Principales motivos de preocupación y recomendaciones

These interactions and relationships between a complex global network of producers and consumers comprise the fashion system. The fashion system is what Ben Fine refers to as a system of provision, simply put, “the inclusive chain of activity that attaches consumption to the production that makes it possible” (2002,

33 The use of the term ‘actors’ comes from Entwistle’s (2009) The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion, in which she analyses different spatial metaphors through which to understand markets (specifically, aesthetic markets): Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993)‘field’ and Bruno Latour’s (2005)‘network’ and ‘actor network theory’ (ANT).

78).³⁴ While Fine’s system of provision suggests a linear progression from producers to consumers, Entwistle (2010) positions the fashion system as a network. The development of the fashion system is intimately connected to the development of capitalism and industrial society in the West. In Gilles Lipovetsky’s analysis, fashion is unique to the West and a characteristic of modernity itself (1994, 101). He

parallels the rise of fashion with the rise of democracy and individualism. For fashion to emerge, “the present had to be deemed more prestigious than the

past...what was novel had to be invested with dignity” (Lipovetsky 1994, 740-44).

Fashion’s inseparable relationship with modernity has been the subject of intense scholarly research (notably Wilson 2003; Lehmann 2000; Breward and Evans 2005), with key themes being the speed of change, the notion of progress and the “artificial time” in which fashion exists (Calefato 2004). Walter Benjamin (1999, 252), writing in the 1930s, said “fashion has the scent of the modern whenever it stirs in the thicket of what has been. It is the tiger's leap into the past”.³⁵ At once, fashion can look to past styles and trends yet render them obsolete first and then new again. In his analysis of Benjamin’s ‘tiger’s leap’, Ulrich Lehmann (2000, xvii) writes:

fashion fuses the thesis (the eternal or classical ideal) with its antithesis (the openly contemporary). The apparent opposition between the eternal and the ephemeral is rendered obsolete by the leap that needs the past to continue the contemporary.

Yet while fashion is persistently and self-referentially looking to the past, the

immediate past styles (or even present styles) are declared dead by the emergence of new fashions. These new styles present as if they are truly new, rather than what Roland Barthes (1990 [1967], 289) calls, “an amnesiac substitute of the past for the present”. Barthes positions fashion’s time as artificial, writing, “Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded” (1990 [1967], 289).

Contemporary fashion continues in this artificial time, eating up the present and substituting it for the past, all the while under the guise of the new. Yet the way

34 The term ‘system of provision’ is more accurately attributed to both Fine and Leopold, however as mentioned earlier, the 1993 edition of The World of Consumption is no longer in print.

35 This passage by Benjamin was used as the basis for Lehmann’s (2000) book Tigersprung.

fashion operates today has clearly evolved in response to global cultural and industrial shifts.

To understand the workings of the contemporary system, it is necessary to outline the changes wrought in the fashion system in the past 150 years. Prior to the

nineteenth century, fashion was chiefly the domain of the wealthy, and as Lipovetsky (1994) describes, the modern fashion industry developed during the 100 years of fashion, spanning from the 1860s (beginning with the couturier Worth) through to the 1960s. This period was characterised by the release of two haute couture seasons per year, spring/summer and autumn/winter. The garment models shown in the haute couture collections would be disseminated in an orderly flow through the fashion system to reach the high street. The end of the 100 years of fashion was marked by the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. At the same time, apparel production developed into “an industrial production of clothing accessible to all that would nevertheless be “fashion”, inspired by the latest trends of the day” (Lipovetsky 1994, 4185). While mass-production had occurred since the nineteenth century, by the 1970s, as Valerie Steele (1997) argues, fashion trends were no longer governed by the haute couture system and instead fashion shifted in response to subcultural styles, the growth of casual wear and the increased freedom of individual choice. Barbara Vinken (2005) terms this era ‘postfashion’. Change and speed, two intangible elements of both mass-produced and high fashion, consequently propel greater amounts of material apparel through the system, with their associated environmental impacts. Evidently, finding solutions to sustainability in the fashion industry is in conflict with the premise on which the concept of fashion is based.

As mass-production accelerated from the 1960s, it enabled fashion to become more democratic and accessible, and hence fashion was less bound to one’s economic status (Crane 2000, 6). According to Volante (2012), the fashion system now bears little resemblance to Lipovetsky’s 100 years of fashion, but is rather a system of mass-production based on highly democratised and globalised

consumption. As Polhemus (1994) observes, fashion styles and trends ‘bubble up’

from the street and from subcultures. Since the 1980s, mass-produced apparel enabled more frequent cycles of fashion, to the extent that by the early twenty-first century, it was common to have up to fourteen fashion ‘seasons’ in a year (Jackson and Shaw 2009), and twenty in the case of fast fashion (Christopher, Lowson and Peck 2004). Anne Hollander notes, "the new freedom of fashion in the last

quarter-century has been taken up as a chance not to create new forms, but to play more or less outrageously with all the tough and solid old ones, to unleash a swift stream of imagery bearing a pulsating tide of mixed references" (1994, 166). The result is a plurality of fashion styles and trends, coupled with a quickening cycle of surface-level, micro-innovation in the mix of colour, cut, detailing and fabrication within apparel.

The plurality of styles and the disintegration of the strict ‘trickle-down’ of fashion styles led to the super-growth of fashion branding. In order to distinguish their product offering, companies began to target smaller market niches. They built ‘brand stories’ (Hancock 2009a) that would communicate the values of their product to their audience. In turn, the identities of customers became increasingly connected to these brand stories (Agins 2000; Levy 1999). Despite the overwhelming volumes of styles and niche markets targeted by fashion brands, there are a defined number of key sectors. Branding writer Kaled Hameide (2011) classifies brands broadly as either

‘luxury’ (haute couture and ready-to-wear) or ‘mass-market’. Hovering at the upper end of the mass-market are the premium brands, occupying a ‘sweet spot’ between luxury and accessibility (Hameide 2011, 162).