I'm not asking people to make political fashion films as some sort of crusade to back up a whole set of preconceived, 'right-on' view points... I’m hoping to be surprised by what people send through.

Penny Martin: To what extent do you think fashion should be ideologically engaged?

Nick Knight: Photography, along with the other arts, is communication. And if you’re communicating you should have something to say. If you’re in the privileged position of doing a global advertising campaign or if your work is on the back of every magazine, on every bus stop, every billboard and in every shop window in every city worldwide, it’s an enormous audience you’re talking to. The idea that you’re not saying anything with this opportunity seems a waste.

In this Political Fashion film project, I’m really looking to encourage people to say something with the voice they've been given; to realise the possibilities that they have at their fingertips and the absurdity of not using them.

Penny Martin: Do you think turning serious political ideology into fashion trivialises it?

Nick Knight: I don’t think that political thought is constant. I think there is the same degree of change within the political spectrum as there is within fashion. In this Political Fashion Films project, I’m really looking to encourage people to say something with the voice they've been given; to realise the possibilities that they have at their fingertips and the absurdity of not using them.

Penny Martin: What periods do you think have been the most successful in using fashion to express political comment?

Nick Knight: I think fashion is political comment, the statement you make when you dress. When I started dressing as a skinhead in the late Seventies, it seemed to be relevant in questioning who I was, what social class I was; a rites of passage in a time when that no longer existed. It became a way of feeling empowered and of feeling of some belonging. People would have no idea if I was left-wing, right-wing, gay, straight, violent, non-violent, into the girls, into the dancing, into the music... They would assume any stereotype they projected onto Skinheads was what I represented. The immediate reaction I got was very, very powerful. You come to realise just how important your outside appearance is and also how you can use that.

In terms of historiography, Dior’s New Look of the 1940s caused enormous reaction on the streets. Or Yves Saint Laurent, in the 1960s, promoted a particular free-thinking, liberal, progressive attitude through the way he dressed. In that sense, he designed political clothes, though later his political opinions became much more mainstream. Also the non-sexualisation of women through the clothing of Yohji Yamamoto in the 1980s or the way that Leigh Bowery dressed at Taboo, it was such an outrageous provocation. Yet people weren’t outraged by it, that was the strange thing. He would go out covered in swastikas, with his head painted blue and incur virtually no physical threat because he was so far from frame of reference people had that they treated him as 'spectacle'. He had a funny knack of carrying all this off and making it look non-threatening, it was a lot more to do with beauty. But when you have a man bending over and spraying water at a crowd out of his anus, it’s reasonably aggressive as a political stance.

McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2001 collection (Voss), when he presented a fashion collection in a glass box, I thought that was a great political statement about power in the industry. With the fashion audience sat around the front of it looking at their own reflections; after waiting an hour you were humbled and looking at your feet. To do that to the whole of the front row, I thought was the naughtiest form or political comment. In this Political Fashion Films project, I’m really looking to encourage people to say something with the voice they've been given; to realise the possibilities that they have at their fingertips and the absurdity of not using them.

Penny Martin: Let’s clarify that distinction then – if there a difference between radical fashion and political fashion?

Nick Knight: This project could be called 'Radical Fashion' or 'Ideological Fashion', but I prefer the title 'Political Fashion'. In this Political Fashion film project, I’m really looking to encourage people to say something with the voice they've been given; to realise the possibilities that they have at their fingertips and the absurdity of not using them.

Penny Martin: So what is the difference between someone expressing personal politics through their dress, and someone using their field of creativity, to express a political point?

Nick Knight: Well, in this project, we're asking people to use their medium, whether it’s modeling, fashion, filmmaking, sculpture, whatever it is, to express a point or political belief they have, through fashion.

The problem with using the word ‘political’ is that it’s a very narrow, constraining word to define the concept as I see it. I think of 'the political' in terms of body politics as well as politics of race, the wearing of fur or political correctness in dressing. So the brief is purposefully very wide. One could use the brief right from framing one’s own political and social values, through to using it more specifically to say: ‘well, actually, I feel quite upset that there aren’t more black women used in advertising and I want to make that political point by making a film.’

I'm not asking people to make political fashion films as some sort of crusade to back up a whole set of preconceived, 'right-on' view points... I’m hoping that we won’t just get a series of moralising films on all the issues we kind of know already, but something more contemplative, that explores the politics of beauty. I’m hoping there’s going to be a wider range of issues, dealing with the fashion industry is run or the way that imagery is produced. I’m hoping to be surprised by what people send through.

Penny Martin: Given that fashion is an intrinsically capitalist medium, is it logical to encourage, for instance, an anti-capitalist statement in that context?

Nick Knight: I’m not sure how to do it, partly because I haven’t started to do the project myself. But I don’t see the whole of the fashion industry in terms of capitalism. It is a problematic context, but I don’t think that should stop us from attempting to make the statement.

If politics is about the exercise and regulation of power in public and private life, then fashion would appear to be the ideal mirror of, and vehicle for political action. In all aspects of its production, dissemination and use the fashion product engages in a distinctive polity. Its materials relate to ethical values; its manufacture is informed by the legal and illegal practices of government and business; its promotion entails an engagement with a visual politics of persuasion; and its wearing ignites the fiercest moral debates. And yet….

The history of dress provides a familiar roll-call of self-consciously ‘politicised’ items, where an over-literal interpretation of ideology seems sometimes to leach the political life out of the very fabric. From the sans-culottes of Revolutionary France, through the utopian prozodezhda of constructivist Russia to Katherine Hamnett’s iconic anti-nuclear slogan t-shirts of the mid 1980s, the potential of clothing to act as a form of sartorial agit-prop, seems to me to have been fatally limited. When garment becomes bill-board, all the nuances of signification in which political meaning ultimately lies are amplified into a one-dimensional propagandist rant. Context, as ever, appears to be all. It’s the savage imagery of the sans-culotte in eighteenth-century satirical print-culture that terrifies; the face-to-face confrontation of Tory prime minister and campaigning fashion designer that inspires – not the item itself.

So, rather than embed the politics in the dress, far better to recognise the paradoxes and tensions which position fashion itself as paradigmatic of the broader politics of the time. Fashion at its most vibrant is in and of the political – and no more so than when its surfaces coalesce to ‘epater le bourgeois’. The provocations of Punk have often been cited in this respect. But in my view the Italians were doing it better and earlier. Anyone doubting this should turn to Paola Colaiacomo’s recent and excellent book ‘Factious Elegance: Pasolini and Male Fashion’ (Marsilio: 2007) and in particular to the illustration on its back inside cover, where the matrix of dress, body, desire and power finds a piquant and electrifying resolution.

Fashion is inherently political. The choice of what to wear each morning marks you out as a sentient being. It is a manner, albeit tacit, of advertising a point of view, a belief system, like scrawling your cultural affiliations across your chest. Fashion, in short, is sartorial propaganda. In a modern world where we afford fashion the status of the politic it is perhaps inevitable that politics in turn are subject to the vagaries of fashion.

Of course one can argue that complicity between fashion and politics is old-school. Louis XIV used fashion as his foremost tool of government: following the Fronde, the civil war that tore France apart, Louis made his nobility so fashion-conscious within the rigid hierarchy of Versailles that they couldn't think of overthrowing him. Elizabeth I used fashion to reinforce her mythical status as virgin queen, expressing the power and wealth her country did not really have. Even her contemporary namesake uses fashion as a political tool, her coronation gown emblazoned with embroidered emblems of the Commonwealth she was barely holding together. What is different now is that it is the system of fashion, the conspiracy of fashion, rather than its sumptuary frills and furbelows, that is being used by politics and politicians to further their power.

Today, politics and fashion are in cahoots. Fashion, the ultimate spin-doctor, has been seized upon by politicians as a way to further their endeavours. David Cameron's recent appearance on the cover of GQ was striking because it was accepted as perfectly normal. The only other time a Conservative Party leader appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine, she was played by Vivienne Westwood in Tatler's notorious 1989 'April Fools' edition. If we consider fashion the ultimate means of manufacturing desire, it is only natural that politics should seek to harness its power. Politicians are now airbrushed, sliced and diced into their own propaganda, political campaigns run with the slick gloss of a fashion show, candidates styled, buffed, preened, their answers polished to a sheen.

Jean Baudrillard argued that in a post-modern world, fashion penetrates domains of experience outside of itself: it is perhaps inevitable therefore that in a culture dominated by quick fixes - fast food, fast fashion, fast promises - political policies become short-term. One week it is immigration, the next terrorism, the next monetary union, each one seized, milked and spat out, barely masticated like a cheap high-street trend. We no longer have left or right, black or white, just this season's ever-fashionable middle-ground in a fetching shade of grey.

There is something more sinister in these assertions. If fashion uses politics to add weight to its arguments - whether rebranding their catalogue as 'Manifesto' or using clothes themselves as tools of tub-thumping didacticism - fashion is a convenient distraction and disguise for the more dubious machinations of government. Walter Benjamin described Fascism as “the aestheticisation of politics”: today, the flash and scintle of fashion distracts from policy otherwise too dark to stomach. 'New Labour' branded themselves like a top advertising campaign - a fashion campaign - jumping on the bandwagon of 'Cool Britannia' and using it to consolidate their power. At the same time, Labour's broken election promises (on education, health, crime...) were craftily wrapped in a Vanity Fair veneer of hip. In America, Hillary Clinton appeared preened and poised on the cover of American Vogue as dewy-eyed diversion to her husband's indiscretions and perjury.

Fashion is politics' lambs clothing: if you can dress it up and make it look pretty, maybe people won't notice the ugly things it's saying. Again, this may be ages old - propaganda is hardly a modern conceit after all. But in the past, there was some kind of substance behind the sparkle. Today, image is as good as reality: if you can't have the real Hermès Birkin, a fake looks just the same. If you can't have a real politician, does it matter as long as they look the part? The real influence of fashion on politics is the sad, stark reality that image is everything and policies come a distant second.

Propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. All that matters is propaganda.

...Who was it that said that again?

At a time when the jumpsuit seems to be approaching some kind of critical mass as a passable garment for fashion-conscious men (offered by the likes of Prada, Alexander McQueen and A.P.C.) it is, perhaps, worth returning to its origins as a manifesto printed as a paper pattern.

On 19th June 1920 the Florentine newspaper La Nazione published an illustrated article of a universal garment, the tuta, designed by futurist artist and designer Thayaht (pseudonym of Ernesto Michahelles). Inspired by the overalls he had and designed and made for his own working wardrobe, the ‘one piece straight line garment for men and boys’ was the tuta after the Italian word for all, ‘tutta’, which the artist then subtracted a single ‘t’ from in order to make it reappear, symbolically, as the shape of the garment itself.

The economy of the garment, cut from 4.5m of 70cm wide cloth with minimal material wastage , simple seams and only seven buttons, belied the complexity of its modernist polemic. While the manifesto blessed the ECONOMY OF FABRIC CONSUMPTION, ECONOMY OF EFFORT, ECONOMY OF TIME and ECONOMY OF ENERGY, Thayaht preferred a tuta made from African cotton or hemp worn with a Robespierre-collared white shirt and ‘Forte dei Marmi’ leather sandals, an outfit which resists, even in descriptive terms, the political notion of economy supposedly rationalized in the design of the garment.

Such a sartorial form of contradiction calls to mind Winston Churchill’s siren suit, a ‘one-piece zip-up suit’ he designed for practicality with his shirtmakers, Turnbull & Asser, in the late 1930s to allow him to dress quickly and respectably for the War Cabinet. A surviving example at the Churchill museum in a claret velvet, once worn with Oxford brogues and a silk cravat, is remarkably at odds with the speech he made to the nation whilst wearing one, where ‘death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment.’ Faced with the prospect of Utility clothing as a measure for clothes and textile rationing, Churchill suggested the idea of using his siren suit as the model for civilian uniform. The Board of Trade declined to comment.

So before plumping for Adam Kimmel’s all-in-one this season, remember that some jumpsuits are more equal than others.

In the ten years I have been working as a fashion journalist I have written a lot of rubbish. Opinions, it seems, aren’t always required in fashion journalism.

While all magazines editors claim to publish smart, provocative writing, it is well known that successful fashion magazines are driven by advertisers. In a highly competitive marketplace it is accepted that editorial is created to endorse the advertisers’ products.

Magazines that have a contentious point of view are increasingly sparse. The ‘there is always something to like,’ mentality and the current popularity of visually-led magazines, has placed the written opinion out of sync with the current zeitgeist.

Looking at the current crop of successful monthly and biannual fashion magazines, many resemble advertising catalogues (or 'magalogues'). Fashion shoots increasingly depict tip-to-toe looks from designers that are presented in orderly fashion on their own page. Are all consumers aware of this swindle, or is it just an accepted structure of a carefully constructed industry?

In my career there have been a few defining moments that have clarified my perceptions of the industry's need for reciprocal appreciation.

Working for Sleazenation magazine created a platform for ranting and forming opinions on the escalating power of advertising in fashion magazines. For the September 2001 issue a “100 Pages of Hypes And Lies” tag line straddled the cover, and was a stab at the bland cheerleading antics of other fashion glossies.

A pedigree PR commented: “beautiful image on the cover”; our swipe at the industry's preoccupation with hype clearly hadn't penetrated the PR's consciousness. The focus of this PR's delight was instead the irreverent perfume credit on the cover, which she gleefully read as positive appraisal of her client. The implication of this misinterpretation was clear: non-stick, opinion-free, glossy images are appropriate for an industry that is content to ignore judgements and instead focus on praise and mutual gratification. Unfortunately, advertisers who got the jibe stayed anyway and the magazine eventually folded.

Working for opinionated independent magazines invariably means little cash so the call from the mainstream is seductive. However, working in the commercial arena brings a whole different set of constraints.

I was commissioned to write a piece for a London-based women’s monthly glossy magazine on Amnesty International’s collaboration with Rankin, which was promoting their human rights campaign. My brief for the article was to avoid any politics and focus on the atmosphere of the shoot and document any gossip being traded between models. It was my last job for the magazine.

“You make the designer sound very dry, serious and quite political,” another fashion features director reprimanded me on a profile I had written for a future issue. The fact that the designer was brilliantly opinionated on contemporary issues did not fit with the mood of the new spring issue. My piece was cut to 200 words.

Thankfully then, there are newspaper journalists that, devoid of advertisers' influence, can write what they want, opinion and all. Or are there? Regrettably, the days of journalists being banned from shows for panning designers and their collections are, more or less, relegated to fashion history. Cathy Horyn of the New York Times recently highlighted instances of designers being so protective of their brand that they will, in extreme circumstances, give opinionated journalists the cold shoulder.

In fact, the hierarchical nature of fashion journalism does nothing to encourage free thinking. Journalists who are invited to shows are made to feel worthy of being part of the performance. Front row politics ensures writers are kept strictly in their (very visible) place. Those who brave honest reviews are often demoted to the cheap seats or, heaven forbid, are banned.

So who is to blame for the fashion media’s apparent lack of opinion? Is it the advertisers, the designers or the magazine editors themselves? Or is it us, the consumers that buy into it all? Fashion is a fascinating and luminous industry that thrives on new ideas. The communication of this revolutionary business should be matched in all its varied discussions. Fashion journalism shouldn't be about cheerleading. Surely vigorous, balanced debate can add another dimension to the surface gloss that currently exists?

What is happening to shoes? Specifically, what is happening to shoes on the runway? Enquiring minds want to know. Sitting at Stella McCartney’s show in February, a designer whose whole shtick is about girl-friendly dressing, was a terrifying experience. Those models tottered, their calves in tight, holding-on-for-dear-life knots of terror, as they attempted to navigate the floor in weird, towering, inward curving wedges. Even the sylph-like Liya Kebede, who normally seems to glide through her runway appearances, crept along at a snails’ pace, presumably so she did not tumble down in an ignominious heap instead. At Jil Sander, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Zac Posen the story was the same: footwear that had become an abstraction, not a vehicle that would allow a woman to motor through life, but one that would chain her, complicate her life, render her... dependent.

That is not progress. It’s foot-binding in contemporary form.

There are two ways to look at this: one unintentional (these weird accessories are merely the extreme and unsuccessful version of the trend toward wedges and platforms, the footwear that gave women physical dominance with comfort) and one purposeful (designers, after empowering women through wedges and platforms, became uneasy and wanted to undermine the advances). What side you come down on depends on how much credit you give fashion for actually thinking about its responsibilities towards female actualisation, as opposed to what Frank Gehry building it just saw, or historical time period it was feeling particularly romantic about at that moment.

Personally, I would like to give fashion the benefit of the doubt. Raf Simons and Stella McCartney do so much sartorially to liberate women, to make them look slick and strong through the cut of a jacket, the generosity of a collar and the absence of extraneous gewgaws, that I would like to think the shoes are simply a mistake, not a misanthropic gesture (I use Raf and Stella here simply as examples; they are not at all the sole offenders in this situation). But something niggles. After all, presumably they are smart enough individuals and aware-enough brand managers to understand the mixed messages they are sending on their runways. If not, here is the wake-up call.

Free the foot!

Why don’t male critics understand the frock film? Clothes in cinema are not just frivolous. Sometimes the fantasies they inspire are sheer escapism, but at others they’re inspirational, even subversive.

When Alexandra Byrne won the 2008 Oscar for Best Costume Design for Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth The Golden Age – a film roundly condemned by male reviewers for playing unnecessary tricks with history – it was a supreme vindication.

Far from making soap of statecraft, clothes are as much a character in 'Elizabeth' as any of the politicians and prelates. And once again playing the Virgin Queen, Cate Blanchett is the most brilliant clotheshorse. We see Elizabeth stage-managing her appearance for every role she needs to play. Through costume she can appear metaphorically bigger against the architecture.

Byrne creates stunning dresses for Blanchett that draw inspiration as much from modernity as the original time period. The Spanish fashion designer Balenciaga, who interpreted Elizabethan costumes in his 1950s couture, was a key design influence.

In all the great fashion films of recent times (Orlando, The Wings of A Dove, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, The Hours), clothes tell you about desire, about politics and psychology.

In fact Byrne says that when Shekhar talks about clothes, he never talks about them in a naturalistic sense. He talks about the emotion of the character or the emotion within the story, and that's the starting point.

Go back 60, 70 years and all the great ‘women’s pictures’, from All About Eve to The Women, use these signifiers to trigger fantasies of self-transformation and transcendence. Costumes and make up literally are the subtext of the film.

Kapur says he instinctively saw Elizabeth wearing the colour blue, which meant that it was immediately out of the comfort zone of the first film. It was Byrne’s task to find a way of making blue Elizabethan and English and royal.

In the first Elizabeth film, Blanchett's clothes express the loss of innocence. We watch her journey to power as she gives up free-flowing dresses for the rigid pomp of coronation. In the final frame, an alabaster-white queen, she literally wills herself to become a virgin again. (Kapur jokingly described it as “the Trainspotting version of the English costume drama”).

But in the sequel, The Golden Age, it’s more complex: clothes have to take her from mortal to divine. At first she appears in formal red and orange robes with an ornate ruff – embodying the job of being queen. It’s clothes as a PR exercise. When she has to sign the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots; the palette changes to rich, discordant green.

But at the age of 52, Elizabeth faces a crisis as a woman. She cannot have the lover – Frances Drake – she craves. She must live through his voyeuristic courtship with her lady in waiting, Bess.

And so her clothes tell us everything about thwarted sexual desire. She starts dressing in unstructured blue, with rich embroidery, cleavage and veiled sleeves. Her wigs, which usually resemble a plumed bird on her head, are more natural.

But in the pivotal bath scene, her hair scraped in a turban, she ponders her naked body with grim despair. Flesh is literally fabric. As she ages, her availability to be married and form alliances with other countries ebbs away. Yes, Bess caresses the royal head and keeps the imperial body intimate company, but Elizabeth knows she is the hollow woman. “What is going to fill me?” she cries.

By the end of the film she understands she must rise above her human desires if she is to achieve her destined state. In full Joan of Arc armour and a flowing red wig she rouses her troops to victory. Finally we see her “framed” on the cliff top in a nightdress, hair unashamedly shorn: she has almost become a spirit.

It is woman as luminous icon – after all, Kapur opens the film with Elizabeth as a stained glass motif – but with all the sacrifices that implies.

Among primitive peoples, it is reported, women’s private property generally develops later than that of men, and, originally, and often exclusively, refers to adornment. By contrast, the personal property of the male usually begins with weapons. 
Georg Simmel, ‘Adornment’ (1904)

From sexual assertiveness of the ‘red hot’ lipstick that came to define the New Woman of the 1920s, to the pro-African American hair and beauty treatments of early 20th century black entrepreneur Madame C J Walker, fashion has wielded a politics at the forefront of women’s everyday lives. Fashion is not just an industry peddling rarefied clothes. At its most basic it is a process incorporated into daily practices and rituals, traditions, knowledges and bodily habits. We are all familiar with the self-aggrandizing claims of individual fashion geniuses, from avant-garde designers to fashion investors, over their contribution to aesthetic economy and ‘culture’ per se. But fashion is actually lived and politicized in more intimate and mundane terms. In Carolyn Steadman’s now classic feminist history/ auto-biography, Landscape of a Goodwoman (1987), she describes how the post-WW II working-class culture of longing, embodied in her own mother’s desire for the fashionable glamour of a Christian Dior New Look dress, was far from trivial; rather it was at the core of an emerging class and gender politics that would transform society.

The furore over celebrity emulation, $5,000 hand-bags, size zero models and ‘It’ shoes provides us with an endless circus of controversy over fashion’s escalating degeneracy and absurdity; and women’s complicity in its futile antics. But this tends to obscure the fact that fashion, and its anti-fashion movements and counter dispositions, is more accessible today than at any other period in history; likewise the definitions of its practice. Within fashion, connoisseurship and elitism are as rife as in the upper echelons of any art market. However, the devolution of style knowledge through the accelerated and heterogeneous forum of the internet has already generated the possibility of a whole new relation between politics, fashion and everyday lives; one that might even render its original power-brokers, from hard-copy editors to celebrity stylists, ultimately redundant.

Fashion is a vast industry which sells us a dream: buying a dress, a handbag or even a fridge, restaurant or holiday will make us feel more beautiful, intelligent or successful. Most of us want to be part of that dream. Selling that inherent value added quality influences the economic, creative and cultural sectors of UK society. It is a serious business.

As a worldwide business, fashion is strongly influenced by the global agenda. Climate change, globalisation and social inequality are examples of current, critical issues that all of us must face. I believe that 21st century fashion courses should prepare their students for an industry that will have to transform itself to meet these challenges; challenges that I believe bring a potent political dimension to fashion.

Climate change and the pressure to reduce carbon emissions coupled with the exploitation of workers means that factors such as design, eco-fabrics, refashioning, new technologies, new fabrics and recycling are all being explored as the industry begins to look at how fashion can develop a more responsible approach to production and consumption. We must also respond to the emerging debates about how much we are prepared to pay as consumers and what companies mean by profit.

Fashion can no longer focus on the beautiful young. An ageing population, disability, obesity and eating disorders have placed health and well-being high on society’s agenda. Factors such as design skills, new technologies and fabrics, coupled with economic opportunity give us the resources to start developing a more inclusive industry with new audiences and consumers as well as designers, manufacturers and retailers in a more encompassing fashionable future for all.

A materialistic generation, the pressure of cool, a disenfranchised population: all these are visible signs that both individuals and society are experiencing difficulties in coping with the constant pressure to buy and be in fashion. The media, catwalk and cult of the celebrity all create a pressure to conform to a uniform idea of beauty and fashion. The consequence of this can be seen in the rise of cosmetic surgery, diets, and eating disorders. Through the ages women have suffered to be beautiful and fashionable but we need to open up the debate and challenge notions of what is fashionable and a beautiful body. How can we in the fashion industry help steer a new line that emphasises the inclusive potential of fashion, by involving a range of groups and sections of society in its creation and production?

Fashion has an intensely political future and this is what makes it for me the creative subject discipline for the 21st century. However it means that fashion educators need to work with scientists, psychologists, sociologists, chemists and physicists to look at ways that the discipline and industry can take a lead answering some of the great challenges that society will be facing.

In fashion you are not allowed to have an opinion.

You may wear something contentious, provoking, offensive…but only as long as it remains an unspoken challenge. Visual imagery - particularly fashion imagery - is less likely to be held accountable for its content than the written or spoken word. The silence of the image is its strength, its protection. Yet it is also what sites fashion as unimportant and trivial.

It may be acceptable to find the serious both beautiful and evocative. But attempting to take the ephemeral seriously can lead to ridicule. When fashion is deemed to have stepped out of its self-protective wrapper, the results can be uncomfortable, sometimes laughable: ‘I’m not a plastic bag’; Hussein Chalayan’s models, naked but for chadors; Bailey’s blood-strewn anti-fur images; Vogue and the size zero debate; Benetton’s politicised campaigns; Vivienne Westwood’s Manifesto; Knight’s images of Sarah Morrison; Hamnett’s ubiquitous T-shirts.

It is always uncomfortable when fashion takes itself seriously. How can something so much concerned with surface have a political agenda of any depth? Yet other forms of popular culture are allowed to weight themselves without much quibble: film, sport, art, music, comedy.

Then there is the breadth of interpretation that the fashion industry has long prided itself on. It leaves the insider critic in an uncomfortable place. When an agenda is so seemingly open, how hard it is to pull any real meaning out of it. And if the industry struggles to lay clean its own politics - and retreats in the face of any sniff of disquiet - then how can it complain when it is taken at face value?

The wise fashion designer has learnt to keep quiet about political agendas. How can anyone be both fashionable and informed? Yet the very act of dressing in the morning is a personal declaration of stance, aesthetics, consumption and class. If that is not political, then what is?

There were lots of great things about being a kid in 1960s Britain. Singing along to The Beatles on the radio. Cheering at a black and white telly when England won the World Cup. Cheering again when Manchester United won the European Cup. Scoffing Fab 208 ice lollies, and so on.

The hitch was that growing up didn’t bode very well because adult life wasn’t nearly as appealing, not for women anyway. Typically they were housewives, secretaries, or anything else roles that sniffed of female subservience. You rarely saw women in positions of power, and the (very) rare exceptions seemed irredeemably dull, unless they were Barbara Castle.

There she’d be on Blue Peter or the Six O’Clock News. Making speeches. Touring Africa. Cracking down on drunk driving. Campaigning for this, that, or the other. I didn’t know exactly who she was – the Bradford grammar school girl who’d become Britain’s youngest-ever woman member of parliament in 1945, then the star of Harold Wilson’s 1960s cabinets – but I liked what I saw. Nothing Castle did was dull and, unlike every other woman within a whiff of power – the Queen, Queen Mum and so on – she always looked great with dashing red hair, natty mini-dresses and matching hats.

What I didn’t realize was quite how carefully she orchestrated every aspect of her appearance. There wasn’t an army of semiologists and tabloid style cops poised to deconstruct her wardrobe as they do Hillary’s today. And even if there had been, as I was one when the 1960s started and eleven when they ended, I wouldn’t have understood what they were talking about.

Castle would. As a woman who’d invaded a man’s world under the scrutiny of a male-dominated media, she toned her femininity up or down to suit her objectives. The young Barbara had asked for clothes every birthday and Christmas, and grew up to love them, especially expensive ones, often confiding in female journalists (almost all of whom were relegated to the “women’s pages”) that ministerial duties left little time for shopping. The quality and quantity of her outfits suggested otherwise, and however hectic her schedule, Castle rarely missed her twice-weekly trips to the hairdresser. She also scandalized civil servants by sending them out to buy lipstick, and popping into public loos to “do my face” before photocalls.

The only time she dressed down (or less expensively) was on visits to her Blackburn constituency, where she was sensibly anxious to preserve her northern-girl-made-good-but-hasn’t-got-above-herself reputation. Castle sustained the illusion that she spent more time there than she actually did by staging carefully choreographed visits packed with photo ops for the local press, who’d snap her popping into Debenhams for tights and having her hair done in the town centre before tea at an old folks’ home.

The price she paid was endless (and tediously predictable) speculation that she’d slept her way to the top. The reward, for Barbara Castle and the rest of us, was that she got there by being herself.

In the twenty first century, the simple act of pulling on a hood or headscarf has become a political statement. The space between the base of the neck and top of the head has become a site of power politics where individuals, society, government and the law jockey for position. On the one hand, the covered head, which covers the sports-based hoodie to the religious hijab, is a dangerous sign, one that links the wearer to potential terrorism, crime and transgression.

For every crisis moment: armed raid, knife crime, hostage scene, terror alert or suicide bombing, there is likely to be a covered head paraded in the media, underlining our fears and stoking our deepest anxieties. In the collective unconscious, the hooded face evokes the terror of nightmares: the executioner, rapist, armed intruder. In these times of uncertainty and dread, the media has provided a visible enemy, one we recognise and can categorise. Somehow, this makes the prevailing climate of paranoia manageable. More endurable.

On the flip side of this power equation, we see the covered head is not, as the media would have us believe, the garb of attack but of defence . The hoodie and hijab represent the ultimate in resistance clothing. With Andy Warhol’s prophesy now a reality; fame really is available to everyone for fifteen minutes or more and voyeurism has been redefined as the great national pastime, the new powerful elite is the anonymous, incognito, and the resolutely private.

At a time when civil liberties are being eroded and identity theft is rife, donning a hoodie or head scarf is about self-preservation; protecting that which we hold most precious. It’s about individuals refusing to be chipped and pinned, refusing to be beeped in and out of monitored spaces, refusing to be tracked by the all-seeing eye of CCTV. It amounts to a refusal of intrusive state control, a genius way to slip the net and go off grid. In this world of extreme self-exposure, the covered head allows us to cast ourselves in shadows of our own making. In the Post-Millennial era, we have come to exist, not in the bright glare of cameras but the comforting dark spaces in between.

“Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles”. Elizabeth Wilson, 2003, Adorned in Dreams

Obsolescence is the defining feature of fashion. This industrially mediated process, whereby outmoded, rather than outworn, becomes the stimulus for purchase has far reaching political implications.

Environmentally, fashion becomes, in these terms, the inverse of sustainability.

Furthermore, in terms of the structuring effect on clothing manufacturing processes, obsolescence, as manifested in continual change in the clothing constituted as appropriate and desirable, feeds the ethical spectre that looms over the fashion industry: the sweat shop.

Our fashionable apparel is produced in situations where low pay, long hours with forced overtime, piece working, poor health and safety, abusive management, child labour, lack of job security and barriers to unionisation have been a constant feature and concern since the nineteenth century. Due to the long term linkage between ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’ and female labour in the manufacturing sector the spectre has a gender and an ethnicity (2).

As a consequence of seasonality (and the speed of trend turnover now often exceeds the bi annual rhythm of autumn/winter, spring/summer) the fashion industry faces what has been described as a ‘specific production problem of hyper innovation’ (3). There is no stability to the design specification of fashionable clothes. This lack of product standardisation is also characteristic of the fashion product due to the inconvenient variety of the human body; any single commercial garment has to be made in multiple variations of size.

Clothing manufacture has never undergone the complete transfer to mechanised production that has been the norm for other products. The hyper innovative nature of the fashion market leads to a demand for highly flexible production technology that does not need retooling as product specification changes. Since the nineteenth century this has been met by the sewing machine; this has served to reinforce the craft basis of clothing production rather than undermine it. The single operative still feeds textiles, complex in shape, and flexible, under the needle by hand.

Sewing machines are cheap and pose low barriers to market entry, consequently fashion manufacturing has, since the inception of ready to wear, been characterised by a multitude of small contractors with very low levels of industrial concentration. This has always been a convenient set of circumstances for the brand owners and retailers who control the design and marketing of fashion. Given their need for need quick response and flexibility at low cost, brands and retailers prefer to sub contract the actual manufacturing of clothes – the cut, make up and trim - rather than vertically integrate into manufacturing themselves.

Sub contracting to a multitude of small contractors, whose capital investment rarely extends beyond the sewing machine, not only provides extreme flexibility and shifts the fixed costs of manufacturing (premises, sewing machines) onto the producer; it also effectively outsources any ethical responsibility for the labour intensive process of making clothes. “Not our fault….. they signed our code of practise”.

The low barriers to market entry also explains the concentration of sweat shops among capital starved ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ in the industrialised world and the enthusiasm of newly industrialising nations to enter into clothing manufacture.

Obsolescence, the defining feature of fashion, creates products with a shelf life akin to vegetables, this reproduces the structural determinants in clothing manufacture that perpetuates the exploitation of labour for our personal adornment. Maybe our anxieties about fashion should extend beyond whether we are sufficiently à la mode. 

(1) Marx, a better analyst of nineteenth century political economy than a prophet, believed the sewing machine would lead to a rationalisation of clothing production which would end the “the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion”. His sometime co author, Fredrich Engels, in his 1844 analysis of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, made a comment which remains apposite a century and a half later: “It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers”.

(2) See labourbehindthelabel.org for details

(3) Green, Nancy, ‘Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York’, Durham, Duke University Press, 1997

I’m a fashion historian and feminist, raised in the US, in a period when something we might now call the ‘politics of appearance’ was at least covertly an issue for activists, who struggled to work out what ‘the personal is political’ meant for us –then the younger generation. This SHOWstudio project has made me realise that it’s not at all surprising that when I began researching the photographer Lee Miller this unexplored aspect of her life post- war and post- photography came to rather obsess me.

Fashionistas know that Gucci's Frida Giannini dubbed Miller her muse for her Autumn-Winter 07-08 collection, calling her “a pioneer - talented, passionate and fashionable, just like strong women of today." Miller was, of course, Vogue’s cover girl in 1928, and then regularly photographed by Steichen, Genthe and Hoyningen-Huene. Man Ray’s lover, muse and pupil in the early thirties, she became a photographer herself for Vogue and later served as their WWII correspondent in Europe. Briefly, post-WWII, she returned to fashion photography. But, by the mid-fifties Miller left Vogue and channelled her creativity into gourmet cooking and at times rather whimsical entertaining at her home with Roland Penrose, Farley Farm. Yet, the idea that this woman who’d once been a beauty and talent amidst the modern art scene in Paris and New York and then had been the only female photographer at the liberation of Dauchau and Buchenwald could basically retire – (much less do so in pop socks and ‘slacks’!) - seems to have many appalled friends and colleagues after the war.

Dave Scherman, the Life photographer, her comrade in WWII and her sometimes lover, wrote in the summer of 1946 that Miller was ‘getting old and with it getting fat and she won’t face up to it’. Her trouser-wearing in post-war Manhattan shocked her younger colleagues at American Vogue. Back in London, newly-appointed Vogue arts writer, Peggy Riley, (known today as Rosamund Bernier, famous for her talks at the Met) was also amazed by how Miller ‘had lost her delicate beauty’ and showed ‘a total disregard for her dress’. Her son has written that by 1955 Miller was in the grips of a deep depression, having ‘found herself unable to get any pleasure from sex’ after giving birth to him in 1948. He states that: 'Her hair was getting thinner and lifeless. The fat was piling on, making her body look coarse and bulky. To make matters worse, the woman who had once been described as a ‘snappy dresser’ was fast becoming a slob. She would turn up at smart dinner parties in scruffy or unsuitable clothes – calf-high stockings under a knee length skirt, or an ill-fitting jacket worn over slacks'.

Such statements make me wonder. Have any male WWII correspondents been similarly derided for being slovenly, while transforming themselves into gourmets? Surely, this raises questions about women and the ‘politics of appearance’. I fear that Miller’s other life- long traits – joking, swearing and drinking - were sexy and attractive in a twenty-year old Lee, but not so in a fifties mother or in a sixties Lady Penrose.

But, isn’t it important to reflect on the ‘issue’ from Miller’s angle? Perhaps fashion, which had captured her imagination only at times in her life, really seemed rather obscene after what she’d witnessed in the concentration camps. A recent find in the archives, penned to Alison Settle, then Vogue’s fashion editor, reveals this might well have been the case. Miller wrote the following lines in the Summer of 1951, when the Festival of Britain was in full tilt on the South Bank:

Dear Alison Settle, The French aren’t anywhere near as sensitive to the horrors as you think the English might be…gloomed by atom designs in textiles. The famous skimpy bathing costume was named ‘Bikini’ before the ashes had settled and last week, in Paris, a friend was wearing a new Dior hat…snow-white panama with a naval anchor called ‘Narvik’. I’m told Cecil Beaton, somewhere in print, described an elegant and attenuated creature as a ‘Belsen Beauty’ while there were still bodies on the ground in other unliberated camps. The ladies are though, I think, and would trim themselves with mice and spiders to be fashionable and remarkable….Yours lee

I am on my way back from a couple of days at the Paris shows. In the past 48 hours, I have seen collections that made me want to shop. I have also seen collections that made me think, and one that made my blood heat up to a rolling boil. But I am leaving Paris feeling quite satisfied that the worlds of fashion and politics, and the ability to make a statement with your clothes, are as strong as ever. It is simply up to us to be as engaged with the issues or as blissfully ignorant as we like.

For Viktor & Rolf, the issues are quite black and white. Their walking slogan clothes shouted ‘No!’ as emphatically as a contrary teenager. ‘What are we supposed to be saying no to?’ asked the editor next to me. Well, it seemed you could take your pick, but Viktor & Rolf were apparently saying no to fast fashion, even though their seams were hurriedly stapled together (with gold staples, no less) instead of painstakingly stitched. Now, I seem to recall a recent collaboration between V&R and the high street chain, H&M, which they didn’t seem too concerned about at the time, but they are right to raise the issue. The speed at which fashion is being produced and the rate we are throwing it away is simply unsustainable and irresponsible – contributing to the pollution of the planet, the exploitation of garment workers in the developing world, and feeding our feckless desire to consume, consume, consume.

For Vivienne Westwood, it might be too late to say no. On a roll after the publication of her manifesto, (how long before she forms her own political party? I can’t wait) her collection was called Chaos Point. ‘Scientists have warned that ecological crisis has reached tipping point and the destruction is now irreversible,’ she writes in her show notes. ‘Others believe the response of human beings to the crisis is one factor that can save us – provided enough of us wake up to the emergency but calls for new thinking (my manifesto recommends practice which will effect a change in thinking: we need a new ethic.)’ She used the naïve and primitive drawings of a class of seven and eight year olds to express her chaos theory. Her brief to the children included this sound advice: ‘Look up ecology in the dictionary …good management of the earth. Now you know something more than you did a minute ago – this is what life is about.’ There is hope for the future generations at least.

Another fashion house that is always looking for new ways forward is Issey Miyake. For one exciting moment, while reading the Miyake news sheet waiting for the show to begin, I thought Dai Fujiwara had come up with a solution to the world’s nappy landfill problem. He is experimenting with the idea of disposable clothing – the ultimate in fast fashion and something Viktor and Rolf would not approve of. But Fujiwara believes there is a need for clothes that can be thrown away – with as little impact as possible on the planet, of course – after a single use. He compares it to the convenience of disposable nappy. His biodegradeable dresses are an interesting idea, but I’m not sure if this is the way forward. Surely we don’t want to encourage society to become any more throwaway than it already is. If he can come up with a way to turn disposable nappies into clothing, however, he really would be onto something.

And finally, if I may, a short rant. The show that made my blood boil was Jean Paul Gaultier. I felt ashamed to sit so passively, watching a splayed zebra stitched to the back of a coat, a crocodile’s head worn as a hood, its once mighty tail trailing pathetically behind, and a seemingly endless parade of exotic skins and furs that followed. Why are we looking back to the Stone Age and the most primitive form of clothing known to man? After the show, nobody else seems concerned. But that is what makes the power of fashion as a political tool so subtle and subversive. The medium is the message, but more often than not, the message is studiously ignored. These are only clothes, after all.

Fashion has always been libertarian when it comes to sexuality and gender. Designers and photographers have long explored the boundaries of what is acceptable, to create images that test social mores. However, despite the role that fashion has arguably played in enabling individuals to explore gender and sexual identities, there is still a lack of progress in representing and exploring race and ethnicity.

Why is this? Firstly, it must be remembered that the fashion industry is part of the wider culture. It responds to and takes part in the construction of social and cultural ideals at any given period. Since fashion is often adept at exposing subconscious fears and desires, it can also delve deeper into national and global attitudes. The lack of black and Asian models, for example, must therefore be set alongside, on the one hand, the relatively few top-paid Hollywood stars who are black or ethnic minority, and on the other to the tiny number of black and ethnic minority MPs.

The fashionable aesthetics created by the industry are predominantly white. Too often when black and Asian models are used, and when designers reference non-white cultures, this is primarily to promote an image of exoticism, a concept which itself was constructed by white Westerners.

In recent years there has been much discussion in the wider media about the impact of fashion’s promotion of an ideal body image, but questions of race and ethnicity tend to be glossed over. The industry often claims that commercial concerns limit the use of black models. It is hard to think of another industry where a statement of this kind would pass without comment.

It is a great pity that the fashion industry, which prides itself on breaking taboos, should remain, with a few notable exceptions, so reactionary in this respect. This is a matter not just of inclusiveness, although that is clearly the main issue, but of extending ideals of beauty, visibility and representation to the wider population, and recognising the role fashion could potentially play in challenging the overwhelmingly white ideals that still dominate.

Crunch time is nearing. Fashion’s uneasy flirtation with eco issues, a flirtation that is riddled with inconsistencies and paradoxes, cannot continue much longer. For eco is no longer an environmental issue that preoccupies a minority of earnest activists. It’s a mainstream political hot potato affecting us all, from politicians to designers to consumers. 
For fashion, in particular, fence-sitting is not an option. The hard truth behind the rapid depletion of the world’s resources is that we must learn to consume less. But fashion is intrinsically linked to consumption. From clothes to mobile phones and cars, fashion is the driving force of modern consumer culture. Indeed, the recent retail industry emphasis on “fast fashion”, based on a faster turnover of trends - coupled with ultra-low prices - has encouraged us to buy more, not less. 
But we must buy less. This requires a fundamental shift in attitude in the fashion world. Could it be good news? Perhaps so. A return to quality rather than quantity. An emphasis on recycling and reinvention. A rebirth of DIY and craft skills. A focus on the regeneration of local production rather than the exploitation of cheap labour in the developing world.

None of this strikes me as a bleak vision for the future of fashion.

During my career as a fashion journalist, I’ve seen at least three green waves sweep through the industry. A season or two when organic cotton has been hip, when the potential of hemp and other apparently groovy fibres has been explored, when (in the most literal interpretation of eco-chic) the colour green has been hot.

Fashion is good at that kind of thing - a playful and transient reflection of contemporary concerns. But the time for playing is well past now. Fashion in the 21st century has to grow up.

For further reading, check out: 'Eco Chic: The Fashion Paradox' by Sandy Black, Black Dog, 2007 and 'Green is the New Black' by Tamsin Blanchard, Hodder & Stoughton, 2007.