely. This power is wielded through our collective interactions and commentary that pushes certain elements of the show to the top of the algorithm.

For Prada’s Fall 2023 Ready-to-Wear collection, the point of interest that dominated the news cycle came from TikTok fashion influencer, Madeleine White. Before attending the show, White posted a get-ready-with-me video where she cuts up a jumper from Prada’s previous Spring 2023 Ready-to-Wear collection. Although this style of garment repurposing is a common theme on her page, the responses she received for this specific look were polarizing.

One side of the argument sees it as a disrespectful or rather tacky stunt to haphazardly chop up the clothes of the designer whose show you are attending; the other side sees it clearly as a marketing strategy carefully organized between the brand and influencer.

but, again I ask, why does any of this matter?

We’ve grown so accustom to our all-seeing eye, to the point where the main focus of a fashion show doesn’t even have to consider the content of the collection being presented. At what point do we draw a line in the sand and reinstate the boundaries between the runway and its audience?

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