In the psychological game of fashion, there are only winners and losers. As much as fashion helps build self-esteem and propels desire and seduction for the winners, it thrashes and harasses the losers, shattering their social status, self-esteem and self-image. Shifting focus from the inherent qualities and identity and representation, to the dynamic game of envy, jealousy, status and violence may highlight the immediate and urgent connection between dress and the self. The psychopolitics of fashion aims to unpack the competitive desires enacted through fashion, and how they affect our mental and social environment under the surface of “shallowness.”
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The Enigma of Fashiopolitics and Fashiopower
A paradox in the politics of fashion is the tension between freedom and conformity; we use the same word for fashion both when it breaks free from the convention of the time, as well as that very same convention. As highlighted in Susanne Pagold’s (2000: 8) definition of fashion as “to dress like everyone else, …
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Fashion and the Psychopolitics of Social Media
Social media are platforms for turning the subject into a project. As Byung-Chul Han (2017) posits, they are arenas where we turn our lives into transparent endeavors which are broadcast to turn friendships into quantifiable data-processes. By broadcasting my actions into a competitive arena, where I am nothing if I do not do things, “the …
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Bare fashion and the inferno of the same
We often hear that fashion is in some way erotic; it plays with seduction and sexuality. And this then becomes excuses for harassment and worse. But is fashion really erotic? Or is it more narcissistic? Does fashion draw the observer into the meeting of sensual aesthetics of intertwined sexual desires, or is it more an issue …
About FashioPolitics
Fashion is per definition a social phenomenon. It is a quality we only can come to know in correspondence and comparison with others. But it is also a temporal distinction, to be amongst the first to wear something new. But for someone to be “first” others have to follow, and for anyone to be “in” others have to be out. Psychopolitics of Fashion is about this desire, rivalry, competition, envy, and violence residing at the very heart of fashion, under the surface of fashion’s perceived “shallowness.”
Thus under the surface of fashion lurks a dark sibling of desire. In FashioPolitics we try to unpack fashion as a vector of rejection, bullying and violence in interpersonal and group dynamics, to better learn how fashion can cultivate social nonviolence.
Fashion is the aesthetic dynamics of competitive desire, and this makes fashion not only concern my own inner world, but my world is in continuous confrontation with the desires of others. Thus fashion is not simply related to social psychology as it can never be neutral, but by its very nature, it is required to be an asymmetrically distributed asset or sensibility.
By suggesting a ‘critical psychology’ for fashion design, and addressing the social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion through a political lens, we will examine the psychological implications of status dynamics in everyday use of fashion. Here, fashion and clothing acts as interpersonal interfaces for rivalry and possibly aggression, where the very “shallowness” of fashion becomes an excuse for marginalization, rejection and punishment. This affects self-esteem and self-knowledge, psychologically wounding and reducing the victim. Thus the psychopolitics of fashion traces the mental processes of social hierarchization and interpersonal power-play. Yet, we also hope to address possible ways to reduce the violence which is seemingly inherent in fashion.