Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Lynes, Associate Professor, School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED), University of Waterloo. Office hours: Wednesdays 10:00 am to 12:00 pm.

This course explores the idea of “fashion” — including trends in clothing, accessories, footwear and cosmetics — through a lens of sustainability. The course weaves together the history of consumer culture, the mechanics of the fashion industry, the environmental and social costs of how clothing is produced and discarded, and emerging alternatives ranging from ethical sourcing to the minimalist movement and circular economy design.

Looking Inward — What Is Fashion and What Is in Your Closet?

Introduction to the Course

The first week of ENBUS 375 invites students to begin not with grand theory but with a deeply personal act: taking an inventory of their own wardrobe. Before analyzing global supply chains or the ideology of consumption, the course grounds itself in the concrete reality of what each of us actually owns and wears. The assignment for this week asks students to catalogue their clothing — how many items they have, where each was made, how long they have had it, and how often they actually wear it. This apparently simple exercise quickly reveals something surprising: most of us own far more than we use, and we know remarkably little about where our clothes came from.

Fashion can be defined broadly as a popular or widely accepted style or practice at a particular time. In its most familiar sense it refers to clothing, footwear, accessories, and cosmetics — but the concept extends to furniture, language, and social behavior. What distinguishes fashion from clothing as a purely functional category is its relationship to time, status, identity, and social meaning. Fashion, by definition, changes. A garment that is fashionable this season will not be fashionable next season; the very impermanence is structural to the concept.

The fashion industry itself is enormous. As of 2019 the global fashion market was valued at approximately $531 billion USD. It encompasses design, raw material production (fiber, textile manufacture), garment manufacturing, logistics, retail, and end-of-life disposal. It employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide, with the heaviest manufacturing concentrated in South and Southeast Asia. The industry is deeply interconnected with questions of labor rights, environmental impact, and cultural expression.

COVID-19 and Fashion Trends (2020-2021)

The global pandemic that began in early 2020 disrupted fashion in ways that no marketing forecast had anticipated. Lockdowns, remote work, and the collapse of public social life changed what people needed from clothing almost overnight. The COVID-19 pandemic became, in effect, a natural experiment in what fashion means when the social contexts that drive it — offices, parties, restaurants, travel — are suddenly removed.

The lecture material for Week 1 was prepared by Dr. Lynes together with Heather Brown, a co-op student in Environmental Science. It identifies several dominant pandemic fashion trends that together tell a revealing story about the relationship between clothing, identity, and circumstance.

Tie-Dye: Revival of a DIY Tradition

One of the most immediately visible pandemic fashion phenomena was the revival of tie-dye. Google searches for tie-dye peaked in June 2020 at levels higher than at any point in the preceding five years. The trend made sense given the conditions: people were at home, had access to old clothing, wanted a creative project, and craved color. Tie-dye is casual, versatile, and requires no sewing skills — only fabric, dye, rubber bands, and patience.

The term “tie-dye” was coined in the mid-1960s in the United States, though the technique had been recorded in writing as early as 1941 (as “tied and dyed”). Tie-dye is a specific form of resist dyeing, a textile decorating tradition with roots going back thousands of years. In resist dyeing, portions of a fabric are physically manipulated — folded, twisted, pleated, crumpled, bound with string or rubber bands — before dye is applied, so that the areas under tension resist penetration by the dye and create patterns. The manipulations are called the “resists.”

Archaeological evidence shows resist dyeing in Peru as early as 500 to 810 AD during the pre-Columbian Late Stone Age. A scrap of cotton fabric discovered in 2007 still showed faint traces of the original design, dyed in indigo. Other traditions of resist dyeing include African batik (where wax is applied as a resist before immersion in dye), Indonesian batik, and Japanese shibori (characterized by its deep indigo and white patterns).

The pandemic tie-dye revival thus tapped into a practice with a very long cross-cultural lineage — one that had already been popularized in the 1960s counterculture as a symbol of individuality and anti-establishment values. That it reemerged in lockdown conditions, where self-expression through public dress was suddenly constrained, is meaningful: it suggests that people turn to textile creativity when ordinary channels of fashion consumption are closed.

Comfort and the Sweatsuit

Alongside tie-dye, the most significant COVID fashion trend was the near-universal shift toward comfort clothing. The color-coordinated sweatsuit — known in Australia as a “tracky-dack” — became the unofficial uniform of the pandemic. Its appeal was practical and psychological simultaneously: comfortable enough to work and sleep in, yet assembled enough to appear presentable on a video call. The “put-together-yet-still-feels-like-pajamas” quality that made it popular during lockdown may reflect a broader and lasting shift in what people expect from clothing.

Slippers became so sought-after in the 2020 holiday season that they sold out in many stores across North America. Heels and formal work shoes largely disappeared into closets. The category of athleisure — clothing designed for both athletic activity and casual everyday wear — had been predicted by fashion analysts to grow even before the pandemic. When home workouts and virtual fitness classes replaced gym memberships, athleisure became the dominant clothing category. Brands like Lululemon and Nike reported significant growth throughout 2020-2021. Almost a quarter of Americans indicated that athleisure was among their top three categories for spending stimulus payments.

The Work-From-Home Mullet

Remote work produced its own particular fashion logic. With video calls requiring only an upper-body presentation, many people developed what was cheerfully labeled the work-from-home mullet: a professional shirt or blouse on top paired with sweatpants or pajama bottoms below. Sales of tops and business shirts remained relatively strong while sales of business pants and formal skirts collapsed. This division of the body into a “performative front” and a “comfortable private back” is sociologically interesting: it reveals how much of everyday fashion is in fact performance, oriented toward the gaze of others, and how quickly we abandon performative dress when that gaze is removed.

Face Masks as Fashion

The face mask became, unexpectedly, the most consequential new fashion accessory in a generation. Early in the pandemic, masks were functional, homemade, and often improvised from whatever fabric was available. As time went on, people began to personalize masks: adding sports team logos, animal faces, smiley faces, fake teeth graphics, and other expressive elements. The mask became an extension of self-expression — a new surface of the body available for customization.

The initial scarcity of manufactured masks in North America created a community-driven sewing movement: people made masks for frontline workers, then for themselves, and then for others. This in turn revitalized home sewing skills that had largely atrophied, which then spilled over into other DIY projects. The crop top trend of 2020-2021 may partly have been fueled by this: cutting the bottom half off a shirt is one of the simplest home sewing modifications possible. TikTok filled up with clothing transformation videos, and upcycling — the practice of creatively repurposing existing garments rather than purchasing new ones — gained a new cultural visibility.

The Fashion Industry Under COVID: Economic Impacts

The pandemic’s economic impact on the fashion industry was severe. The global market, valued at $531 billion in 2019, was expected to decline to approximately $485 billion — a drop of nearly $50 billion. Retail stores closed. Supply chains were disrupted at multiple points. Orders from brands to manufacturers were cancelled, often after production had already begun, leaving factory workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other major producing countries without income or recourse. Fashion Revolution, a global advocacy organization, documented these supply chain ruptures and the human cost to garment workers.

At the same time, e-commerce accelerated dramatically. Online fashion retail accounted for almost 30% of all fashion retail sales in the United States during the pandemic period. This structural shift — from physical to digital retail — had implications for how fashion is presented, sold, and experienced, and for the sustainability of the logistics networks (particularly last-mile delivery and returns) that underpin online retail.

The pandemic thus simultaneously disrupted the fashion industry and accelerated transformations that had already been underway. The long-term question Dr. Lynes poses at the end of the Week 1 material is: what role will the current pandemic have on the future of consumerism — will it push us toward less, or more?

A Brief History of Consumerism

Opening Frame: The Devil Wears Prada and Fashion’s Invisible Hand

Week 2 opens with one of the most famous scenes in film representations of the fashion industry: the “cerulean sweater monologue” from David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. The scene features Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of a high-fashion magazine loosely modeled on Vogue, delivering a devastating lecture to her new assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who has laughed at the apparent identical appearance of two fashion belts.

Miranda’s monologue is worth quoting at length because it encapsulates a central argument of the course about how fashion works:

“You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.”

This monologue articulates what might be called the trickle-down theory of fashion: trends originate at the apex of the fashion system (luxury design houses, haute couture), move through mid-range department stores, and eventually reach mass-market and discount retail. The consumer who believes she has made a free and individual choice has in fact been guided — invisibly but systematically — by decisions made seasons earlier by a small group of people in the fashion industry. Whether we are fashion aficionados or deliberately indifferent to fashion, as the lecture argues, fashion has an impact on and affects all of us.

The World Before Consumer Culture

To understand how we arrived at the current culture of consumption, the course takes us back to the long sweep of economic history. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people on earth owned very little. The clothes they stood up in, a few bowls, a pot and a pan, perhaps a broom — and if things were going particularly well, some farming implements. Global GDP did not grow from year to year. The world was, in aggregate, as hard up in 1800 as it had been at the beginning of recorded time.

This was not primarily a failure of production capacity but of purchasing power. The vast majority of people produced subsistence crops and had no discretionary income — no money left over after meeting the basic necessities of survival. Without disposable income, there could be no market for consumer goods beyond the most basic necessities. And without such a market, there was no incentive to develop the manufacturing systems that would produce consumer goods at scale.

The First Consumer Revolution

Starting in the early eighteenth century in northwestern Europe — particularly in Britain — something changed. Economies began to expand and wages to rise. Families who had never before had money beyond what they needed to survive found they could purchase small luxuries: a comb, a mirror, a spare set of underwear, a pillow, thicker boots, or a towel. Their expenditure created what economists would call a virtuous economic cycle: the more people spent, the more businesses grew; the more businesses grew, the more wages rose; the more wages rose, the more people could spend.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, observers recognized that they were living through a period of epochal change. Historians have since described this as the world’s first consumer revolution.

In England’s cities, enormous new industries sprang up to supply demand for goods that had once been the preserve of the very rich. Consumers could purchase furniture from Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton; pottery from Wedgwood and Derby; cutlery from the smitheries of Sheffield. Best-selling magazines such as the Gallery of Fashion and The Ladies Magazine featured the latest styles in clothing and hair. Crucially, styles for clothes and hair — which had formerly gone unchanged for decades — now began to alter every year, often in extremely theatrical and impractical directions. By the early 1770s there was a craze for decorated wigs so tall that their tops could only be accessed by standing on a chair. Dr. Samuel Johnson wryly observed that he wondered whether prisoners were also soon to be hanged in a new way.

This cyclical, perpetually changing character of fashion — its planned obsolescence built not into the product but into the social meaning of style — is one of the most important structural features of the industry. It ensures continuous demand even from people who already have functional clothing.

The Church, Vanity, and Bernard Mandeville

The Christian Church looked on with profound disapproval. Up and down England, clergymen delivered bitter sermons against the new materialism, calling it vanity — a sin. Sons and daughters were to be kept away from shops. God would not look kindly on those who paid more attention to household decoration than the state of their souls.

But an intellectual revolution was underway that would fundamentally alter the moral and economic understanding of consumption. In 1723, a London physician named Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract titled The Fable of the Bees. Its argument was audacious: contrary to centuries of religious and moral teaching, what made countries rich — and therefore safe, honest, generous-spirited, and strong — was the apparently undignified activity of shopping for pleasure.

Mandeville argued that it was the consumption of what he called fripperies — hats, bonnets, gloves, butter dishes, soup tureens, shoehorns, and hair clips — that provided the engine for national prosperity. On the back of demand for such trifles, hospitals could be built, apprentices trained, and the poor supported. No one needed embroidered handbags, silk-lined slippers, or ice creams — but it was a blessing that fashion could prompt people to want them, because on the back of that want, an entire economy could function.

Mandeville presented his audience with a stark choice: a nation could be very high-minded, spiritually elevated, intellectually refined, and dirt poor — or it could be a slave to luxury, idle consumption, and very rich. His thesis shocked, but it convinced. Almost all of the great Anglophone economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century came around to his basic argument.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Counter-Argument

Not all thinkers accepted Mandeville’s framework without objection. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most impassioned philosophical voice of the eighteenth century, was shocked by the impact of the consumer revolution on the manners and social atmosphere of his native Geneva. He called for a return to a simpler, older way of life — the kind he associated with Alpine villages or with accounts he had read of Native American tribes. In such places, he argued, there was no concern for fashion, no one-upmanship around hair extensions or luxury goods.

Rousseau recommended closing Geneva’s borders and imposing crippling taxes on luxury goods, so that people’s energies could be redirected toward non-material values. He looked back with admiration to the austere martial spirit of Sparta. Yet — and this is philosophically significant — Rousseau did not dispute Mandeville’s basic premise. He agreed that the choice seemed to be between decadent consumption and wealth on the one hand, and virtuous restraint and poverty on the other. He simply, unusually, preferred virtue to wealth.

The Mandeville-Rousseau debate has continued to structure economic and political thinking ever since. Its terms reappear in ideological arguments between capitalists and communists, and between free marketeers and environmentalists. It is the underlying tension of this course: can we have both a functioning, wealth-generating economy and a sustainable, equitable world?

Adam Smith and the Hope for Enlightened Consumption

A more subtle path through this dilemma was suggested by Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist whose work is too often reduced to a simple apology for laissez-faire capitalism. In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Smith acknowledged the force of Mandeville’s argument: consumer societies do help the poor by providing employment based around satisfying sub-optimal purchases. All those embroidered lace handkerchiefs, jeweled snuffboxes, and miniature temples made of cream for dessert were flippant, Smith conceded, but they encouraged trade, created employment, and generated wealth.

However, in his earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith had made an interesting observation: people were already stuffing their pockets with small conveniences and buying coats with more pockets to carry even more. What mattered, he pointed out, was that people were looking at these purchases as a means of happiness. This was a profound shift from the earlier view — shared from Plato and the ancient Greeks through Augustine and the Christian Fathers to the Italian Renaissance — that the pursuit of things was wicked, dangerous, and corrupting.

More importantly, Smith held out the possibility that consumption did not invariably have to involve the trading of frivolous things. He saw the expansion of the Edinburgh book trade and understood how large a market higher education might become. He recognized that humans have many higher needs — for education, for self-understanding, for beautiful cities, for rewarding social lives — that require labor and intelligence to fulfill but that could in principle be the basis for a different kind of economy. The ultimate goal of capitalism, in Smith’s view, was to tackle happiness in all its complexities, psychological as well as material.

The reform of capitalism, as the BBC’s School of Life documentary screened in this week argues, hinges on what may seem an odd-sounding task: developing a new kind of consumerism focused on our higher needs rather than on vanities and superfluities.

Frederic Bastiat and the Consumer’s Perspective

The nineteenth-century French liberal economist Frederic Bastiat is reputed to have said on his deathbed: “We must learn to look at everything from the point of view of the individual, from the point of view of the consumer.” This framing — placing the consumer, rather than the producer or the state, at the center of economic analysis — became foundational to modern economic liberalism and to the marketing and advertising industries that followed.

Pop Art and the Culture of Consumption

By the mid-twentieth century, the dependence of modern economies on mass consumption had become so complete that artists began to treat it as material in its own right. The American sculptor Claes Oldenburg developed a reputation for taking modest consumer items — many of them food-related — and reproducing them at enormous scale in outdoor public spaces, in vibrant polyester or vinyl. In city squares where one might once have expected statues of political or religious figures, Oldenburg placed outsized hamburgers, giant cheesecakes, huge fries with ketchup, and his most famous work: a twelve-metre-high stainless-steel inverted ice cream cone.

Oldenburg’s work was simultaneously absurd and accurate. The scale of his objects only seemed superficially ridiculous; it rather precisely reflected the actual importance of mass-produced consumer goods in the collective economic destinies of modern nations. The deflated appearance of many of his giant burgers and pizzas hinted at a certain bathos — the cultural deflation that comes from recognizing that civilization’s achievements include optimizing the production of sweetened tomato paste.

Current Consumption Patterns: Fashion in Numbers

The course grounds this historical analysis in contemporary statistics that reveal the current scale of fashion consumption:

We consume (purchase) approximately 400% more clothing than we did two decades ago. Financial planners today recommend budgeting about 5% of household income for clothing, and the average person spends approximately $160 per month. The average woman has 103 items of clothing in her wardrobe, yet 21% of those items are identified as unwearable, 33% are too tight, 24% are too loose, and 12% have never been worn — leaving only about 10% of the wardrobe in active rotation. A comparable survey reported by Esquire found that men wear only about 13% of the items in their closets.

A comparison across the past century tells a striking story. In the 1900s, clothing accounted for approximately 15% of a typical household’s income. Today we spend around 5% of income on clothing — yet we own dramatically more garments. The explanation is that the price of clothing has fallen dramatically while incomes have risen. We spend three times less on clothing as a percentage of income, but buy far more items. The implication is that clothes have become cheaper, less durable, and more disposable.

Emulation, Patriotism, and Post-War Consumerism

After World War II, a significant ideological shift occurred in the United States. Consumer spending was reconceptualized not merely as the satisfaction of individual wants and needs, but as a civic duty — a patriotic act. Historian Lizabeth Cohen has documented how “the good purchaser devoted to ‘more, newer, and better’ was the good citizen,” because economic recovery after a decade and a half of Depression and war depended on a dynamic mass-consumption economy.

This mid-century framing linked consumer spending to national identity and moral virtue in ways that continue to echo in political and advertising discourse. The baby boomer generation grew up within this ideology: buying things was not just pleasurable, it was patriotic and responsible. The social psychology of emulation — wanting what others have, seeking to match or surpass the apparent consumption of peers — became a central driver of the consumer economy.

Class, Etiquette, and the Complexity of Social Signals

The Week 2 lecture closes with a clip from the 2019 film Downton Abbey, specifically the Royal Dinner Scene in which the Downton household serves King George V and Queen Mary. Dr. Lynes uses this clip to illustrate how formal dining — with its elaborate array of specialized cutlery and its complex rules of etiquette — functions as a vehicle for class distinction and social exclusion.

The analogy to fashion is direct. Just as formal place settings include specialized forks for pickles and shrimp whose function could as easily be served by a single ordinary fork, fashion encompasses thousands of garment categories, styling rules, and brand hierarchies whose function is not purely practical but social. Complexity creates the conditions for distinction: those who know the rules can signal their cultural capital; those who do not can be identified, judged, and excluded.

This connects to the sociological concept associated with Pierre Bourdieu: the idea that cultural knowledge (knowing which fork to use, which designer is prestigious this season, how to dress for which occasion) is a form of cultural capital that both reflects and reproduces social class.

The Week 2 lecture closes with an image of the sculpture The Way We Eat (2001) by Liu Xiao Xian (1963-), from the Queensland Art Gallery collection. On the left side, every conceivable eating utensil; on the right, a pair of chopsticks. The chopsticks can accomplish virtually every task that the entire left-side array can accomplish. The forest of specialized utensils is not a necessity but a social construction — a set of conventions that require consumption to participate in and that create the conditions for inclusion and exclusion. The question it poses for fashion: how do we go from a closet full of rarely-worn clothes to a carefully curated wardrobe — a set of proverbial chopsticks?

20 Iconic Items That Changed Fashion History

As a companion to the history-of-consumption lecture, Week 2 also includes a slide presentation on twenty iconic fashion items, prepared by Dr. Lynes and Heather Brown, inspired by Federico Rocca’s book A Matter of Fashion: 20 Iconic Items That Changed the History of Style (2013). The items selected include foundational garments and accessories whose histories illuminate broader themes of fashion, culture, industry, and sustainability.

Jeans: A Casual Revolution. Denim jeans represent perhaps the most significant democratization event in fashion history. Originally workwear for miners, cowboys, and laborers, denim jeans became globally ubiquitous through the twentieth century, crossing class lines that had previously seemed unbridgeable in dress. The casualization of fashion — the long historical shift toward comfort, practicality, and informality as acceptable everyday dress — finds no better emblem than jeans. Their sustainability profile is, however, deeply problematic: cotton cultivation is water-intensive, dyeing processes are chemically intensive, and denim manufacturing is one of the most polluting segments of the textile industry.

The Mariniere: From Boats to Cinema. The mariniere (navy and white striped shirt) has its origins in the uniforms of the French Navy, later adopted by Breton fishermen. Coco Chanel popularized it as a leisure garment in the early twentieth century, pairing it with wide-legged trousers to create a look that simultaneously evoked aristocratic resort culture and working-class authenticity. The mariniere’s history illustrates the appropriation dynamic in fashion: garments associated with lower-class or occupational contexts are absorbed into high fashion, stripped of their original meaning, and repackaged as style.

Louis Vuitton: The Logic of Luxury Travel. The Louis Vuitton trunk — designed in 1858 for the steamship and railway era, featuring flat tops (unlike dome-topped predecessors that could not be stacked) and Toile Monogram canvas — is an artifact of the intersection of fashion and modernity. Its famous monogram, introduced in 1896 to deter counterfeiting, became one of the most recognizable logos in history. Sustainability assessments of Louis Vuitton are mixed: the brand’s use of exotic animal skins and its opaque supply chain practices are concerns, despite the durability and longevity of its leather goods.

The Trench Coat. Originally developed for British Army officers in World War I (with contributions from both Burberry and Aquascutum), the trench coat illustrates how military necessity can become civilian fashion. Burberry attracted controversy in 2018 when it was reported to have destroyed 28 million pounds worth of unsold stock to protect brand exclusivity — a practice that has since led to significant sustainability criticism and changed business practices.

The Moncler Puffer Jacket. Moncler (founded 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, France) originally made sleeping bags and tents before pivoting to quilted down jackets for the 1954 Italian expedition to K2. The puffer jacket became a global fashion item, and Moncler has in recent years positioned itself as a sustainability leader among luxury outerwear brands, including featuring on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.

Lacoste: The Logo as Status Marker. Rene Lacoste, the tennis champion nicknamed “the crocodile,” founded his sportswear brand in 1933. The embroidered crocodile on the chest of his polo shirt was one of the earliest examples of an exterior visible brand logo — a practice that transformed clothing from a surface for self-expression into a surface for brand display.

The Little Black Dress. Coco Chanel’s 1926 introduction of the little black dress is conventionally cited as a democratizing moment in fashion: a simple, versatile, affordable garment that could be dressed up or down, worn by women of different classes and body types, and adapted for many occasions. The American edition of Vogue, on its 1926 publication, compared the LBD to a Ford — meaning it would become a universal fashion staple. The LBD’s significance for this course lies partly in what it says about wardrobe minimalism: a single, well-chosen, durable garment can serve more social functions than a wardrobe of disposable fast-fashion items.

The Hermes Kelly and Birkin Bags. The Hermes Kelly bag (named for Grace Kelly) and the Birkin bag (designed in 1984 for actress Jane Birkin) are among the most valuable fashion accessories in the world. A new Birkin bag can cost between $9,000 and $500,000 depending on material and configuration; secondary market prices often exceed retail. They exemplify the economics of artificial scarcity — Hermes controls supply to maintain desirability — and of investment-grade fashion, in which clothing and accessories function as asset classes.

The Hermes Carre. The Hermes silk square scarf, introduced in 1937, is among the few fashion items that can simultaneously be art object, investment, and wardrobe staple. Designed by independent artists whose work is curated and commissioned by Hermes, each carre design is produced in limited quantities and printed on silk woven at the Hermes-owned Perrin mill in France. The carre’s longevity — individual scarves remain collectible and wearable for decades — is a model of fashion durability in tension with fast fashion’s disposability.

Chanel No. 5. Introduced in 1921, Chanel No. 5 was the first perfume to be created by a professional perfumer (Ernest Beaux) rather than blended from natural ingredients by an aristocratic household. Its success established the modern luxury fragrance industry and demonstrated that the commodification of intangibles — scent, mood, identity — could be as commercially powerful as the commodification of clothing.

Killer Fashion — The Monsters in Your Closet

Fashion and Its Hidden Dangers

Week 3 addresses one of the most viscerally confronting aspects of fashion history: the ways in which garments and accessories have, throughout history, harmed or killed the people who wore them, made them, or disposed of them. The lecture introduces the concept of “killer fashion” as a lens for examining the gap between fashion’s polished, aspirational surface and the human and environmental costs that lie behind it.

Historical examples of killer fashion include lead-based cosmetics used in face powder from ancient Rome through the eighteenth century, causing neurological damage in wearers. Green arsenic dye (Scheele’s Green), fashionable in nineteenth-century clothing, wallpaper, and artificial flowers, caused arsenic poisoning in both wearers and the factory workers who produced the items. The dye was used on everything from ball gowns to the artificial flowers that middle-class women wore in their hair, and resulted in documented deaths among workers in flower factories.

Radium paint was used in the early twentieth century to create luminescent watch dials, applied by hand by workers — predominantly young women — known as the Radium Girls, who were instructed to point their brushes with their lips and died of radiation-induced cancers and bone deterioration. Victorian crinoline skirts created a genuine fire hazard: the cage structure beneath skirts held them out from the body in a way that made them highly susceptible to catching fire from hearth flames or candles. Tight corsets deformed ribs and internal organs when worn habitually from childhood or laced too tightly, contributing to respiratory problems and complications in pregnancy.

These historical examples are not merely curious antiquities. They raise contemporary parallels: chemical residues in fast-fashion garments (formaldehyde used as a wrinkle-resistant finish; azo dyes that can release carcinogenic amines), occupational health hazards in garment factories (sandblasting of denim causing silicosis in workers), and the psychological harms of fashion-industry beauty standards.

Fast Fashion vs. Sustainable Fashion

The Rise of Fast Fashion

Fast fashion is the dominant business model of the contemporary clothing industry, characterized by rapid production cycles, low prices, high volume, and short product lifespans. The model involves compressing the time between trend identification and product delivery from months to weeks or days; producing clothing in very large volumes at the lowest possible cost through global outsourcing to low-wage countries; pricing clothing so cheaply that it is treated as nearly disposable; and replacing seasonal collections with continuous “micro-seasons” — some fast fashion retailers introduce new items weekly or even daily.

The environmental and social costs of fast fashion are severe and well-documented. The fashion industry is responsible for approximately 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions — more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. It is the second-largest consumer of the world’s water supply. It is the primary source of ocean microplastic pollution, because synthetic fabrics (polyester, nylon, acrylic) shed microfibers when washed, which pass through wastewater treatment systems and enter waterways.

Approximately 85% of textiles produced globally end up in landfills or are incinerated. The average garment is worn only seven times before being discarded. In total, the industry produces an estimated 92 million tonnes of textile waste annually.

The Geography of Fashion Production

The vast majority of fast fashion is manufactured in a small number of countries: Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, and a few others. Workers in these countries — the majority of whom are women — typically earn wages far below what would constitute a living wage in the context of their local economy. The fashion industry’s constant pressure on suppliers to cut prices forces factories to reduce labor costs, which translates directly into lower wages and worse working conditions.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh in April 2013 — killing 1,134 garment workers and injuring more than 2,500 — stands as the single most devastating event in the recent history of the fashion industry’s labor crisis. The building housed multiple garment factories producing for major Western brands. Workers had reported cracks in the structure the previous day and been told to return to work anyway. The disaster catalyzed the global Fashion Revolution movement (established April 24, 2014, on the one-year anniversary) and its annual Fashion Revolution Week, during which consumers are encouraged to ask brands “Who made my clothes?”

Sustainable Fashion: An Overview

Sustainable fashion encompasses a broad range of practices and principles aimed at reducing the environmental and social impact of the fashion industry. Eco-fashion or green fashion focuses primarily on environmental dimensions: using organic or recycled materials, minimizing water and chemical use in production, reducing carbon footprint in logistics. Ethical fashion focuses on social dimensions: ensuring fair wages and safe conditions throughout the supply chain, preventing child labor, protecting workers’ rights to organize. Slow fashion, the antithesis of fast fashion, values durability, quality, transparency, and the local or artisanal production of clothing. Slow fashion garments are designed to last years or decades rather than seasons.

The tension between these dimensions is real: a garment can be environmentally sustainable in its material composition but made under exploitative labor conditions, or vice versa. Genuinely sustainable fashion requires attention to the full lifecycle and supply chain.

How Is Clothing Labelled?

The Proliferation of Eco-Labels

Walk into any clothing retailer today and you are likely to encounter a profusion of labels, tags, and certifications making claims about environmental or social responsibility: “organic cotton,” “Fair Trade,” “B Corp,” “Bluesign,” “OEKO-TEX,” “recycled polyester,” “carbon neutral,” “made with sustainable practices.” The sheer volume of these claims makes it extremely difficult for consumers to evaluate them. Are they meaningful? Independently verified? Applied to the entire garment or only part of it? Governed by rigorous standards or essentially self-declared?

Greenwashing — the practice of making misleading or unsubstantiated environmental claims — is a persistent problem in the fashion industry. H&M’s “Conscious Collection” labeling has been the subject of scrutiny for implying greater sustainability credentials than the collection’s manufacturing practices warranted. The Norwegian Consumer Authority found in 2022 that H&M’s sustainability claims violated marketing regulations.

Key certification standards relevant to fashion include the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which covers organic fiber certification through the entire textile supply chain including social criteria; OEKO-TEX Standard 100, which certifies that every component of a textile product has been tested for harmful substances; the Bluesign standard, which focuses on water, energy, and chemical use in textile manufacturing; Fair Trade certification, which ensures fair pricing and working conditions; and the Good On You platform, which rates fashion brands on People, Planet, and Animals dimensions.

Textiles and Their Impact

The Environmental Profile of Major Fibers

The environmental impact of a garment begins with the fiber from which it is made. Conventional cotton is one of the most water-intensive crops in the world. The production of a single cotton T-shirt requires approximately 2,700 liters of water. Cotton occupies about 2.5% of global agricultural land but accounts for 16% of global insecticide use and 7% of herbicide use. Organic cotton reduces chemical impacts but does not eliminate water intensity.

Polyester is made from petroleum and is energy-intensive to produce. Its primary environmental liability, beyond carbon emissions, is microplastic pollution: when polyester garments are washed, they shed synthetic microfibers that are too small to be captured by standard wastewater treatment and ultimately enter aquatic ecosystems.

Nylon, like polyester, is a synthetic petroleum-derived fiber. Its production generates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas approximately 300 times more potent than CO2. Wool is natural, renewable, and biodegradable, but its environmental profile depends heavily on how sheep are managed. Linen (from flax) and hemp are among the more environmentally favorable natural fibers: both can be grown with minimal pesticides and irrigation. Silk is a protein fiber raised from silkworm larvae; its production raises animal welfare questions and involves significant chemical use in processing.

Dyeing and Chemical Processes

After fiber, dyeing and finishing are the most environmentally intensive stages of textile production. The fashion industry uses approximately 8,000 synthetic chemicals in its production processes. Textile dyeing is the second-largest source of industrial water pollution globally, primarily through the discharge of untreated wastewater into rivers in countries with weak environmental enforcement.

Azo dyes, the most commonly used class of synthetic dye, include some compounds that can decompose to release carcinogenic aromatic amines. These are regulated in the European Union but less consistently elsewhere. Formaldehyde, used as a wrinkle-resistant and anti-static finish, can cause contact dermatitis and is a known carcinogen at higher exposures.

Alternative Textiles and Bio-Based Innovation

The Search for Sustainable Fibers

The limitations of both conventional natural fibers and synthetic fibers have driven significant innovation in the search for more sustainable textile materials. Lyocell (Tencel) is a regenerated cellulose fiber made from wood pulp (often eucalyptus or beech) using a closed-loop solvent process in which 99% of the solvent is recovered and reused. It is biodegradable, requires significantly less water than cotton, and is widely regarded as one of the most environmentally favorable conventional textile fibers.

Recycled polyester (rPET) is made from post-consumer plastic, often recycled PET bottles or pre-consumer textile waste. It has a significantly lower energy and carbon footprint than virgin polyester, but does not eliminate the microplastic shedding problem.

Pinatex is a leather-alternative material made from the fibrous leaves of pineapple plants — an agricultural by-product developed by Dr. Carmen Hijosa, produced in the Philippines and providing additional income to pineapple farming communities. Mycelium leather is made from the root structure of fungi, grown on agricultural waste substrates. Companies including Bolt Threads (Mylo) and Ecovative are commercializing mycelium-based materials as leather alternatives. Bio-fabricated textiles represent the frontier of materials innovation: fibers produced by microorganisms engineered to produce silk proteins, cellulose, or other structural materials in bioreactors.

The course includes a guest podcast by Amaryah DeGroot on the challenges and opportunities of textile recycling — a sector that remains nascent despite growing urgency, primarily because of the technical difficulty of separating fiber blends and the economic challenges of making recycling commercially viable at scale.

Cosmetics and Their Impacts

The Beauty Industry and Sustainability

The cosmetics and personal care industry is closely intertwined with the fashion system and shares many of its environmental and ethical tensions. The global cosmetics market is valued at over $500 billion USD.

Ingredient concerns in cosmetics include: microbeads (tiny plastic spheres used as exfoliants, now banned in many jurisdictions), palm oil and its derivatives (linked to deforestation in Southeast Asia), synthetic musks and other chemicals with endocrine-disrupting potential, parabens (preservatives whose safety has been debated), and heavy metals in pigments.

Animal testing remains a significant ethical concern in the cosmetics industry. While the European Union has banned the sale of cosmetics tested on animals since 2013, companies wishing to sell in the Chinese market faced a structural conflict that led to many nominally “cruelty-free” brands conducting or commissioning animal testing for Chinese market compliance. Packaging is one of the industry’s most significant environmental liabilities. Cosmetics packaging is typically a complex combination of materials that is difficult to recycle. The industry produces an estimated 120 billion units of packaging annually.

Supply Chain Responsibility — A Circular Economy Perspective

Understanding Fashion Supply Chains

A typical fashion garment passes through dozens of hands before reaching the consumer: fiber production, spinning, weaving or knitting, dyeing and finishing, cutting and sewing, quality control, packaging, export logistics, import logistics, distribution, and retail. Each stage of this process is typically performed by a different company in a different country, linked by subcontracting relationships that can be several tiers deep. The brand whose name appears on the label may have little or no direct visibility into conditions beyond its first-tier suppliers.

This structural opacity has historically allowed brands to disclaim responsibility for conditions in their supply chains. The post-Rana Plaza era has seen growing pressure on brands to map and monitor their supply chains more thoroughly, driven by regulation (including the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015, the French Duty of Vigilance Law 2017, and the growing body of mandatory human rights due diligence legislation in Europe), by civil society campaigning, and by investor pressure.

The Circular Economy

The concept of the circular economy offers an alternative framework to the dominant linear “take-make-dispose” model of industrial production. In a circular economy, materials and products are kept in use for as long as possible through strategies of reuse (extending the life of a garment through continued wearing, resale, or donation), repair (maintaining and mending garments to extend their useful life), remanufacturing (using components of used garments to make new products), recycling (breaking down textile materials into fibers or chemicals for new textiles), and composting (returning natural fiber materials to the soil at end of life).

The course features a guest podcast by Prof. Komal Habib on fashion and the circular economy, exploring both the opportunities and the structural barriers to genuinely circular material flows in the textile industry. Key barriers include the prevalence of fiber blends (which are technically difficult to separate and recycle), the use of non-recyclable components, the lack of infrastructure for textile collection and sorting, and the economics of recycled fiber production.

Re-imagining the Industry — Sustainable Design from the Ground Up

Design as Intervention

The most powerful point of intervention in a garment’s environmental lifecycle is at the design stage. Decisions made at design — about materials, construction methods, durability, ease of repair, end-of-life recyclability — determine the overwhelming majority of the garment’s environmental impact before a single stitch has been sewn.

Cradle-to-Cradle design, developed by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, proposes that all materials in a product should be designed either for a biological cycle (where they can safely biodegrade and return to the soil) or a technical cycle (where they can be recovered and reused indefinitely without losing quality). Genuinely Cradle-to-Cradle fashion would require elimination of dyes and finishes that contaminate fiber for recycling, use of only mono-material textiles to facilitate mechanical recycling, and design of closures and seams that can be easily disassembled.

Biomimicry in textile design seeks to learn from biological systems — the structural color of butterfly wings, the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, the extraordinary tensile strength of spider silk — to create materials and processes that achieve high performance with minimal environmental impact.

The course includes a guest podcast from Mikayla Wujec, founder of Alder Apparel, a Canadian sustainable fashion brand, exemplifying the challenges and opportunities of building a sustainable fashion business from the ground up: sourcing ethical and environmentally responsible materials, maintaining transparency about supply chains, pricing that reflects true costs, and educating consumers about why sustainable fashion costs more than fast fashion.

Re-Design Through the 6Rs

The 6Rs Framework

The 6Rs framework provides a systematic vocabulary for thinking about sustainability in design and consumption. Originally developed in product lifecycle analysis and adapted for fashion:

Rethink: Challenge the need for a product altogether. Before designing or buying a new garment, ask whether the need can be met in another way.

Refuse: Decline to participate in consumption patterns that are harmful — whether by choosing not to buy fast fashion, not to purchase from brands with documented labor violations, or not to accept “free” clothing that is effectively waste.

Reduce: Consume less overall. Buy fewer, better-quality garments. Shift toward a smaller, more carefully chosen wardrobe.

Reuse: Extend the life of garments through continued use, resale, donation, swapping, or rental.

Repair: Maintain and mend clothing to prevent premature disposal. Sewing skills, once near-universal, have become rare — their recovery is part of the sustainable fashion movement.

Recycle: At end of life, ensure that textile materials are diverted from landfill into fiber recovery processes.

The “If I had $500” assignment in this week challenges students to practice what the course has taught: curating a selection of sustainable fashion or cosmetics items within a budget, applying criteria learned over the term about materials, labeling, supply chain responsibility, durability, and personal need.

Applying Sustainability Principles — Synthesis and Forward Thinking

From Theory to Practice

The final week of ENBUS 375 brings together the course’s themes into an integrated framework for sustainable consumption in fashion and cosmetics. At its core, the course has been asking a single question that turns out to be very difficult: how do we participate in a fashion system that is structured around overconsumption, planned obsolescence, and externalized costs, while making choices that are more aligned with our values?

The honest answer is that individual consumer choices, however well-intentioned, cannot by themselves transform an industry whose problems are structural and systemic. Choosing organic cotton jeans, shopping at secondhand stores, and supporting ethical brands are all meaningful actions, but they operate within and alongside a system that produces millions of tonnes of textile waste annually, employs millions of workers in substandard conditions, and has externalized its environmental costs onto ecosystems and communities that have no voice in its governance.

The course therefore concludes with a call for action at multiple levels: consumer choices, yes, but also brand accountability, supply chain transparency, regulatory frameworks, industry innovation, and cultural change in how we understand the relationship between identity, consumption, and wellbeing.

The Ideology of Consumerism Revisited

The BBC’s School of Life documentary screened in Week 2 frames the central question of the course: is there a way to draw on the best aspects of consumer capitalism without suffering its worst sides — environmental destruction, exploitative labor practices, and the psychological treadmill of perpetual dissatisfaction?

Adam Smith’s answer was hopeful: he saw no reason why the same energy that had driven consumption of frivolities could not be redirected toward genuinely enriching goods and services — education, beautiful environments, rewarding social institutions. The reform of capitalism, on this reading, hinges on developing a new kind of consumerism: one oriented toward our higher needs rather than toward vanity and superfluity.

The minimalism movement represents one contemporary expression of this aspiration. But there is an important distinction between minimalism as a lifestyle choice (an individual response to the anxiety of overconsumption) and the structural transformation that would be required to produce a genuinely sustainable fashion industry.

The Minimalism Movement: A Counter-Narrative to Consumption

From Compulsory Consumption to Intentional Living

The documentary film Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2015, directed by Matt D’Avella, featuring Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of “The Minimalists”) provides the course with a counterpoint to the dominant consumer culture. The film’s central claim is not that consumption is inherently wrong, but that compulsory consumption — buying things because that is what we are expected to do, because advertising has created artificial desires, because accumulation is mistaken for achievement — has produced widespread unhappiness alongside its environmental costs.

“There’s nothing wrong with consumption. The problem is compulsory consumption,” one interviewee states in the film. “We’re tired of acquiring things because that’s what we’re supposed to do.” The film’s participants describe a pattern familiar from the history of consumerism discussed earlier in the course: we pursue the acquisition of objects with great energy, but “nothing ever quite does it for us,” and “the hunt makes us miserable.” The new version of a product arrives, and the previous one becomes a source of dissatisfaction. The pursuit of happiness through consumption is structurally self-defeating: the happiness anticipated from an acquisition never matches the happiness experienced, and the gap immediately generates a new acquisition desire.

The documentary connects personal psychology to political economy: “This is not something that just happened yesterday. This is something that has been sold to us over the past hundred years by those that want to make a whole lot of money.” This is precisely the history traced in the Mandeville-Rousseau-Smith narrative: a deliberate ideology of consumption that has served powerful economic interests and has been reinforced by advertising, social norms, and the structural design of the economy.

One participant recounts reducing their possessions to 51 items. Another family estimates they have sold or donated at least 90% of their belongings. The experience described is consistently one of liberation rather than deprivation: “As I started to move that stuff out, I was able to finally realize what I had sacrificed.” The minimalist turn is presented not as asceticism but as the recovery of agency — “taking control of my life and stop being told what to do and actually deciding what I wanted to do.”

The film also makes the ecological connection explicit: “This same thing that’s not making us happy is also causing the degradation of our habitat.” The personal psychology of compulsory consumption and the environmental crisis of industrial overconsumption are not separate problems; they are the same problem viewed from different angles.

Applied specifically to fashion, the minimalist movement advocates for a capsule wardrobe — a carefully selected collection of versatile, high-quality, timeless garments that can be combined in multiple ways to meet a wide range of occasions, replacing the bloated, underused closet of the average consumer. It advocates buying less and better, investing in garments that are durable and genuinely useful rather than chasing trends. It encourages mindful consumption: considering each purchase deliberately — Do I genuinely need this? Will I wear it regularly? Is it worth the environmental and social costs it represents?

Mindful Consumption: A Customer-Centric Framework (Sheth, Sethia & Srinivas, 2011)

The academic foundation for mindful consumption in this course is provided by Jagdish Sheth, Nirmal Sethia, and Shanthi Srinivas, “Mindful Consumption: A Customer-Centric Approach to Sustainability” (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2011). Their framework offers a systematic critique of conventional sustainability approaches and a positive alternative grounded in the consumer.

Sheth et al. argue that current corporate sustainability strategies have three major deficiencies: they do not directly focus on the customer; they do not recognize the scale of threats arising from rising global overconsumption; and they do not take a holistic approach that integrates all three dimensions of sustainability (environmental, social, economic).

The three modes of problematic overconsumption Sheth et al. identify are:

• Acquisitive consumption: purchasing for possession and accumulation beyond actual need — buying more than one uses, holding items one never uses.
• Repetitive consumption: repurchasing existing products before their useful life has ended, driven by fashion cycles, planned obsolescence, or marketing pressure.
• Aspirational consumption: purchasing to signal status, identity, or aspiration — buying things for what they communicate about the purchaser rather than for their use value.

All three modes are described as “self-defeating” because the psychological literature consistently shows that material acquisition does not produce the lasting happiness it promises (consistent with the hedonic treadmill and research by Csikszentmihalyi, Kasser, Myers, and others cited by Sheth et al.).

The overconsumption data Sheth et al. cite is striking: North America and Western Europe, with 12% of world population, account for 60% of private consumption spending; the US in 2006 accounted for 32% of global consumption expenditure with only 5% of world population. Humanity’s current consumption level requires resources equivalent to 1.4 earths; if all people consumed at American levels, five earths would be needed.

The CCS framework reframes the three sustainability dimensions from a consumer perspective:

• Environmental dimension: the impact of consumption on environmental well-being — specifically the human health consequences of environmental change caused by consumption.
• Social dimension: the impact of consumption on personal and community well-being — quality of life, life satisfaction, family welfare, community cohesion.
• Economic dimension: the impact of consumption on consumers’ economic well-being — debt burden, financial stress, earning pressures, work-life balance.

This reframing is strategically significant for fashion: fast fashion’s environmental dimension is widely discussed (carbon emissions, water use, textile waste), but its social and economic dimensions are equally important — the link between overconsumption and consumer debt, work intensification, and diminished personal well-being.

The business case for mindful consumption that Sheth et al. articulate is that fostering MC aligns customer self-interest with business self-interest. Customers who consume mindfully incur less debt, experience less stress, and develop more sustainable and loyal relationships with brands — all outcomes that serve long-term business interests even as they reduce short-term volume.

Theoretical Frameworks Across the Course

Aspers and Godart: A Sociological Definition of Fashion (2013)

Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart’s article “Sociology of Fashion: Order and Change” (Annual Review of Sociology, 2013) provides the course with its most rigorous sociological definition of fashion and a synthesis of the field’s classical and contemporary strands.

Aspers and Godart define fashion as “an unplanned process of recurrent change against a backdrop of order in the public realm.” This definition is notable for several reasons. It insists that fashion involves genuine change (not merely variation) and that this change is recurrent (cyclical, not one-directional). It specifies that fashion operates in the public realm — distinguishing it from purely private style choices. And the phrase “against a backdrop of order” captures the paradox at the heart of fashion: change is only perceivable, and only meaningful, against a stable background of conventions, categories, and expectations.

Related Concepts Distinguished by Aspers and Godart

Aspers and Godart carefully distinguish fashion from four related but conceptually distinct phenomena:

Fads (or crazes) are sudden changes that spread quickly and fade rapidly. Fashion differs from fads in two ways: first, fashions are connected to previous fashions (they have genealogy), while fads appear random and unpredictable; second, fashions are inherently limited in their diffusion because they are driven by distinction — once everyone adopts a fashion, it ceases to be fashionable — while fads carry no such restriction.

Innovation involves change that implies improvement and produces longer-lasting alterations to social practices. Fashion changes do not necessarily represent improvement; they represent change relative to prevailing norms of taste, which are themselves contingent and contested.

Style is “a combination of silhouette, construction, fabric, and details that exists, and which thus can be used, over time” (Welters & Lillethun). A style is a lasting cultural reference — the punk style, the preppy style — that can be subjected to fashion trends without itself being a fashion.

Trend is a broader directional movement — a “direction in which fashion may be heading” — that encompasses several fashions and outlines some stylistic aspects. Fashions are less general than trends.

The Origins and Domain of Fashion

Aspers and Godart note that fashion became a significant social force with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in Europe, with some scholars dating this to the European Renaissance (fourteenth century) and others to around 1700. However, they challenge the assumption that fashion originated in the West, pointing to evidence of fashion phenomena in medieval Japan and ancient Rome. Fashion is, on their account, probably as old as dress itself and likely appeared in several civilizations simultaneously.

Crucially, fashion is not restricted to clothing and dress. Blumer (1969) listed painting, sculpture, music, drama, architecture, dancing, household decoration, medicine, business management, literature, and philosophy as all subject to fashion. Zuckerman extends this to managerial practices, arguing that fashion cycles can emerge in any domain where “quality differences are relatively minimal” and valuations are socially constructed rather than anchored in objective criteria. Aspers and Godart embrace this domain-general view: fashion is “a central social phenomenon, mechanism, or process that can be applied to any domain.”

Etymology

The word “fashion” derives from the twelfth-century Old French façon (ways of making and doing things), itself from the Latin factio (making and doing together), which carried social connotations. In the sixteenth century, the English word acquired its more contemporary meaning of conforming to prevailing tastes and implying change. The French mode and Italian/Spanish moda derive from the Latin modus (manners), connecting fashion to concepts of modernity and, historically, to capitalism.

Thorstein Veblen and Conspicuous Consumption

The American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) introduced the concept of conspicuous consumption in his 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen observed that as industrial capitalism generated a new moneyed class, its members distinguished themselves through the visible, deliberate non-performance of useful labor — what he called conspicuous leisure — and through the ostentatious display of expensive goods. Fashion, in Veblen’s analysis, is deeply implicated in this system. Elaborate, expensive, fragile, and impractical dress signals leisure status: the wearer cannot possibly be engaged in physical labor and must therefore be wealthy enough not to need to be. The corset, the crinoline, the stiletto heel — all impair physical movement in ways that mark their wearers as above the need for practicality.

Veblen also introduced the concept of vicarious consumption — the idea that household members display wealth on behalf of the patriarch by wearing expensive clothing and accessories. This captures something real about the social function of fashion as a vehicle for displaying household wealth.

Georg Simmel and the Sociology of Fashion

The German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) offered a complementary analysis in his 1905 essay “Fashion.” For Simmel, fashion serves two contradictory social functions simultaneously: it enables individuals to signal conformity with a social group while also enabling differentiation from those below them in the social hierarchy. These two drives — the desire to belong and the desire to distinguish — are perpetually in tension, and it is precisely this tension that keeps fashion in motion.

Once a fashion is adopted broadly enough that it no longer signals distinction, the fashion-forward must move on to something new. This produces the fashion cycle: the endless rotation of new trends replacing old ones not because the old ones have become functionally obsolete but because they have lost their power as signals of distinction.

Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Capital

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) developed the concept of habitus — the set of dispositions, tastes, and bodily practices that individuals acquire through socialization and that shape their perception and practice in the world, including their taste in clothing, food, and cultural goods. In his landmark study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Bourdieu demonstrated empirically that taste is not random or purely individual but is systematically structured by class position. What appears to be an aesthetic preference — for certain styles of clothing, certain types of music, certain foods — is in fact the internalized expression of a class position, functioning to reproduce social hierarchies by marking those who have (or lack) the cultural capital to participate in high-status cultural fields.

The Fashion Industry: Structure and Power

Luxury Fashion vs. Accessible Fashion

The fashion industry is organized around a steep hierarchy, from haute couture at the apex down through ready-to-wear luxury, premium brands, mainstream retail, and fast fashion at the base.

Haute couture (French: high sewing) refers to custom-made, hand-sewn garments produced by the great French fashion houses for an extremely small clientele. The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture sets the criteria for membership: a house must present collections of at least 50 original designs twice per year and produce garments to order in its own Parisian atelier, employing at least fifteen staff. Haute couture is economically insignificant (fewer than 2,000 clients globally) but culturally hegemonic: it sets the creative agenda from which all other tiers of the industry draw direction.

The environmental and social critique of the fashion industry targets primarily the fast fashion segment, but luxury fashion is not automatically more sustainable. As the Burberry stock-burning controversy illustrates, luxury brands also engage in environmentally problematic practices — including the deliberate destruction of unsold goods to protect brand exclusivity.

The Role of Fashion Media and Advertising

Fashion media — magazines, advertising, social media — plays a constitutive role in creating and disseminating the social meanings that make fashion function. Advertising in the fashion industry is not merely information about available products but the construction of desire itself — the systematic creation of wants that did not exist before the advertising created them. Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Vance Packard’s earlier The Hidden Persuaders (1957) are important critical texts in understanding advertising’s role in consumer culture.

Social media, and particularly influencer marketing, has transformed the mechanisms of fashion advertising without changing its fundamental logic. The aspirational lifestyle image posted by an influencer functions in the same way as a magazine advertisement: it constructs a desire and then offers a means of partially satisfying it through consumption.

Ethical Consumption: Is Individual Action Sufficient?

The Structural Limits of Consumer Choice

One of the most important and difficult questions this course raises is whether individual consumer choices — however thoughtful and well-intentioned — are adequate to the scale of the fashion industry’s sustainability challenges. The argument for consumer agency is intuitive: if consumers systematically demand sustainable products, the market will supply them. The argument against is also compelling: the fashion industry has been designed deliberately to produce, reinforce, and exploit consumption desires; its products are priced at levels that make sustainable alternatives difficult to access for most consumers; its supply chains are so complex and opaque that even highly motivated consumers find it nearly impossible to know whether a “sustainable” label is meaningful; and the structural forces that keep fast fashion cheap are maintained by economic and regulatory systems that individual consumers cannot change by shopping differently.

This does not mean that individual action is meaningless. But placing the entire burden of change on individual consumers displaces responsibility from the actors — brands, investors, regulators — who actually have the power to change the system.

Mindful consumption involves becoming aware of consumption habits and their implications, developing criteria for purchase decisions that go beyond price and trend, questioning whether purchases are driven by genuine need or manufactured want, and considering the full lifecycle implications of a purchase. This awareness is necessary but not sufficient. The course ultimately argues for a combination of informed individual practice and engagement with the structural conditions — regulatory frameworks, brand accountability, labor rights, circular economy infrastructure — that shape what it is possible and practical for individuals to choose.

Summary: Key Themes and Concepts

This course has traced a continuous thread from the first consumer revolution of the eighteenth century to the pandemic fashion trends of 2020-2021. That thread connects the intellectual history of consumerism (Mandeville, Rousseau, Smith), the sociological analysis of fashion as a vehicle for class distinction and identity (Veblen, Simmel, Bourdieu), the industrial history of the fashion system (mass production, fast fashion, global supply chains), and the sustainability crisis that the industry now confronts (environmental destruction, labor exploitation, textile waste).

The course has consistently argued that fashion is not trivial. Miranda Priestly’s monologue in The Devil Wears Prada is not just a memorable film scene — it is an accurate account of how the fashion system works, who has power within it, and how deeply it shapes the choices that appear, to the uninformed, to be purely individual. The cerulean sweater in the clearance bin is the end point of a chain of decisions made by designers, editors, buyers, manufacturers, and marketing departments; it is also the product of labor conditions in factories in South Asia; and it will, in all probability, end up in a landfill within a year of purchase.

At the same time, the course has insisted that the fashion system is not immutable. The history of consumer culture is a history of change — of new ideas, new practices, new social movements, and new technologies reshaping what it means to dress, consume, and participate in public life. The pandemic altered fashion consumption dramatically; the post-Rana Plaza era transformed the conversation about supply chain responsibility; the rise of resale platforms, rental services, and repair culture are changing the economics of fashion ownership. The minimalist movement and the slow fashion movement offer different but complementary visions of what a more sustainable relationship with clothing might look like.

The question is not whether change is possible, but what forms it will take, who will drive it, and how fast it will come.

Course notes compiled from lecture transcripts, slide decks, and documentary materials for ENBUS 375: Fashion, Style & Sustainability, Spring 2021, University of Waterloo. Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Lynes.