Fashioning Ideology, Ideologizing Fashion: How the Climate Crisis Transforms the Cultural Field of Fashion

Fashion is predicated on constant change against a backdrop of order, which consists of the ecologically disastrous consumption and production of apparel. But the climate crisis unsettles this backdrop of order as activists, lawmakers, and consumers demand fashion to become more sustainable. Ideology, which in settled times blends in the background as commonsense to naturalize power, suddenly becomes an explicit meaning system in fashion. This puts ideological pressure on a cultural field that usually only deals with aesthetic and economic meaning systems. 

This dissertation develops a theory of ideologization to understand the unsettling of the cultural field of fashion during the climate crisis. Building on literature from cultural sociology, fashion sociology, and fashion studies, I ask: How do key intermediaries shape the ideologization of the cultural production field of fashion in response to the unsettled times brought about by the climate crisis? To answer this question, I study cultural intermediaries as key players across European fashion and investigate how they integrate and develop ideologies as meaning systems in the field. I investigate traditional intermediaries, interviewing 26 European fashion journalists and analyzing more than 400 texts from historical and contemporary fashion magazines, and how they build new strategies for these unsettled times and integrate ideology in the construction of discourses of legitimate fashion. Next, I study novel intermediaries that are invited to the field by these unsettled times and ask what ideologies they bring to fashion and how they restructure the field towards a tripolar cultural field. I therefore analyze 927 pages of sustainable fashion policy and 7 hours of policy meetings from the UN, EU, and the Dutch state, and investigate 3 transparency apps that make fashion’s supply chain transparent. Observations at industry events such as Milan Fashion Week and Première Vision in Paris and 16 formal interviews and numerous background conversations with key players in the field complemented this study of the field of fashion.

Taken together, I uncover a process of ideologization consisting of four elements: the construction of new strategies and discourses of fashion by established intermediaries, the entrance of novel intermediaries that bring ideologies of their own, the subsequent restructuring of the field which taken together leads to a variety of ideologies in fashion. In the unsettled times of the climate crisis, journalists reconstruct strategies and reformulate what they see as good and legitimate fashion, and in doing so introduce and reproduce a variety of sustainability ideologies in the field. Novel intermediaries like transparency apps and governmental actors act as sustainable cultural entrepreneurs that promote their own ideologies of sustainability. Together, this reproduces internal hierarchies between high and low fashion and leads to a reconstruction of the field to a triple economy of aesthetics, economics, and ideology with two heteronomous poles. As a result, four ideologies pervade the field of fashion: aesthetic denialism, aesthetic window-dressing, technical-material green capitalism, and critical anticapitalism. The first three reproduce and defend the status quo of neoliberal capitalism in fashion, while the latter challenges the ideological hegemony but lacks the political capacities to mount a serious challenge. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that ideologization currently does not threaten the neoliberal status quo. I am therefore pessimistic about fashion’s potential to move to a truly green future. 

Concludingly, this dissertation advances cultural sociology by bringing ideology back in the study of cultural production and developing a theory of ideologization to make sense of the wide-ranging effects of the climate crisis on cultural fields and their working in the 21st century. In the end, I argue that ideologization is not new nor confined to fashion and neither limited to ecological topics, but that the climate crisis poses a unique ideological challenge to cultural production fields and will likely unsettle an increasing number of cultural fields. This deserves sustained sociological attention and the further study of ideologization in fields beyond fashion.