I’m not saying that fashion consumers are “fashion victims” (a sexist and anti-feminist description that implies irrational consumerism); I’m just suggesting that fashion consumers are not only political-sartorial actors but are also market actors whose range of consumer choices are embedded in a larger ethical-economic system that has long produced and managed consumer citizens by moralizing consumption. To celebrate sustainable fashion or inversely to denigrate fast fashion (the term itself inherits all the negative classist associations of fast food) is to forget that these sartorial spheres are stratified across class differences. Eco-fashion is expensive! So are the most coveted “vintage” fashions….. I get that the temporal trajectory and logics of thrift/vintage aren’t the same as Fashion but I’m not convinced that thrift/vintage is the feminist answer to fashion consumption…. That view presumes that Fashion is inherently anti-feminist; it also demands that we have a nostalgic relation to the past.
— Minh-Ha of Threadbared, from an extremely long and interesting conversation on the politics + motivations of shopping and thrifting. Just in case you too are an asshole who gets off on phrases like “politics of sample sales,” “sartorial-ideological positions,” “commodification of ephemerality” and “valorization of vintage as postmodern historical borderlessness.”
