Understanding Fashion Scandals 1350248959, 9781350248953

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UNDERSTANDING FASHION SCANDALS

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Annamari Vänskä and Olga Gurova, 2024 Annamari Vänskä and Olga Gurova have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Dani Leigh Design Cover image © Jacopo M. Raule/Stringer/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vanska, Annamari, author. | Gurova, Olga, author. Title: Understanding fashion scandals / Annamari Vanska & Olga Gurova. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022001682 (print) | LCCN 2022001683 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350248953 | ISBN 9781350248960 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350248946 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350248939 (epub) | ISBN 9781350248977 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Clothing trade--Social aspects. | Advertising--Social aspects. | Scandals. Classification: LCC HD9940.A2 (ebook) | LCC HD9940.A2 V37 2022 (print) | DDC 338.4/7687 23/eng/20220--dc22 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001682 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

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UNDERSTANDING FASHION SCANDALS Social Media, Identity, and Globalization

ANNAMARI VÄ NSK Ä AND OLGA GUROVA

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii List of Illustrations viii

Introduction

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The Two Types of Fashion Scandals 2 Scandal as Politicization of Fashion 3 Decolonizing Fashion 6 Positioning Ourselves 8 Epistemic Positionings 12 Structure of the Book 13

PART ONE THE FASHION SCANDAL—PAST AND PRESENT 17 1

Framing the Fashion Scandal: The Platformization of Fashion 19 Visualization of Fashion 19 Mediatization of Fashion 22 Social Media and the Platformization of Fashion 23 The Instagramification of Fashion 25

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Fashion Brands Negotiating Identity Politics

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Cultural Approach to Brands and Branding 27 Negotiating Identity Politics 30

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Changing Strategies of Fashion Brands: From Shock to Scandal 37 A Short History of the Fashion Scandal: Deliberate Shock 37 Contemporary Shock: The Unintentional Scandal 43 Social Media and New Identity Politics 44 Dismantling White Privilege and Introducing Intersectionality to Fashion 46

CONTENTS

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Emotional Effects of Social Media on Fashion: Calling-out and Canceling 53 Emotional Branding 53 Emotional Reactions and Canceling 55 New Cultural Intermediaries and the Creation of the Unintentional Scandal 58 Consumers Empowered to Speak Up 62 What if a Brand is Canceled? 64

PART TWO CASE STUDIES 5

Russia

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Love is (Not Just) Love 72 Feminist Resistance in a Conservative World 82 Race Across Time and Space 90

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Finland

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Maternity Clothes for 12-Year-Old African Girls 100 Flirting with Fascists 109

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Global Scandals

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Whose Identity? The Problem with “Cultural Appropriation” 124 Casual Racism: “Eating with Chopsticks” 133 Blackface and Structural Racism in the Fashion Industry 140 “Mental Health is not Fashion” 145

PART THREE THE RESPONSE TO FASHION SCANDALS 159 8

Just Don’t Do It!

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Corporate World Response, Part One: Corporate Social Responsibility 161 Corporate World Response, Part Two: Brands as Political Actors 163 Corporate World Response, Part Three: Diversity Officers 168 Academic Response, Part One: The Danger of “Diversity Washing” 170 Academic Response, Part Two: The “Glossification of Diversity” 171 Academic Response, Part Three: Reimagining the Fashion Curriculum 175 Political Response, Part One: Supply Chains and Human Rights 177

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CONTENTS

Political Response, Part Two: Advocacy Groups Benchmarking Business 179 Conclusion: A Call for Cultural and Social Sustainability 180

PART FOUR EPILOG 9

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The Counter Narrative Heidi Karjalainen, Finland 189 Ervin Latimer, Finland 192 Jahnkoy, USA 193 Claudia Lepik, Estonia 199 Muslin Brothers, Belgium 200 Kristian David, Sweden 203

Bibliography 204 Index 228

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book started from a Facebook-conversation in autumn 2019 on Gucci’s runway show—an incident that became a case study on mental health in this book. Our social media conversation turned first into an article on the fashion scandal, published in the International Journal of Fashion Studies (Vänskä and Gurova 2021). We want to thank the editors of the journal, Professors Paolo Volonté and Marco Pedroni for their encouraging feedback on the piece—it led us to write this book. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript: your comments made the book much better. We also extend our gratitude to Professor of Fashion Studies Hazel Clark and Professor of Media Studies Susanna Paasonen for their valuable comments in the final stages of this manuscript. We are grateful to PhD researcher Tatiana Romashko and Dr. Yulia Gradskova, researcher of feminism and decolonial history, for discussing the Russian case studies. We also want to thank PhD researcher Alla Eizenberg, designer Alisa Närvänen, the founder of the Russian fashion industry platform Beinopen Alexei Bazhenov, and the owner of the Telegram channel “i hate fashion” Alexandra Manakina for discussions and suggestions around the “counter narrative” of the fashion scandal. Finally, we wish to thank the designers and brands who contributed to the counter narrative and for leading the way to a more inclusive and just fashion: Kristian David, Jahnkoy, Heidi Karjalainen, Ervin Latimer, Claudia Lepik and Muslin Brothers. This book was partly made possible by funding from the Strategic Research Council at The Academy of Finland.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Calvin Klein are masters of deliberate shock. In the 1990s, Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg (Marky Mark) modeled for the brand’s controversial campaigns. Here they present Fall 1995 Collections at the “Race to Erase MS” Benefit. Photo by: Barry King/WireImage.

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Members of the public walking past a Benetton advertising poster campaign displayed on a wall on November 16, 2011 in Milan, Italy. The posters were part of the brand’s campaign “UNHATE”, created by the then newly formed UNHATE Foundation. Photo by: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images.

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The Dior Saddle bag became the “it-bag” at the turn of the millennium and has remained as such ever since. Here a guest is shown wearing the bag at Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/ Winter 2020/2021 in Paris, France. Photo by: Edward Berthelot/ Getty Images.

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Model Kelly Knox presents a creation by British fashion house Teatum Jones for their Spring/Summer 2018 collection on the first day of London Fashion Week Women’s in London on September 15, 2017. Photo by: Niklas Hallen/AFP via Getty Images.

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Disabled model Jack Eyers, 27, on the catwalk during the Teatum Jones Autumn/Winter 2017 London Fashion Week show at BFC Show Space, London. Photo by: Isabel Infantes/PA Images via Getty Images.

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Model Tess Holliday walks the runway for Chromat Spring/Summer 2020 during New York Fashion Week: The Shows at Gallery I at Spring Studios on 7 September 2019 in New York City. Photo by: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Chromat.

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The power duo behind Diet Prada Lindsey Schuyler and Tony Liu attending the Max Mara fashion show on 20 February 2020 in Milan, Italy. Photo by: Jacopo Raule/WireImage.

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Members of the Proud Boys gather in support of President Donald Trump and to protest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election

ILLUSTRATIONS

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near freedom plaza, 12 December 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo by: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images.

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Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists marching at the “Unite the Right” rally at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, USA. Photo by: Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

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Unidentified Lesotho women dressed in traditional clothing and Basotho-blankets attend a royal wedding. Photo by: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images.

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Traditional vests from the Bihor northwestern region of Romania. Romanian dressmakers rode a wave of demand for their folk designs after Dior showcased their craft in its 2017 Pre-Fall collection. Photo by: Daniel Mihailescu / AFP via Getty Images.

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Madeline Stuart walks the runway during Domingo Zapata At New York Fashion Week 8 February 2020 in New York City. Photo by: Arun Nevader/Getty Images for Art Hearts Fashion.

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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wearing a dress at the Met Gala in 2021 with the slogan “Tax the Rich” printed on it, designed by Aurora James of the Brother Vellies. Getty Images.

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In September 2018, Nike included the American NFL football player Colin Kaepernick in its thirtieth anniversary ad campaign with its “Just Do It” slogan. Photo by: Robert Alexander/Getty Images.

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A map of Georgia, by African-American writer and historian W. E. B. Du Bois, showing the number of acres owned by AfricanAmericans in each county in the period 1890–1900. Chart prepared by Du Bois for the Negro Exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. 186

9.2

“In fashion, politicization is not seen if it is not shouted and if it is shouted then it is perceived as a provocation, a ‘selling point’ or a way to seek column space. This is an unfortunate continuum of fashion stuck on the idea of attention-seeking,” the designer Heidi Karjalainen states. Photo by: Diana Luganski. Courtesy of the designer.

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From the collection of Young Designer of the year 2020 award by Ervin Latimer. Photo by: Hayley Lê. Courtesy of the designer.

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ME$$ENJAH: Work-in-Progress, PUMA x JAHNKOY, installation at Bergdorf Goodman Men’s department store. The PUMA x JAHNKOY collection. Photo by: Oluwaseye Olusa. Courtesy of Jahnkoy.

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9.3 9.4

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ILLUSTRATIONS

“Sunchain” by Claudia Lepik. The designer’s gender neutral jewelry draws from Estonian indigenous Seto culture. Photo by: Claudia Lepik. Courtesy of the designer.

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Installation I’m Feeling Lucky by Muslin Brothers investigates generic clothing and how its meanings change over time. The work was displayed in the Fashion Pavilion at Jerusalem Design week in 2017. Photo by: Elad Sarig. Courtesy of Muslin Brothers.

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The white keffiyeh suit from the collection To Construct a Bridge. The collection is an investigation of Western and Eastern clothing traditions. Photo by: Kacper Kasprzyk. Courtesy of Kristian David.

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INTRODUCTION On the first weekend of January 2018, an image of a Black child wearing a green hoodie with the phrase “Coolest monkey in the jungle” on it appeared on the online store of the Swedish brand H&M. It did not take long for people to notice this image and for outrage to ensue. The problematic photo was immediately noticed and widely condemned on social media because it featured a monkey, an animal that has been historically associated with racial and ethnic slurs. The photograph was criticized as an example of “simianization,” as a form of dehumanization, or the depiction of racial groups and individuals (in this case a Black child) as apes (Hund et al. 2015: 12). As a result of this scandal, many Black celebrities, including the basketball icon LeBron James and Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, a Black Canadian singer-songwriter, who collaborated with H&M, quickly responded. The Weeknd tweeted being “deeply offended and will not be working with @HM anymore” (The Weekend 2018). Consumers agreed and called for a boycott of the company. In South Africa, the outrage led to reports of toppled mannequins, overturned racks and scattered clothes and the temporary closure of stores. H&M reacted hastily. By Monday morning, the image had been deleted from the online store. Two days later, the company issued “an unequivocal apology” stating that “we have got it wrong, and we are deeply sorry” and that “even if unintentional, passive or casual racism needs to be eradicated” (H&M 2018). Recently, in the latter part of the 2010s, there have been many scandals involving either a global or a local fashion brand. There isn’t a week, let alone a month, that passes by without a major or minor scandal. Scandals can occur for a variety of reasons—for example because a brand did not have any Black models in its fashion film, as was the case in Dior’s fashion film in summer 2020 (Cochrane 2020), or because a brand was argued to aestheticize homelessness and celebrate “homeless chic,” as was claimed to be the case with Balenciaga’s window display at the department store Selfridges in London in 2018 (Elven 2018). These contemporary fashion scandals most often begin on social media platforms and then escalate to traditional media. In this book, we focus on scandals caused by different forms of discrimination: cultural appropriation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism or ableism. Cultural appropriation and racism are probably the major source of the

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fashion scandal in contemporary fashion. Controversies over both arise when a dominant or privileged group, which is perceived to be more powerful, offends a less privileged or a socially vulnerable group. The scandal revolves around an act that initially a smaller or a larger number of people believe is unjust, and who express their displeasure on social media. The logic of the scandal often follows the same pattern: an individual or a group of people voice their opinion on social media, others join in the discussion through comments and re-posts, and then the mainstream media takes up the issue. Eventually, the scandal becomes a media event that requires the brand’s reaction and participation. Sometimes brands end up apologizing and making amends with the audience, but sometimes they may resort to a counterattack or ignore the scandal altogether. While in the first instance brands can vindicate themselves, in the latter case they can face severe consequences such as loss of customers, revenues or reputation. The fashion scandal always requires attention from the brand; companies need to take a stand and form some kind of reply, and take seriously the requests and demands made by the audiences. On top of actions made by companies, the fashion scandal also calls for a rethinking of the dominant structures and institutionalized practices rooted in various forms of discrimination. We treat the fashion scandal as a market phenomenon and show how companies, i.e., fashion brands, have faced backlash when using insensitive and scandalizing tactics in their market communication, but also, how they have changed their conduct after a scandal. We also define the fashion scandal as an effect of platformization of fashion and as a social media phenomenon: ordinary people use social media platforms to express their reaction to an action they have found problematic. Even though the fashion scandal used to be a planned form of market communication, its logics and meanings have changed. We will unearth some of the reasons for this and unpack the dynamics involved in creating, debating, and resolving the scandal in fashion communication.

The Two Types of Fashion Scandals We recognize two types of fashion scandals: the intentional scandal and the unintentional scandal. Both touch on sensitive issues but may have very different outcomes. Initially, in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s many fashion brands used scandal intentionally, as a purposeful marketing tool (e.g., Dahl et al. 2003). Brands such as Diesel, Benetton, Calvin Klein, Nike, and American Apparel deliberately provoked and published controversial advertising campaigns to create an impression of the brand as “contemporary,” “cutting edge,” and “libertarian”—and to be seen, remembered, and differentiated from other brands. For high fashion houses such as Dior and Gucci, at the turn of the millennium,

INTRODUCTION

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the scandal was a way to refresh and rejuvenate their stuffy image. Scandal, or “shock,” as it was called, was enabled by visualization of fashion: photographs and moving images became central in defining fashion, building a brand identity, and communicating a fashionable lifestyle. Marketing was not only about selling clothes but also about selling ideas and identities, an idea of a cosmopolitan way of life which included a non-puritan view on social values and moral codes around body, gender, and sexuality. We discuss some of these brands in Chapter 3 where we unearth the history of the fashion scandal through examples such as Benetton and Calvin Klein. With the rise of social media and its impact on the fashion industry in the 2010s and 2020s, we are witnessing a change in the character and dynamics of the scandal as well as its outcome. ln fact, contemporary fashion brands rarely if ever admit that they use scandal as their marketing tool. The contemporary scandal does not attract customers, polish the brand image, create new opportunities for branding, achieve more fame and ultimately create revenues for the brand. It can do exactly the opposite. The scandal can alienate customers, for instance, and bring boycotts and other types of actions. In 2018 and 2019 alone, there were some ten fashion scandals in which a respected, well-known global high fashion brands—Gucci, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Dior— were called out for racism, cultural appropriation and other types of insensitivity towards vulnerable groups (Ferrier 2019; Ilchi 2019; Diet Prada 2018; Wilson 2018; Blanchard 2018; Larbi 2018). Social media has dramatically changed the role of the audience in the contemporary fashion scandal. It has also drastically inflated the scale and dynamics of scandals as well as the power balance in the industry. With digitalization, the audience now has much easier access to brands. It also has the power to redefine the meanings of the scandal and fashion by debating brand communication on social media platforms. This suggests that the power balance between the brands and the audience has shifted and that the voice of ordinary people has become, if not more important, at least more vocal in the fashion system. We suggest that the fashion scandal has made fashion brands more open and also more vulnerable, thanks to the so-called “megaphone effect” (McQuarrie et al. 2012) which describes the effect that social media can produce because they reach thousands of people. It has also led us to believe that the landscape of contemporary fashion and its values have changed.

Scandal as Politicization of Fashion The fashion scandal can be approached from a variety of perspectives. Crisis communication theory is one popular approach (Coombs 2004, 2007). This

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stance takes the company’s perspective and considers the crisis as a threat to the organization’s finances and reputation and offers concrete solutions for managers to protect reputational assets during the crisis (Coombs 2007). Three classical crisis response strategies are denial, diminish and rebuilt. The denial strategy is aimed at removing the connection between the organization and the crisis. The diminish strategy advocates that a crisis is not as bad as people think or that the organization lacked control over the crisis. The rebuilt strategy is aimed at changing the perception of the organization in crisis by presenting new positive information about its activities (Coombs 2007). A crisis poses a threat to the organization because it creates a negative image about it to people. The goal of crisis communication is to assist the company to get out of the crisis with the least amount of damage. While this strategy is good for an organization, it ignores people’s hurt feelings and the societal ramifications of the fashion scandal. It is also a rather instrumental way of dealing with crises and does not criticize the organization’s actions or admit that its conduct might need re-evaluation. It also places the company outside society in the sense that many contemporary scandals are actually about seeking social justice. Another viewpoint on the scandal comes from marketing and consumer culture theory (see, for instance, Scholz and Smith 2019). This approach, like the crisis communication theory, also takes the view of the organization, but this time around it does not ignore consumers or the concerned audiences. The goal of the company which has found itself in a crisis, is to find a way to respond to the troublesome situation by enlisting consumers’ support. The attention is given to a particular type of crisis—one that is fueled by a morally ambiguous topic that pushes conflicting, positive and negative viewpoints. Brand managers can play the role of provocateurs, facilitating and coordinating brand stories while also identifying the benefits of unfavorable consumer-generated brand stories. Again, this perspective sees the audience as a resource for the brand to manipulate. It does, however, also presuppose that different stakeholders can give competing frames and interpretations of the crisis, which occurs in a “morally ambiguous rhetorical arena” (Scholz and Smith 2019). Consumers might criticize the brand, engage in “moral crusades” against it, or protect the brand against other consumers. When a brand hits a “cultural nerve,” it might provoke positive responses from some customers while eliciting negative responses from others (Scholz and Smith 2019: 7–8). The crisis then becomes part of the brand narrative that a company and its audiences co-create. Our approach expands the previously discussed perspectives on the fashion scandal from an organizational perspective to a broader one; one that looks at its effects on the fashion industry and broader society from a social and cultural perspective. We especially approach the scandals through Stuart Hall’s (1997) concept of representation, which stresses that meaning is constantly produced and reproduced and does not inhere in things. Since fashion is constitutive of

INTRODUCTION

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and constituted by society, the study of the fashion scandal is informative of conflicts and changes over social and cultural status of difference in society. The scandal indicates that fashion plays a critical role in the social lives of people, and that it connects multifacetedly to creating and expressing identities (Gonzáles and Bovone 2012). Fashion is a structure of social integration and differentiation, and the cases reveal that much needs to be done for fashion to become truly inclusive, just, and fair. Our argument is that the fashion scandal represents a novel kind of politicization of fashion—fashion can be a form of political engagement for both brands and citizens (Bartlett 2019; Reddy-Best 2020). A contemporary example of this is how Ukrainian brands have responded to the Russian invasion in communication and design. Vogue UA addressed the luxury and beauty industry asking it to place an embargo on exporting goods to Russia. Moreover, Vogue UA appealed to the global fashion industry not to keep silent in the dark times as it has a strong voice. Politicization means that companies, industry professionals and consumers express their point of view about pressing social concerns through fashion. Furthermore, companies can challenge hegemonic ideologies and views by centering their design, retail, or communication practices on disrupting social norms, systems of privileges and inequalities. It is especially meaningful for groups that have been historically underrepresented in media or in the public sphere, such as LGBTQI+ but also ethnic minorities or people with disabilities. Both the deliberate scandal and the unintentional scandal are part of this dynamic in which fashion can have political potential. The difference is that while the intentional scandal takes the point of view of the company, the unintentional one is generated by ordinary people and actors outside the company. The unintentional scandal often mediates feelings of injustice and represents an attempt to address them and bring change in fashion as well as in the wider world. We have mainly focused on the unintentional scandal and the cultural meanings and values that it inevitably carries. We have used analysis methods through which we have made the scandals “speak”: we have put them in dialogue with feminist theory and theories of sexuality, race, colonialism, postcolonialism and decoloniality. We have also contextualized the scandals within the wider context of fashion and positioned it at the heart of cultural analysis. In our discussion, we do not follow any particular paradigm, but our approach can be broadly called post-structuralist. We read texts and images as formative of reality and structures of power. We follow discourse theory and thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, who have shifted focus from considerations of what is the “truth” to examining the hierarchies of power and dominance. We understand that our interpretations of the scandals may not be the only possible ones: like texts and images, the fashion scandal is always open to other

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interpretations and meanings, depending on the context in which they are read, analyzed, and interpreted. The fashion scandal is a good example of how these interpretations have changed from the scandal being a deliberate and often a very lucrative marketing ploy to something to be avoided.

Decolonizing Fashion We also create new perspectives on the fashion scandal by using theories of postcolonialism and decoloniality (Gaugele and Titton 2019; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012). These perspectives enable us to define how white Europeans have exploited other cultures and their people for hundreds of years. One important concept is “colonialism” which generally refers to a situation where a country invades and settles in another country, and imposes its legal system, government, and other institutional structures on the invaded country (Clark 1999). Colonialism has been justified with arguments of “civilizing” the colonized cultures and peoples and has meant, for example, the replacement of native values, traditions, customs, and clothes with Western ones (Clark 1999). We understand postcolonialism as an approach that addresses the problems of continued tradition of colonialism in contemporary global culture, and as an approach that explains the relationships between local cultures and global forces of fashion. The term refers to the socio-economic and cultural crises caused by colonialism, amongst other factors (Ashcroft et al. 2000; see also McClintock 1995; Hall 1996, 2000; Mills 2004; Gaugele and Titton 2019). We find the postcolonial approach useful in examining the fashion scandal since it defines a variety of colonial relationships beyond the traditional colonizing activities of the Anglo-Saxon empires. We find useful the concept of “coloniality,” coined in decolonial thinking (Ashcroft et al. 2000). Coloniality is not the same as colonialism, but a concept that defines the global power structure that was created during colonialism, and which still lives on. The world is still divided according to economic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies—a theme powerfully present in the contemporary fashion scandal. “Decolonization” refers to “revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms” meaning that even though the formerly colonized countries gained their political independence, they did not necessarily free themselves from colonial values and ways of thinking (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 56–57). It is also an approach that suggests alternatives and aims to dismantle power structures and the creation of new futures. This is especially important in the globalized world where economic and cultural power still largely resides in the hands of former colonizers. This also applies to fashion. The concept and process of “decolonizing fashion” can be helpful in overcoming the colonial project of the so-called

INTRODUCTION

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“civilizational fashion.” What we mean by this is, i.e., the way in which the fashion discourse, past and present, is defined according to the values stemming from Western, Eurocentric, and white culture and which is imposed on other cultures with a “civilizational purpose” in mind. Decolonizing fashion implies a project of global transformation (Janssen and Niessen 2020; Niessen 2020; Jansen 2020). It demands a fundamental shift in how we understand fashion, its logic of exploitation and oppression. It also urges that the institutions that still uphold and reproduce them, be undone and changed, something that is visible in many of the scandals we address. The scandals suggest that it is not enough to apologize and make promises. Real change is needed in reformulating meanings, histories, modus operandi, and logics of fashion, and who fashion addresses. Even though our aim is not to create an account of postcolonial or decolonial epistemology of fashion, we position the scandals in dialogue with these theories and approaches. The contemporary fashion scandal calls for a rethinking of the fashion discourse, especially the dismantling of its colonialism, Eurocentrism, and masculine domination. Fashion, like any other social and cultural institution, is the constitutive product of “global coloniality” and the “colonial matrix of power” (cf. Mignolo 2007; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013; Vazquez 2020) and thus white masculine domination. Colonialism is the result of modernity and the “Western imperial expansion” which began in the sixteenth century with the European Renaissance, European Enlightenment, and the “discovery” of the Americas. Modernity has long been associated with Western imperialism (i.e., Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, England, and the U.S.) and capitalist economy—but it is also a very gendered and ethnically white phenomenon. Origins of the contemporary fashion scandal thus lay in the voyages of discovery by white men and the colonization and exploitation of “the new worlds” and in the imprinting of European customs and identity onto the colonized cultures (Hall 1996: 195). Although the era of colonialism is over and most colonies have gained their independence, colonization continues in many ways: the world is economically dependent on the West, even when the formerly colonized cultures are formally independent, colonizing representations are regularly circulated in fashion—which, in turn, are often the cause of the scandal. In fact, some scholars argue that the networked media and platformization have furthered and intensified colonization rather than eradicated it (Jin 2019). Inequalities, polarization, various forms of discrimination—such as racism or sexism, the current spatial organization of the fashion industry with manufacturing in the Global South and consumption in the Global North, or sustainability issues resulting from the mass production of clothes—are all part and parcel of continued colonization. Fashion is inextricably related to Western modernity and instrumental in creating the narrative of white superiority. Fashion is a “connecting tissue” in an individualized society (Wilson 2003: 12). Modernity has been praised in fashion

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studies with fashion as the manifestation in this “civilizing process” in Europe, whereas coloniality has been noticed, but to a large extent ignored, as the dark side of modernity (cf. Wilson 2003: 13). There is no modernity without coloniality and decolonizing fashion means “delinking” these two from each other (Mignolo 2007; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013; Vazquez 2020, Niessen 2020; Jansen 2020). The fashion scandal allows us to witness the work of the global colonial matrix of power embedded in fashion and the attempts to dismantle it. In this regard the fashion scandal is a useful analytical instrument that facilitates the process of delinking, or decolonizing, which is currently taking place in societies on a global scale.

Positioning Ourselves One cannot see the decolonizing process in isolation from one’s own life. There is no outside position from which the colonial matrix of power can be observed which means that when we, as authors, participate in the decolonizing process, we also acknowledge our position within this global colonial matrix of power. We don’t see ourselves as detached spectators, but rather as active participants in the processes we are writing about. We have both been trained in the academic discourse of gender studies and feminism, especially that of the so-called “thirdwave feminism,” or poststructuralist, or intersectional feminism, which refers to the internal critique of feminism’s own ideals such as the idea of “essential womanhood” (Butler 1990). We have been trained to see differences between and among women, and how the intersections of e.g., gender, sexuality, class, skin-color, ethnic background, nationality, beliefs, or cultural and economic background affect one’s position and opportunities in the world (Crenshaw 1989). This has also made us sensitive to the wider structural problematics that lie behind the scandal. Often, they seem to engender from an experience of not being seen or portrayed in a just manner—an issue and problematics that is more than familiar to all who work with feminist issues. Furthermore, we are also aware of our own privileged positioning as white educated scholars in the matrix of global power. In his book on modernity, Stuart Hall (1996) eloquently writes about the discourse that created the colonial discourse through the separation of Europe (“West”) from the rest of the world (“Rest”). We will go deeper into this discourse in one of the case studies, suffice it here to note that the colonial discourse is not without its internal discrepancies— those that affect scholars and individuals. Although the colonial discourse may appear as homogenous and unified—as if Europe or the “West” more generally were one single place with one worldview and understanding of other cultures— of course, this is not the case. Europe has its own internal Others: Western Europe versus Eastern Europe, for instance.

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Hall’s ideas also touch us: while we both might be cis-gendered white women, have an academic education and work in higher education, in the colonial discourse we also fall into the margins linguistically, culturally, and geographically. We both live and work in Finland, one of us is a Russian migrant from Siberia, another a native Finn whose ancestry partly comes from Karelia, which was formerly part of Finland but is now part of Russia. Our geographical, cultural, and linguistic positions locate us at the fringes of Europe geographically and culturally but also at the margins of the global academic world linguistically. This means that the colonial discourse, the ideas of which were established in Western Europe, contrasted not only with regions and cultures far away but those much closer to home: the former Communist “Eastern bloc,” including Russia, and the fringes of Northern Europe—Finland. Although in significantly different ways, our respective countries have also been and continue to be colonizers (e.g., Keskinen, Seikkula and Mkwesha 2021; Tlostanova 2008), they were also places that were not considered properly “Western” in the conceptual constellation of “West and the Rest.” Russia was a “mystic and mythic Orient for the West” (Tlostanova 2008: 1). In February 2022, after we submitted our book, Russia’s political leaders cemented the country as the hostile Other to the West. Russia embarked on an imperial and colonial invasion of Ukraine and justified the action by denying Ukraine’s political, cultural, and historical sovereignty. This invasion has been described in many ways, including as a “a proxy war between Russia and the West” (Suny 2022). Historically, as well as culturally and politically, Finland has been located inbetween East and West: it has always attempted to balance Eastern and Western influences. As scholars coming from the margins of the so-called West, it has been somewhat startling to realize how the colonial discourse has formed our very subjectivities, and how it has also placed, at least before February 2022, our respective cultures as “internal Others,” within definitions that describe Western Europe as “civilized,” and “the Rest” as “barbaric” and culturally inferior. Through our complex cultural positionings, we feel affinity with “border thinking,” a term first coined by the queer Chicana poet, writer, and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) and later developed by decolonial writers such as Walter Mignolo. Border thinking is based on the idea that there are always theories and epistemologies that situate at the borders of the colonial matrix of power. Within academic discourse this means that the colonial matrix of power works in a way that we, as authors, not only come from marginally located countries but that we speak, write, and think in languages—Finnish and Russian—that belong to a different epistemic rank than those coming from Anglo-Saxon countries where English, French, or German is spoken. The global distribution of academic power does not need to consider knowledge produced in other languages. Border thinking is thus thinking from the outside. For us English is a foreign language—therefore, we inevitably investigate the world of fashion, which is largely an Anglo-American cultural product, as outsiders—or at

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least as scholars situated at borderlands of fashion. At the same time, we are also the products of the Eurocentric academic discourse. Our knowledge is a product of exteriority, that is, of the outside, created about the inside. The same applies to the discourse of fashion: it also throws us on the borders. Neither Finland nor Russia are considered the “original” centers of fashion. These countries are still located on the outskirts of Western fashion and its “fashion capitals” of Paris, London, New York, or Milan (Breward and Gilbert 2006), even though the new fashion capitals seem to be popping up at the margins all the time and the criticism of the concept of the fashion capital is growing (Gilbert and Casadei 2020; Chun and Gurova 2019). Nevertheless, the study of fashion has also long been centered in these same geographical places, the fashion capitals, within European and Anglo-American contexts—even though fashion, as an academic discipline, has always been methodologically diasporic (Denzin and Lincoln 2005), combining different disciplinary approaches, and mixing methods utilized in cultural studies, visual studies, art history, museology, sociology, ethnography, consumer culture studies and so forth. Despite its assumed cross-disciplinary research methodology, the study of fashion has largely built on a Euro-centric approach to the world. For one, fashion’s scholarly function was long to highlight (visual) differences between cultures by mapping out differences in dress styles. In this sense, fashion has served as a “visualization technique” of colonialism through which social, cultural, and geographic classification and hierarchies of peoples and races have been established, “tying together assumptions based on appearance, place, and time: such as urban versus rural or civilized/modern/Western versus primitive/ traditional/other” (Jenss 2016; see also Taylor 2004: 4–43; Lillethun, Welters, and Eicher 2012; Kaiser and Green 2021; Gaugele 2015). Furthermore, the establishment of the academic study of fashion in the Western institutions was historically formed by collecting “exotic” objects and juxtaposing them with Western upper-class women’s haute couture garments (Taylor 2004). This, in connection with the early scholars of fashion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has deeply informed the routes that later scholarly as well as industry engagement with fashion has taken and some of the blind spots that the fashion scandal attempts to address. The fashion scandal is thus very much part of this history. Some of the case studies that we discuss clearly indicate that white Eurocentrism is still the norm of fashion, leading brands to treat cultures and people of color and of non-Western societies from a white Western perspective. Following feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013: 15), Eurocentrism is more than just an attitude. It is a “structural element” of culture, which is embedded in both theory and practice of fashion. Even though the development of fashion studies as a scholarly field can be said to have followed a Eurocentric or modernist pattern historically, now the dichotomies have shifted. In the internal logic of fashion, new fashions are

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understood to grow “on the streets” i.e., at the margins or borders of society (e.g., Hebdige 1979; Polhemus 1994; English 2007), and of course also on the “digital streets” of the internet. In this sense Russia and, more broadly, Eastern Europe changed the fashion system in the 2010s through the post-Soviet youth street style of the 1990s brought to prominence by Russian fashion designers like Gosha Rubchinskyi, as well as the Russian stylist Lotta Volkova and the Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia, who were key figures behind the label Vetements and the contemporary success of Balenciaga. Finland, in turn, has been gaining importance in the establishment and institutionalization of sustainable fashion, the fashion industry of the future, in the 2020s. As we can see, the issues are convoluted and the colonial discourse is first and foremost a stereotype and a simplification of very complex issues, both social, cultural and in terms of fashion. It tends to represent the world, phenomena and people as divided according to simple dichotomies (Hall 1996: 189). Still, it has real effects on people, as the fashion scandal suggests, in unexpected and (in)visible ways. Ultimately, the discourse of the fashion scandal is bound up with questions of power and justice. It explains how power circulates and is and can be contested. Thus, these different cultural, geographical, spatial, linguistic and epistemic positionalities constructed by the colonial discourse also impact us and our research, as well as our self-location across e.g., gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and even nationality. We are aware that our researcher subjectivities and who we are as individuals has undoubtedly affected the data collection, questions we have asked, and analyses we have made. Our backgrounds and positions in the systems of Western/Scandinavian higher education may yield further questions about our ability to represent others. Our social, cultural, and professional contexts have also influenced our choice to focus on the fashion scandal as an issue of fashion communication and marketing instead of a study, say, about the lived experiences of those who live with, for example, the racerelated injustices caused by the fashion scandals on a daily basis. However, we believe that the fashion scandal is an indication of large structural problems that we cannot ignore. It is a call for action. In this sense, our aim is to uncover and contextualize the fashion scandal as a symptom of systemic inequalities within the wider theoretical framework of postcolonial and decolonial discourses. We are undoubtedly also insiders of academic discourse and have, as trained scholars, the tools to frame and contextualize the scandals in particular cultural contexts which (at least partly) explain the experiences of those who have had an issue in each scandal. We do not, thus, confine ourselves to our respective cultures and personal experiences: we are ingrained in the academic, Western-oriented study of fashion, which has shaped the ways we see and understand the phenomenon. We believe that the best way to position ourselves vis-à-vis the scandal is to exercise critical thinking and to undo the fashion discourse and its assumptions. As researchers we are capable of examining

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diverse phenomena and issues as long as we are cognizant of our own positionalities, opportunities, and limitations—in essence, when we are reflexive and recognize how our own subjectivities affect the research.

Epistemic Positionings Simultaneously, we also acknowledge that the “self” is multiple and unknowable (Butler 2004). No-one can “truly” know her/his/their self and, thus, is unable to provide a “true” account of how her/his/their subjectivity has impacted the research process (Pillow 2003). As Professor of Critical Psychology Vivian Burr (2003: 6) has pointed out, it is common for people to not understand the historical and cultural specificity of knowledge, even about themselves—or, to cite Judith Butler (2004: 3), if we have any agency, it is “opened up by the fact that we are constituted by a social world we never chose.” The problem with research built on a personal account—a coming out of sorts—is that it assumes that people have specific properties or characters that affect them and their capabilities of thinking, doing research, or interpreting data. As social constructionists, Butler and Burr object to the essentializing of human characteristics and identities because they are often used to control people and are undone altogether, when it no longer incorporates the norm in such a way that makes this “ ‘I’ fully recognizable” (Butler 2004: 3). The “self” is not a natural and unchanging state of being but it is constituted by and dependent on norms as much as it is also constituted by the culture and the language penetrating it. The “self” is a conception of what passes for the self and what is worthy of reflection in our culture. It is formed as a result of continuous struggle and negotiation, and is mediated by various (academic, cultural, and social) expectations. Like representing the self, representing the world, cultures, phenomena, and people, is always impartial. We have not aimed to make any “truth claims” about the fashion scandal. Through our analysis, we have aimed to contextualize the fashion scandal within global and local cultural and social contexts. We have mainly used methodological tools provided by critical, feminist, queer, poststructural, postcolonial theories, and decolonial thinking, to better represent the meanings and consequences of the fashion scandal. An important question that runs through the book relates to the “politics of the gaze” (Pillow 2003: 175–176). Historically, this formulation comes from anthropology: it was a response to the critiques of classical, colonial ethnographic methods and “emphasized the role of reflexivity in situating the researcher as non-exploitative and compassionate toward the research subjects” (Pillow 2003: 178). By engaging in the politics of the gaze, we have aimed to make visible how we have challenged the “work of representation” (Hall 1997) understood as the process which enables us to refer to either the “real” world of objects, people, or

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events, or to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people, and events. By doing so we have aimed to give “attention to the complex relationship between processes of knowledge production and the various contexts of such processes” (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009: 8) as well as to ways in which to challenge and question these processes. It is also an attempt to depict those feelings of (mis) recognition that can make life unlivable to some. The scandal is like a juncture, a wound, or an opening that allows critique to emerge and creates space for the possibility of establishing more inclusive way of life—and of fashion. We are also inspired by the epistemic and interpretive possibilities of social constructionism, especially the way in which Butler and Burr use it. It emphasizes the historical and social construction of knowledge and the possibility of change—a standpoint that is also important for postcolonial and decolonial thinkers. For cultural studies of fashion, social constructionism, alongside postcolonial theory and decolonial thinking, offers a suitable methodology for examining the fashion scandal, especially in how the scandal shapes understanding of fashion and fashion’s understanding of who counts as human. Constructionism also challenges the modernist / positivist idea that a single truth can be found—of the world or of any individual self. It conceptualizes knowledge as something historical, contextual, and culturally specific, built through interpersonal communication and undergoing continuous change (Shotter 1993; Edwards et al. 1995: 25–49; Parker 1998; Burr 2003; Hibberd 2005). The changing understandings and interpretations about the individuality of our respective selves but also that of the fashion scandal indicate that knowledge is always processual. What this means for the study of fashion scandals is that when we discuss and interpret them, we treat them as objects of knowledge that visualize and materialize understandings about fashion, culture, and the human. The scandals often make visible what may be invisible to the naked eye: ideas and ideologies that have framed—and that continue to frame—how peoples and cultures are seen and understood. Fashion scandals exemplify the cultural values that brands attach to people.

Structure of the Book Part I of the book sets the scene. We frame the scandal and trace its genealogy from the perspective of the visualization, mediatization and platformization of fashion. We explain how the visualization and mediatization of fashion, especially social media platforms, have affected the relationship between ordinary people and fashion companies. We discuss how these changes first enabled the intentional fashion scandal, how its meanings are now changing and how brands must react to scandals. We also explain how the scandal taps into broader

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discourse of identity and identity politics, and how both brands and individuals use fashion to negotiate different identities. We suggest that social media has enabled the so-called “calling-out” and “canceling” of brands, and forced them to take corrective measures. Here we map the emotional foundations of the scandal and show how connectivity is necessary for the operations of the contemporary fashion scandal. We also ask whether it is a new form of political activism understood as consumers’ use of the market as an arena for identity politics. The heart of the book can be found in Part II which examines recent unintentional fashion scandals. Our discussion includes nine fashion scandals, both those that spread globally and those that have been more specific to our respective cultural contexts, Russia and Finland. The scandals represent contemporary fashion debates where themes relating to different aspects of identity—gender, sexuality, women’s rights, racism, and cultural appropriation— proliferate. We also bring forth new types of scandals that do not necessarily seem to be about identity, but which do, in our opinion, take the identity discourse further, for example, in cases on mental health and neurodiversity. Through these cases we show that the contemporary scandal has many negative effects: it can easily alienate customers through boycotts and buycotts and ostracize brands from their markets, even from certain countries, but can also eventually lead to corrective actions. Part III of the book we examine how brands respond to the unintentional scandal. We describe the different types of tactics that brands have adopted to overcome negative effects. We also write about one significant shift which concerns the establishment of new roles, such as the “diversity officer” within brands. We ask whether this is a new marketing tactic, whether it is mere “diversity washing,” or whether it is an actual change that brands have made in their effort to become more sensitive and more socially responsible. Although we leave this question open since developments are too recent for a proper evaluation of their lasting effects, at the time of writing this book, diversity consultants now occupy a high-profile position within fashion. We also expand the horizon and argue that a true change must involve shifts on every level of the fashion system, including fashion design education. It may not be possible to get rid of the fashion scandal fully, however, it is more probable with a profound change in the fashion system and an expectation that fashion companies are involved in social change. Part IV, which we call the epilog, shows a visual narrative. The impetus for creating such an ending came from the trouble we had in reproducing images that have caused scandalized reactions and hurt people. Since the book deals with sensitive material—visual images that are considered offensive—one methodological principle that we decided to adopt was to avoid reproducing hurtful images and further participating in the circulation of the offense. By doing this, we wanted to delink fashion from coloniality and take one more step towards healing.

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Still: a book about fashion without images sounded sad, so we had to come up with another solution. We became inspired by fashion scholars Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton’s (2019) idea of creating a “counter-archive” for fashion. Its aim is to revise fashion history inspired by postcolonialism and world history, and to problematize white gaze on Black people by offering other kinds of narratives and representations. Although our aim is not to create “counter-archives” per se, we think that the study of the fashion scandal is part and parcel of the discourse which aims to unpack and dismantle the colonial and thereby also the racist past of the fashion canon. Thus, we decided to create a visual counter narrative of the fashion scandal. It meant curating a selection of images from individual designers and brands who deal with sensitive and potentially scandalizing issues, but who decidedly work from a non-scandalizing position. Their approach is rather one of education and activism. It is a standpoint from which the designers and brands have set out to analyze and to open up, to educate people and to change the power dynamics of fashion production—and, eventually, how fashion can be perceived, enjoyed and understood. We have highlighted the visual over the textual in this section partly because we wanted to give space for the images when the first part of the book is so text heavy. But we also wanted to give the chosen examples a chance to tell their own story and to show that it is possible to handle sensitive issues justly, delicately and respectfully. The contemporary fashion scandal invites us to see how fashion is affected by colonialism and racism. In this sense the fashion scandal is fashion’s subconscious. Metaphorically speaking, it is a Freudian slip—a seemingly trivial and nonsensical event—which is, in fact, neither trivial nor nonsensical but an event, a crack on the glossy surface of fashion that explains something much deeper about the fashion discourse and its relation to the wider discourse of the society. The fashion scandal brings forth an old discourse which is still alive and well in contemporary fashion, its language, its representations, and in its hidden assumptions. We are aware that the fashion scandal is an emotionally charged phenomenon: it is a spectacle of sensitive issues. We have analyzed a variety of visual images whose aesthetics show how coloniality is the condition that underlies fashion (cf. Vázquez 2020: 4; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). The marketing materials of fashion brands are complicit with coloniality. In this sense, this book walks a fine line between making a spectacle of sensitive issues that have been made into spectacles to begin with, and wanting to speak analytically and contextually about them, with respect to those who are most affected by them. We have written this book in the hope of being able to contribute to the growing discourse of inclusive and culturally sustainable fashion, the aim of which is to make fashion a safer place of enjoyment, pleasure, and work. In this sense the aim of our book is political: with it, we wish to join the brave activists who fight against prejudices in the industry, who want to make fashion better for future generations—and to show that fashion can truly be an advocate of social and political change.

PART ONE

THE FASHION SCANDAL—PAST AND PRESENT

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1 FRAMING THE FASHION SCANDAL: THE PLATFORMIZATION OF FASHION In this chapter we discuss fashion as a form of visual communication. We set the scene by tracing some of the recent developments in which fashion is separated from garments and becomes more abstract and intangible. We especially write about visualization of fashion, how images—still and moving—have become an inseparable part of fashion and how this reflects a wider paradigmatic shift from a text-based culture to an image-based one. We also connect visualization to a wider shift that has been called as mediatization of fashion (Rocamora 2017) which refers to the transformative power media has had over fashion since the 2000s. Furthermore, we also discuss digitalization of fashion, focusing especially on platforms and social media applications—more widely on platformization of fashion. We particularly look at what we call “instagramification of fashion”, and how Instagram has changed the way fashion functions. As part of this shift, and the shift to the unintentional scandal we also discuss the power of one social media application, that of Instagram. As a potent site of “citizen journalism,” it has affected a paradigmatic shift in how and by whom fashion is discussed. We explain how platformization and instagramification of fashion have contributed to the rise of the contemporary fashion scandal.

Visualization of Fashion Fashion has gone through several processes of medium-related transformations that contribute to the creation of the fashion scandal. One of the biggest changes has to do with fashion becoming an image. In the mid-2000s, the Professor of Marketing Jonathan E. Schroeder (2005) argued that nothing escapes visualization. He created a list of physical and virtual places and 19

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spaces where images are encountered every day: advertising, internet, television, newspapers, billboards, magazines, buildings, t-shirts, credit cards etc. Schroeder’s argument still applies: visual representations impact contemporary Western societies profoundly. We are exposed to images like Schroeder states but the places we encounter most images are not in the real world anymore (billboards and magazines) but in the virtual one, enabled by the internet and its platforms many of which are based on images (just think of social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok). Scholars have argued since the 1960s that there is no un-coded and un-mediated reality outside the visually mediated one (Debord 1967/1994; Baudrillard 1981; Castells 1996; Tomlinson 1999). Especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars of visual culture explained that contemporary culture has gone through a profound paradigmatic change: a pictorial turn (Mitchell 1994) or a visual turn (Jay 2002). Both concepts were used to explain a paradigmatic change from a culture in which text preceded, to a culture where the image has taken the position formerly preserved to text. In contemporary culture, phenomena, things, and people are represented through images, and especially commercially produced images proliferate. From the perspective of academic research, pictorial or visual turn follows linguistic turn (Rorty 1967) and uses the methods developed in linguistics, semiotics and rhetoric, among others, in the analysis of visual representations. Visual turn conceives images as texts and discourse: as cultural structures produced and shaped by different scientific explanatory models. This means that the notion of reality as visually constructed is a paradigm. It brings together Charles Peirce’s semiotics, Nelson Goodman’s idea of the languages of art, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Jacques Derrida’s grammar of modernity, the Frankfurt school’s hierarchies of visual cultures (Mitchell 1994). The visual culture theorist W J T Mitchell draws from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy and the paradox between the early and later phases of his career. According to Mitchell, Wittgenstein started with an image theory of meanings but ended up with a ban on images: “Image has held us captive. And we could not get out of it because it was in our language and the language seemed to repeat itself relentlessly” (Wittgenstein 1953, cit. Mitchell 1994: 12). Visual turn and the study of visual culture has also been associated with the changing understanding of knowledge: images do not only reflect reality, but they produce it actively (de Lauretis 1987). Some scholars have even suggested that the history of Western philosophy is characterized by the slandering of seeing and that up until the twentieth century, words dominated the image meaning that text was considered to represent truth, while the image was seen to be an unreliable source of knowledge. Visualization certainly applies to fashion which has mostly been disseminated in image-form since the drawn fashion plates of past centuries but especially

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since the late-twentieth century with the development of camera and printing techniques. We agree with colleagues who have proposed that fashion is a powerful form of visual communication (Barnard 1996; Evans 2003; Schroeder 2005; Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006). As part of the much wider and more philosophical visual turn, advertising and marketing, and brand communication more generally, has also seen a visual turn. To come into contact with fashion, one only need leaf through a fashion magazine or dive into the digital world of the internet and social media which are built on viewing, browsing, skimming and surfing images. Although the image has always been an essential part of disseminating information about the latest fashions, the contemporary prominence of the image goes hand in hand with the paradigmatic shift from linguistic to visual turn: to the establishment of fashion photography as the main medium of fashion in the mid-twentieth century. The invention of modern lensbased image reproduction techniques—the camera—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled mass production of images which has led to the erosion of text as the primary means of communication and given prominence to the image. In the 2010s, digitalization—a digital turn—and the proliferation of digital media have fundamentally helped the transformation of fashion into consumption of visual representations. This has meant that contemporary brand communication strategies largely depend on visual rhetoric and visual representation (Schroeder 2007: 277–293). Visual images produce a world around the brand, breathing life into it and its products and services. Visual representations, still photography and moving images, thus play a key role in the meaning formation process about the brand and the product, and ultimately about its desired customer. The broader theoretical context of this book thus stems from the study of fashion as visual culture which understands images as central producers of meaning in the global world. To put it another way: like Marshall McLuhan argues in his groundbreaking book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (2003), a medium of any device, images as well as clothes, always changes the habits of social life and enables people to act differently with this new technical support. A medium is always “an extension of (hu)man” because it expands and adds new opportunities to the offering of human action. Clothes, visual representations of them and digital media that distribute information about clothes and fashion are no exception: they have changed our perception of the world, humans, and fashion. Now, with networked media, ordinary people have gained access to the formerly closed and impenetrable fashion system. They have been granted the possibility to participate, create and direct discussion and debate, unlike before when the gatekeepers of (print) fashion media, editors and journalists occupied this position. The digital disruption of (fashion) media has also disrupted participation. It has enabled a dialogue between brands and individuals about fashion and has created the ability debate it on a global scale. The fashion scandal is an example of this.

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Mediatization of Fashion Consequently, visualization and digitalization have contributed to a new paradigmatic shift: that of mediatization (Lundby 2009; Hepp 2012; Hjarvard 2013). At heart of the concept is the term “media,” the plural of the word “medium.” The origin of the word is in Latin where it means that something is in the “middle.” In contemporary English, the term has a similar meaning when it refers to “effecting or conveying something” and to “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment” (Merriam-Webster 2018). A “medium” is thus a go-between or an intermediary which communicates and brings different parties together. It is also a concept that is used loosely to refer to different methods of disseminating information that is second hand. “Mass media,” such as newspapers, refers to dissemination of information to large populations, but there are also specified media which address specific demographic segments interested in certain phenomena, such as the fashion magazine. In contemporary culture information is increasingly disseminated through different media outlets: TV and the internet with its online platforms. Technological development, especially with the so-called “new media” which encompasses computers and mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones has democratized information dissemination. The idea is that everyone can become, in principle, a medium. Mediatization is part of the proliferation of digital media. It describes a process by which “activities of various social spheres come to be conducted under the influence of the media, with the media, through the media, or by the logic of the media” (Rothenbuhler 2009: 279). Mediatization also describes “the process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic” (Rocamora 2017: 508). Mediatization thus refers to the transformative power of media: the media produce the very thing they mediate. In this sense mediatization is similar to visualization which refers to the transformative power of the image to create the very thing an image represents. The media, like visual representations as one form of mediatization, are “performative and constitutive” (Rocamora 2017: 506) of this thing, and of reality more generally. Fashion has visualized and mediatized. Mediatization means that fashion is not only disseminated through different media or that the media are separate from fashion, but also that media strongly shape the perception and understanding of what fashion is, how and where it appears, and more importantly, what it means (Rocamora 2017). Meanings of fashion have for the past decades been largely produced, shaped, and transformed by media, be it text, video, or image. Media are not just technologies but techno-social systems (Fuchs 2017: 39–40) which consist of both technological infrastructure and humans who interact. Mediatization indicates that fashion is a cultural industry which tells stories and makes meaning about the world and its people (Colucci and Pedroni 2021).

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Due to the openness of social media, the fashion system, including brands and their communication, must pay close attention to the audiences that have access to media and who have become part and parcel of creating meanings of fashion. Since the transformation of fashion into visual language, visual media have always been an irreducible dimension of all processes of modern fashion. What has changed in the current mediatized fashion landscape, is that ordinary people have access to the formerly closed and highly regulated fashion discourse. The fashion scandal indicates that the digital disruption of fashion has not only spread the white Eurocentric fashion discourse around the world but also that the white Eurocentric fashion discourse is being challenged. Digital media have made far-away things, people, and phenomena such as fashion approachable, and enabled the establishment of new critical discourse.

Social Media and the Platformization of Fashion The latest development in visualization and mediatization relates to social media platforms. Business scholars understand them as “matchmakers” (Evans and Schmalensee 2016) which interface among different parties. Social media are interactive, two-way channels for networked sociality (van Dijck 2013) which enable “individuals and communities to gather, communicate, [and] share information” (boyd 2009). Social media marks a shift from the closed fashion media system to one in which anyone can publish and produce content e.g., about fashion and lifestyle in any form, be it text, image, or video (Lovink 2011). There are different types of social media e.g., “social network sites” (SNSs) and “user-generated content” (UGC). While the former promote interpersonal connections, the latter promote the exchange of amateur or professional content. Well-known SNSs are Facebook and Twitter, and UGC sites YouTube and Instagram. These interactive platforms are built on a promise of making culture more “participatory,” “user centered,” and “collaborative” which makes social media “online facilitators or enhancers of human networks” (van Dijck 2013)—something that is very present in the contemporary fashion scandal. Another technological invention that has affected fashion and the emergence of the contemporary fashion scandal is the platform. A platform is a digital infrastructure which enables two or more groups to interact (Srnicek 2017: 43). Platforms are intermediaries that bring together different parties: people, brands, advertisers etc. Platforms provide the basic infrastructure of mediation—thus, they are located between users, and form a ground upon which different activities occur (Srnicek 2017: 44). A platform can obviously be an important place of commerce. However, from the perspective of the fashion scandal, a platform is

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also a site for social networking and debate as is the case with the popular platforms of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As enablers of social networking, debating, mediating, and exchanging of ideas about fashion, platforms enable a variety of intimate and public social interaction. From the perspective of fashion and the fashion scandal, platforms are part of the broader development of the “Web 2.0,” which made websites user-friendly emphasized user-generated content and participatory culture at the beginning of the 2000s. This shift has been named the democratization of fashion communication (Rocamora 2011). While public communication about fashion was previously in the hands of institutionalized actors it is now conducted by anyone with access to the internet. In principle, ordinary people with an internet connection are supposedly able to create and share content online becoming their own fashion media. In this shift the established fashion system has lost its monopoly over what is said about fashion. Platforms grant the power to communicate and structure and steer fashion communication. They allow and enhance different types of activities, connections, and knowledge—according to Professors of Media Studies David B. Nieborg and Thomas Poell (2018: 4276) this represents platformization: “The penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of the cultural industries.” Platforms are important since they produce “network effects” (Srnicek 2017: 53): the more people use a platform, the more valuable that platform is, and the more activities on it matter. The platformization of fashion is not only an external, technological process. It is also internal and governs, shapes, and organizes the fashion system and the meaning of fashion. Mass access to public dissemination of information about fashion is visible in the fashion scandal: social media platforms bypass institutionalized media and information about a scandal is “passed from one person to another along social connections, to create a distributed discussion or community” (Standage 2013: 3). The scandal is often shared further and commented upon in ways that defy time–space constraints. Social media platforms have radically transformed the fashion industry. On the one hand, fashion companies have gained access to much wider and diverse audiences. On the other hand, audiences have gained access to brands and even have power over them. Platforms have truly transformed mass communication into “mass self-communication” (Castells 2009). Social media communication is mass communication because messages can potentially have a global audience. However, because it is also “self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many who communicate with many” (Castells 2009: 70) it is also communication that is personal and about the person who communicates. The global shift from mass communication to mass self-communication becomes especially tangible in the contemporary fashion scandal. It is often

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generated by individuals, it is often about the individual’s feelings, and it is spread to others in digital person-to-person networks. The fashion scandal represents a novel type of communication realm within fashion—one that aims to have a global reach, to find new audiences and identify new opportunities to make change. The fashion scandal is part of this shift and its “backbone is made of computer networks [. . .] whose senders are globally distributed and globally interactive” (Castells 2009: 70).

The Instagramification of Fashion As part of the disruption of fashion communication, new actors have emerged. The first were fashion bloggers before the 2010s (Rocamora 2011; Pedroni 2015, 2022). To paraphrase the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993), bloggers were newcomers affecting a major crisis in the industry, attracting the attention of the audience and the money of advertisers. Single personalities such as Bryanboy and Tavi Gevinson of Style Rookie were among the first to turn the spotlight onto themselves, eventually making bloggers essential to fashion and its discussions. Bloggers were independent actors who were able to voice their opinions, unlike journalists who lack this kind of autonomy (Rocamora 2016: 246). They also lowered the entry barrier, publishing personal opinions to a potentially global audience. This enabled a fashion communication revolution by transferring power to ordinary citizens (Pedroni 2015: 180). Blogs provided minorities and misrepresented groups with an opportunity to circulate counter-hegemonic images which shook the established structures and hierarchies. Bloggers changed judgments of taste and provided space to voices that had been “Othered” by the fashion industry and its white European values. Bodies that had been previously invisible in the visual world of fashion dominated by white, Western, young, slim bodies, became visible; how bloggers dressed was encouraged and supported, even celebrated. Blogs served as springboards to celebrating difference (Mora and Rocamora 2015). By the mid-2010s, social media applications were institutionalized as places to discuss, disseminate and market fashion (Rocamora 2013: 69). Bloggers and journalists started using Twitter to share their experiences which further lowered access to the fashion industry. Marketers adopted Facebook which became filled with online marketplaces for new and vintage clothing. But perhaps the biggest disruption of fashion was caused by one single social media application: Instagram. In fact, the 2010s has been labeled “The Age of Instagram” (Ahmed 2019) fueling platformization, and more specifically, the instagramification of fashion.

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The instagramification of fashion refers to the idea that Instagram has become the major vehicle for fashion photographers, designers, brands, retailers, and the media to disseminate, market, and debate fashion. It has changed how fashion is reported, shared, and consumed in a seminal way: fashion brands have created shows and designs that are either intended only for Instagram or that read well on Instagram. It also means that this platform has become the most effective site where fashion is monetized, with in-built possibilities to shop items displayed as images (Pedroni 2022: 10). The instagramification of fashion has also brought about new fashion personalities, especially the fashion influencer (Bendoni 2017). Influencers are important in personifying fashion and making it more “authentic” by bringing it closer to the ordinary people. They have the power to influence the opinion and purchase behavior of their followers with their recommendations and viral marketing (Pedroni 2022). Their influence is directly linked to who they are, what they wear, how they live, whom they know, and what they think. They have also become important to fashion brands that have started to collaborate with influencers, depending on the number of followers they have. The instagramification of fashion thus means that fashion communication has helped ordinary people to find their own voice. Instagram is a platform where people from different backgrounds, especially those who are socially marginalized, can become visible to and reach brands and give them direct feedback. Furthermore, the instagramification of fashion also refers to a profound transformation of the fashion industry in that those independent voices, whether bloggers, influencers, consumers, or other audiences, have opened up the closed fashion system. It has, in this sense, democratized fashion allowing different audiences and consumers to enter the fashion world’s inner circles from fashion shows to designer’s ateliers, and, perhaps more importantly, to form opinions about fashion and voice them to others. It has made the audience—or at least some personalities—co-creators of fashion and its content and enabled ordinary people to affect fashion brands, also through the logic of the scandal. Instagramification has also changed the power dynamic between brands and consumers. It is also important for understanding the fashion scandal and its changing meaning in the digital age which we will discuss in Chapter 2.

2 FASHION BRANDS NEGOTIATING IDENTITY POLITICS This chapter discusses how the cultural approach to brands and branding has directed attention to social identities. We discuss how brands draw from culturally agreed codes that communicate understandings about identity, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and ability. We also explain how brands use visual representations to transform the narrative of identity into a visible form. In addition, we explore how fashion brands build, circulate and challenge notions of identities through their visual marketing strategies. Drawing from several sources, we conclude that identity has become a “master concept” in contemporary fashion. The scandal further indicates that identity has also become important in the struggle for recognition and change in fashion, drawing an image of new identity politics that largely take place on social media and that are mobilized by cultural identities and personal values. It merges from demands that brands be more sensitive and culturally sustainable.

Cultural Approach to Brands and Branding Alongside changes in the visualization, mediatization, and digitalization of fashion, brands and branding are undergoing a cultural shift. This cultural approach understands brands and branding as important players in society—brands are seen as actors that affect people’s opinions and behavior. Brands are not separate from the cultural and social context; on the contrary, culture and society provide the context in which brands interact with consumers and society (Schroeder 2009). This also puts extra pressure on brand communication, including the imagery brands disseminate, especially when images cross physical/geographical borders, and cultural and ideological boundaries. The 27

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messages images construct can convey a great deal about the brand and its values. However, they can also fail to do this, at least in the sense the brand intended. Of course, this is only logical when meanings are understood as being constructed in time and space and are constantly shifting according to the context. The past decades have seen a change in branding content as corporate leaders and advertising professionals have reconceptualized the role of visual brand communication into cultural discourse. While brand research formerly emphasized the effects of branding and quantitative analysis, the cultural discourse around branding has shifted to a more qualitative analysis of how branding works (Schroeder 2009, 2008; Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006; Cayla and Arnould 2008). This has changed the focus from brand producers and products to consumer responses (e.g., Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001). It has also changed the focus to how messages, be they packaged in visual or textual form, are interpreted, and understood. Here another concept, that of cultural branding, developed by Douglas Holt (2003, 2004) is a good addition. Holt defines cultural branding as a powerful branding strategy which aims to create a myth. Unlike the conventional approach, which targets consumer segments or psychographic types, cultural branding goes after the most intense anxieties and desires that run through society, those that are rooted in actual acute tensions that people feel between their own lives and society’s prevailing ideology (Holt 2003, 2004). Cultural branding may capitalize on crowdcultures that provide enormous cultural opportunities for the brands and are easily accessible in the digital space. Cultural branding can be used by brands to bring crowdculture’s ideology, novel ideas and challenge “cultural orthodoxy”, i.e. existing conventions (Holt 2016). To bring such novel ideas to mainstream culture can be risky. The fashion scandal is a good example of how difficult it is to govern brand meanings, and how meanings are always tied to the specific cultural context in which the message is decoded. When brands are seen as cultural (and ideological) actors and as societal institutions instead of mere commercial ones, understanding them requires analytical tools that are developed in the fields of visual and cultural studies, sociology, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. These help to acknowledge brands’ representational and rhetorical power both as cultural artifacts and as bearers of meaning and as actors that shape and reflect societal, cultural, and ideological issues and values (Lury 2004). Like images, brands are not only mediators of cultural meaning: in fact they create meanings and are, as such, “ideological referents that shape cultural rituals, economic activities, and social norms” (Schroeder 2009: 124). Brands not only absorb cultural meanings, they also influence them and the surrounding society, its worldview and understanding of the ideal human actively. From a cultural perspective, brands communicate their identities (cf. Faurholt, Csaba and Bengtsson 2006), but at the same time, people actively negotiate,

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shape, and change these identities, especially on social media platforms. The meanings people give to brands are ever more important with the growing importance of social media. These meanings are generated in and affected by the cultural and social context in which brands and people are situated. Due to the growing proximity of brands and people, fashion brands are required to have a better understanding of the culture and the people in which they operate. To succeed, brands need to understand themselves as cultural influencers and that they are an important, powerful, and a visible part of culture and society. Historically, many brands since the Italian Benetton in the 1980s and the American Nike in the 1990s (Holt 2003) have used advertising as an explicitly political forum (Tinic 1997). This has helped associate fashion and lifestyle companies and their products to progressive social ideas so much so that the ideology presented by the brand through their communication also becomes the identity of the brand and its products and services themselves. Powerful images have worked to translate the economic discourse of the brands into a cultural discourse of the society (du Gay 1997: 309–310). Through images, brands have participated in the cultural discourse and construction of identities while they have also strived to maximize their financial gain without directly naming their activities as such. For brands such as Nike and Benetton, images have played an important role in packaging their message as socially conscious brands to globally dispersed and varied audiences. The assumption of visual communication builds on the idea that images, unlike written text, can bypass cultural and linguistic barriers. Images are (mistakenly) thought of as a universal language, understood by everyone, regardless of their cultural or linguistic context. In the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet, the advertising imagery by fashion brands was mainly mediated in local context i.e., within the relatively homogenous cultural sphere. Now, with the establishment of digital media and the internet, these same images can be shared globally and reach a much wider and culturally diverse audience. Thus, their meanings are also negotiated in a much wider and diverse cultural context. Although it is not true that images would have mediated meanings that always stay the same pre-internet, this is certainly not the case post-internet. Images have always been read against the backdrop of culture, and this fact is highlighted in the networked culture: the fashion scandal is symptomatic of a cultural shift in which the shared meanings of white Eurocentric culture are not accepted automatically. The current discourse of fashion, and especially that of the fashion scandal, thus suggests that in the age of digital media, media literacy that accounts for culturally bound meanings is ever more important. It is virtually impossible to determine any single meaning for images, and even less so in contemporary globalized culture. Ubiquitous geographical borders between nations and cultures and the free movement of people, corporations, products, and images

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on the information highway means that meanings and interpretations become even more complex and multifaceted. Now brands are expected to learn media literacy and be sensitive to cultural differences that affect meanings ascribed to images in different cultural contexts. The contemporary fashion scandal indicates that critics who have long argued that “global culture” has actually meant Western culture and its values were right (e.g., Hall 1991: 19–40; Tomlinson 1999: 195– 196). What fashion calls for now is a know-how and knowledge that goes beyond economics. An understanding of culture, cultural difference, and customs are required. Business savvy requires cultural savvy alongside it.

Negotiating Identity Politics Brand marketing strategies have long built, circulated, and challenged identities (Sender 2004; Aspers 2010; Godart 2012; Kellner 2013; Vänskä 2017). “Brand identity” is the identity of a brand—it includes the logo, colors, design, etc. that make the brand what it is. Brands use words and images drawn from culturally agreed codes that encapsulate understandings about identity, including gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, ability, or race. Some brands intentionally challenge these norms—hence the scandal. The deliberate use of the scandal reminds of tactics Stuart Hall (1997) calls “politics of exclusion”: the scandal can reproduce differences between brands and create boundaries that separates the “inside” from an “outside” or “us” from “them.” Brands that have been successful in using the scandal—Benetton, Nike, Calvin Klein, American Apparel etc.—have aimed to be perceived as “rebellious” (see Figure 2.1). Haute couture brands such as Dior have also aimed to appeal to a younger consumer segment—to those who tend to use scandalous tactics to rebel against the values of their elders (e.g., Vänskä 2005). The question of identity is by no means new; however, in the 2010s, questions in relation to it became increasingly important with the rise of the internet and platforms as sites of sharing ideas, discussion, and debate. One of the prominent voices analyzing this novel interest in identity in the era of social media is the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. In his book Identity (2018: xv–xvi), he even goes so far as to argue that in the 2010s, the concept of “identity” became a “master concept.” Fukuyama links this shift to the rise of the internet as a novel site of political struggle and argues that this kind of identity discourse intensified in the 2016 US presidential elections. What was new about it was that it did not concern the “usual suspects”: women, People of Color, or sexual and gender minorities. Instead, it targeted nationalists and white working-class men from the so-called “rust belt” area, the mid-west of the United States, which has experienced a decline in heavy manufacturing industry due to globalization.

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Figure 2.1 Calvin Klein are the masters of deliberate shock. In the 1990s, Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg (Marky Mark) modeled for the brand’s controversial campaigns. Fall 1995 Collections at the “Race to Erase MS” Benefit. Photo by: Barry King/WireImage.

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The current interest, described by Fukuyama, connects to the long history of identity struggle in America which has addressed the rights of marginalized groups, but also differs from it significantly. In the US, the Civil Rights Movement and its current form #BlackLivesMatter has aimed to end racial discrimination against People of Color since the late 1950s. Since the 1960s, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the current #MeToo movement have aimed to end the sexual and social discrimination against women in work and at home. The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement and its more contemporary versions of Queer Nation and Act Up sought to highlight the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, while the current global LGBTQI+ movements continue to pursue equal rights for non-heterosexuals and transgender people. Similar struggles for sexual rights are still taking place elsewhere, for example in several African, Arabic and Asian countries. In Russia, for instance, homosexuality was decriminalized by law in 1993. Nevertheless, it has become virtually illegal with the rise of President Vladimir Putin, with the strong support of the Orthodox Church, who emphasizes “traditional values” and has imposed “anti-homopropaganda” measures since 2006 (e.g., Wilkinson 2014). All in all, during the latter part of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, identity politics were formed by feminists, civil rights activists, and activists pursuing rights for sexual and gender minorities (Butler 2004). In contemporary culture, Fukuyama argues, this “fight” has radically changed with the rise of social media. The struggle for recognition can, in principle, affect anyone regardless of their factual positioning in society. The quest for a recognized identity has become the quintessential right of Western individualism and freedom. Fukuyama investigates the change in global politics and states that traditional political issues of right and left have given way to (nationalistic) politics that seek to protect cultural identity (Fukuyama 2018: 58, italics added). The new age of internet- or platform-based identity politics grows out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that do not recognize the assumed true inner self. The novel identity struggle stems from this conflict and from seeking to be recognized (2018: 7). These identity politics are thus enabled by the easy access to digital media, and they do not only or necessarily define socially marginalized groups, but rather any groups ranging from the blue-collar white working-class men of the rust belt of America to the contest between nations and cultures. This, Fukuyama (2018) argues, has reformulated the concept of identity politics as a power struggle between the “elites” and the “common people,” the “nationalists” and the “cosmopolitans.” According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2001), identity has become the source of security and confidence, “a surrogate of community” in the globalized (insecure) world. Identity is imaginary: it is rooted in an imagined community of “us.” Identities are also a matter of power relations, those between a dominant or hegemonic group whose ideas are presented as commonsensical and intuitive,

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and a dominated one whose alternative ideas cannot be disseminated or even articulated, as Stuart Hall (2000) writes. Hall follows post-structuralist theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) and considers that identities are like products: they are marked by difference and exclusion, not by their naturally constituted unity (Hall 2000: 17). Above all, Hall argues, identities are made possible by that which is rejected and rendered the “outside.” This entails that identities which are defined as uniform can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude (Hall 2000: 18). The unity of an identity is an imaginary construction. Every identity has its necessary “other” which it “lacks”— despite it being silenced or unspoken. What we mean by identity and identity politics comes close to what fashion scholars Susan B. Kaiser and Denise N. Green (2021: 26–29) note about subjectivity and subject formation although Kaiser and Green prefer subject formation to identity. In fact, they write that identity is a “troubling concept” because it has a “connotation of being ‘who I am,’ as though it is an essence” in everyday usage (Kaiser and Green 2021: 26) and because it can also be locked to one single and unchanging essence. Furthermore, they argue, identity can also lead to particular identity politics—one that does not recognize the complex intersections among identities. We agree with Kaiser and Green in that “identity” may have such an essentializing ring to it. This may be partly due to its everyday use but mostly it is due to the etymological origins of the word in Latin where the word “idem” means “sameness” and “oneness”. However, we also argue, following Judith Butler (1990), that identity is not based on some inner truth or unchanging essence—neither sameness nor oneness. Instead, it is a by-product of repeated identity performances. Identity is performative, processual, in a constant state of becoming—something which the repeated scandals and changing claims of identity also hint at. Identity is, as we see it, also always changing and fluid, demonstrated in the newer scandals pertaining to cultural appropriation and neurodiversity, for example. In the past decades identity politics have been vital for community building around different subject positions of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. In contemporary culture, as Fukuyama writes, community building is also at stake even if the subject positions of the new identity politics might be different. They can include positions that usually have marked a dominant group—such as whiteness—or those that have hardly been recognized at all—such as neurodiversity, a theme in our case study on mental health and fashion. What we mean to say is that identity politics refers to the process of challenging power relations. Cultural discourses impose and shape certain understandings of identity, and as individuals identify with certain identities, they inevitably become subsumed in certain discourses of power. The current networked culture has intensified the discourse of identity claims and attached it to certain identities because of the easy access to digital media where one can voice their

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sentiments and opinions quite freely. Paradoxically, this has not necessarily only led to a plurality of identities and identity politics but ended up, in many cases, as an intensification of the construction of the “inside” and “outside”—those who belong, and those who do not belong. Platforms which were supposed to grant the blossoming of plural voices, seem to intensify juxtapositions, and the seeking of differences and dichotomies between “us” and “them.” Social media platforms constitute a new intimate public sphere of fashion communication, one that may have emancipatory political potential. Social media presents an activist—perhaps also a political—public sphere for fashion by creating a space which German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1997: 52) has called “subpolitics”: politics that are not “governmental, parliamentary, and party politics” but which take place in “all the other fields of the society.” In this new public sphere issues considered private and intimate—those relating to questions of intimate aspects of identity, for example—which have traditionally been excluded from the public domain, have now resurfaced on the internet. The platforms represent a new democratic and multicultural public arena which is open to groups that do not represent the traditional public sphere; that which has excluded women, gays and lesbians, and racial and ethnic groups (Fraser 1992). It has enabled the voice of those who were previously denied access to the public sphere—the closed fashion system—and in this sense it has advanced critical communication about fashion. Even if the promise of the internet and social media often stresses change and the freedom of users (Shirky 2008), not everyone is convinced that the change will only be positive. As some of our case studies also indicate, online activism can cause material and symbolic harm to fashion brands, but it can also just amount to harmless ranting which brands can simply ignore. Furthermore, it can also foster “post-politics” and exclude the “possibility of politicization proper” (Dean 2005: 65): People can think that they are active—the technology will act for them, alleviating their guilt while assuring them that nothing will change too much. [. . .] By sending an e-mail, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political. And that feeling feeds communicative capitalism insofar as it leaves behind the time-consuming, incremental and risky efforts of politics. [. . .] It is a refusal to take a stand, to venture into the dangerous terrain of politicization. DEAN 2005: 70

What political theorist Jodi Dean means is that voicing identity claims on social media is still different than making real change. It may only mount to an illusion, a feeling, of political action. In 2009, writer and theorist of technology, Evgeny Morozov, who has also written about social media from the perspective of

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political engagement and especially from the perspective of “slacktivism,” went even further. He argued that “feel-good online activism [. . .] has zero political or social impact” (Morozov 2009). What he meant was that online activism can be built on a naive belief in the “emancipatory power of online communication.” Even though fashion scandals prove, at least in some cases, contrary to what both Dean and Morozov claim, identity politics based on online activism is not without trouble. At the beginning of the new millennium, the American philosopher Nancy Fraser (2001) warned that the increasing interest in identity politics as recognition of group-specific cultural identity evokes many problems. It may, for example, result in a quest for simplified group identities instead of a quest for full partnership in social interaction—or, in the era of networked media, further exclude the disadvantaged rather than empower them. It has been shown, for example, that a typical Twitter user is white, aged 18 to 34 years, holds a university degree, has no children, and comes from the USA (Fuchs 2017: 231). The same pattern is also known to apply to the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Weibo: its typical users are 25 to 34-year-olds, have attended university and have no children (Fuchs 2017: 232). Social media users come predominantly from the urban middle class while workers, old people and those with disabilities are excluded. Social media and social media activism may thus bolster digital exclusion and misrecognition rather than dismantle it—it can confine people into online “echo chambers” (Sunstein 2001) or “filter bubbles” (Pariser 2012) that feed societal and ideological polarization rather than diminish it. It may thus prop up subordination and unequal opportunity of participation. At stake is the question of distribution of power and justice (Fraser 2001), however, the influence of ordinary people on social media may be minimal. If the medium can function as a megaphone that can amplify single voices exponentially, the fashion scandal can also be heard and have consequences and remedy injustices and asymmetrical power structures. The fashion scandal indicates that, even though individuals may be at the center of their own personal worlds and feelings of injustice, those can become very large thanks to how social media platforms enable communication across time and space. In this case the contemporary fashion scandal is not only about creating visibility for the brand by shocking middle-class values, but it can also signal systemic problems of social and economic injustice built into the fashion industry. The online fashion scandals also speak to social fragmentation which has given rise to an “era of personalized politics” (Bennett 2012) meaning that digital media technology can prioritize individual, rather than collective action. The American political scientist Lance W. Bennett (2012: 21) defines contemporary culture as the “era of personalization” and links it to the fading of ideologies and formal group identifications (e.g., party, union, church, and class) and to the rise of individuals who “increasingly code their personal politics through personal lifestyle values.” This includes questions about consumer choices related to e.g., environmentally friendly and organic

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food, sustainably produced clothes and other commodities, or brands that support and advocate consumers’ personal values. Despite their position as a form of personalized politics, fashion scandals can easily become large-scale thanks to social media, which creates rapid activist participation and direct engagement with brands and other actors of the fashion industry. The aim of the fashion scandal is to mobilize other online users behind the same cause, which often stems from a personal experience that fashion lacks diversity and inclusivity. In this sense, the contemporary fashion scandal draws from or builds on, however implicitly, the identity politics of the social movements of the 1960s which centered on group identities of various groups, or, even more to the point, to issues of a specific cause e.g., to sexual or social rights. The new identity politics represented by the fashion scandal suggest that the origins of the contemporary fashion scandal lie in personal values but can easily become larger demands that brands be more culturally sensitive and socially just. The personal becomes political with the help of the “megaphone effect” granted by social media, by aiming to mobilize as many people as possible to act to end a perceived injustice.

3 CHANGING STRATEGIES OF FASHION BRANDS: FROM SHOCK TO SCANDAL This chapter provides some context for the current fashion scandals. We discuss how being heard—or rather, being seen—is not an easy task amongst the bombardment of visual imagery and how this has led many fashion brands to use shock as a strategy to grab consumers’ attention within overwhelming “visual noise.” We first trace the genealogy of the fashion scandal and discuss some historical cases in which a scandal has been deliberately used as a marketing ploy. We then move on to the contemporary fashion scandal which marks a significant shift in the meaning of the scandal: it has now lost its luster and become a liability that brands wish to avoid. We call this the “unintentional fashion scandal” and conclude that it is about challenging hierarchies between the powerful and the disadvantaged.

A Short History of the Fashion Scandal: Deliberate Shock The fashion scandal is closely linked to the increasing volume of visual communication as well as the formation of social media platforms as sites of sharing information and debating it. Before the digital disruption of fashion, it was estimated that people encountered over 3,000 advertisements every day (Lasn 1999). Although there are no official figures, the average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements every single day (Carr 2021). This means that the majority of brand communication is conducted via visual representation. Photography has made the spectacular a fundamental element of fashion communication by putting the universe of images and visual 37

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symbols before products. Being heard—or rather, seen—is not an easy task amongst the bombardment of visual imagery. It has led many fashion brands to use strategies and tactics that stir people emotionally, help to grab attention, and increase brand visibility. As we explained in the Introduction, we recognize two types of fashion scandals: the intentional scandal and the unintentional scandal. Both exploit identity politics, touch on sensitive issues and transgress boundaries of decency and morality. The outcome of a fashion scandal is hard to predict. The scandal can attract desired customers, polish the brand image, create more fame and ultimately more brand revenue. However, it can also alienate customers unless the brand takes corrective action and changes its code of conduct, as was the case with the unintentional scandals we discuss in the following chapters. Historically, fashion scandals appear through controversial topics and representations. Since the 1980s, fashion brands such as Vivienne Westwood, Benetton, Calvin Klein, Diesel, Nike, Dior, and Gucci have used the fashion scandal deliberately to shock their audiences and to gain visibility. The fashion scandal has been an important marketing strategy and a way to build and rebuild the brand identity as “nonconforming,” “daring” and “cutting-edge” by using scandalous images (e.g., Sender 2004; Vänskä 2011, 2017; Borgerson et al. 2006) and by “radicalizing advertising into an explicitly political forum” (Tinic 1997: 3). Fashion and lifestyle companies have especially aimed to associate their brand identity and products with progressive social movements and, by doing so, they have used tactics that often caused a scandal (Tinic 1997). The aim of advertising has shifted from the mere marketing of commodities to engaging brands in cultural and political discourse (Gluckman and Reed 1997; Sender 2004). For brands like Benetton, shock was a conscious strategy which transformed brand communication and advertising into a broader category of social discourse. Benetton’s strategy has been called “controversy advertising” which refers to advertising designed “to have bearing on a matter of recognized controversy” (International Advertising Association 1977: 18, cited in Tinic 1997: 12). Its emphasis is on encouraging consumers in active participation, debate, and dialogue with the brand. This shift changed the brand’s advertising from merely representing products to representing social issues with topics ranging from same-sex romance and chosen families to environmental issues, war, terrorism, AIDS, and racism (Tinic 1997). The depiction of sensitive and emotionally flammable issues and societal problems not only generated public debate about the issues but also about the brand. Oliviero Toscani’s advertisements for Benetton represented inter-racial families, a dying AIDS patient, and political and religious world leaders kissing each other on the mouth, resulting in debate in the media and ultimately, an increase in brand visibility and the establishment of Benetton not only as the producer of multicolored (yuppie) sweaters, but also as a politically and socially aware brand which wasn’t afraid to take a stand (Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Members of the public walking past a Benetton advertising poster campaign displayed on a wall on November 16, 2011 in Milan, Italy. The posters were part of the brand’s campaign “UNHATE,” created by the then newly formed UNHATE Foundation. Photo by: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images.

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Another tactic that fashion brands have adopted is “shock advertising” or “shockvertising” (Parry et al. 2013). This covers matters considered offensive (Chan et al. 2007; Prendergast et al. 2008), issues of sex and decency (Boddewyn and Kunz 1991), controversial products (Fam et al. 2008) and taboos (Sabri and Obermiller 2012). It can include a visual display of e.g., sexual references, profanity, or violence (Parry et al. 2013). The shock effect is almost always created by visual imagery, photographs, and the moving image. They are handy because there is no one way to understand an image: they always enable many interpretation possibilities. This also means that it is relatively easy for the brand to deny shock—and gain more visibility through the denial (see, e.g., Vänskä 2017). The shock is a stimulus to generate emotional responses and to use these as a way to gain more visibility and fame for the brand. Shock is thus an attempt to “surprise an audience by deliberately violating norms for societal values and personal ideals” (Dahl et al. 2003: 269; emphasis added. See also Vezina and Paul 1997). There is no agreement on the effects of the shock. Some argue that it is a technique used to create publicity, others define it as gimmick that has no valuable effect, still others see it as a valid strategy for capturing attention, especially when the aim is to introduce a new product or a brand (Vezina and Paul 1997). Calvin Klein’s advertising campaigns, for example, were frequently banned from billboards, TV, and the newspapers in the 1990s, because their visual narratives were interpreted to refer to non-marital sex, soft porn, or pedophilia were considered too risqué. (e.g., Vänskä 2011). In the early 2000s, the classical European couture houses such as Dior, also started using raunchy advertisements to rejuvenate their stuffy old-fashioned brand image. One such example is the advertising campaign that introduced the Dior saddle bag by John Galliano for Spring/Summer 2000. The bag quickly became an “It bag” and has now morphed into a Dior classic (Figure 3.2). The bag was introduced with an advertising campaign shot by Nick Knight featuring the supermodel Gisele Bündchen with Rhea Durham in a series of steamy semi-close-up photographs in which Bündchen and Durham hold each other passionately, their skin glowing as if covered in sweat (Vänskä 2005). This campaign marketed the bag to a younger consumer segment, and it was also seen in numerous variations on Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in the television series Sex and the City (1998–2004). The photographs were considered so scandalous that they were banned from Finnish fashion magazines. It was argued that the advertisements represented the “wrong kind of femininity” and the “ultimate objectification of the female body” (Vänskä 2005). In 2001, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) reported Dior’s accessories sales were up by at least 60% due to the bag’s success and that it had been adopted by the celebrity Paris Hilton (Piters 2018). This helped to transform the image of the brand making young fashionable women covet it.

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Figure 3.2 The Dior Saddle bag became the “it-bag” at the turn of the millennium and has remained as such ever since. Here a guest wears the bag at Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2020/2021 in Paris, France. Photo by: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images.

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Professor of Journalism Michael Schudson (1989: 169) has noted that advertising must find “resonance” and “match the needs and interests of particularly socially and culturally constituted groups.” He also believes that the success of an advertising campaign depends on “how skilfully the object draws from the general culture and from the specific cultural field it is a part of” (Schudson 1989: 166). As the examples of Benetton, Calvin Klein and Dior demonstrate, advertising is no longer only a persuasion tactic that promotes commodities and sales. It is a “distinctive and central symbolic structure” (Schudson 1989: 210) which takes up social issues and generates debate around them. Fashion brands that took a stand wanted to play an important role in people’s socially situated lives, and they did so by critiquing the prevailing middle-class norms. Brands aimed to be perceived as advocates of complex social issues and as sites of (ideological) struggle, and not just as the promoters of goods and services. To increase visibility, the above-mentioned brands “offended the audience”—or, more to the point, the white European middle-class values of decency and propriety—in order to be seen and remembered. They managed to create their brand identity as “avant-garde” and “liberal-minded” by connecting the brand to global issues with ethical importance, themes ranging from AIDS to multicultural same-sex families, nonconforming (sexual) behavior and gender ambiguity. The scandalized reactions against “offensiveness” circled around the violation and transgression of social norms of decency, and the breaking of social or moral codes of propriety. Shock tactics were fruitful: the brands connected with the desired customer-base, increased their value and economic gain, and ultimately became classical examples of the successful use of the scandal. Shock is one way of creating meaning and identity for the brand. Brands draw from culturally agreed codes that encapsulate understandings about identity, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race. Visual representations transform the narrative of identity into a visible form. There is a broad agreement that identity is established in social interaction and that it is mediated by cultural institutions, including the systems of clothing and fashion. Furthermore, “identity” is also understood to be processual: becoming rather than being, a discursive practice rather than a given. Brand marketing strategies build, circulate and challenge identities (e.g., Sender 2004; Aspers 2010; Godart 2012; Kellner 2013; Vänskä 2017). Identity is constructed in the visual images—as the key to understanding the brand. Stuart Hall (1997) stresses “identity construction” as politics of exclusion. Identity is a process that reproduces difference. “Identity” is a concept that negotiates the relation between the self and the Other. It is created by setting boundaries that separate an “inside” from an “outside”: the “self” from the “other,” “us” from “them.”

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Contemporary Shock: The Unintentional Scandal Alongside the intentional fashion scandal, we have identified what we call the unintentional fashion scandal. It is similar to the deliberate scandal in that it also exploits identity politics, touches on sensitive issues, and transgresses boundaries of decency and morality. However, while the intentional fashion scandal deliberately scandalizes and manages to create a juxtaposition of “us”—the liberal-minded brand and its desired customers—and “them,” the conservative people who just don’t get it, the unintentional scandal does not refer to “us” and “them” in a similar manner. In fact, the brand, caught up in an unintentional scandal, manages to alienate those who might be its desired group of customers as well as creates a juxtaposition which divides people according to e.g., their cultural context, ethnicity, race, or ability. The unintentional scandal is not a witty marketing ploy created to attract publicity. It is a mistake that often seems to have been generated by lack of knowledge about cultural differences, as well as by ignorance and hubris. Our cases suggest that it can alienate customers unless the brand takes corrective action—apologizes, or withdraws products or images, for example—and changes its behavior somehow. Paradoxically, the unintentional fashion scandal marks a shift towards a more sensitive and socially responsible conduct on the part of the brand—actions that take cultural difference seriously. Contemporary fashion brands are expected to be in a dialogue with their audiences and with society, and to take identity-related concerns earnestly. A shift towards the unintentional fashion scandal connects to a change which has evaluated advertising through the standards of social norms (Day 1991). In the past, that which was considered shocking was argued to be dependent on a given culture’s values: how, for example, decency or moral suspicion was defined. But how to define these values now, in the era of social media and a globalized world in which multiple and even contrasting cultural values apply? The shock tactics of the past can easily make brands vulnerable to “cultural backlash” (Thompson, Rindfleisch and Arsel 2006), meaning that instead of being seen as socially progressive, the brand is seen as socially backwards. Critical and offended commentary is easy to circulate on social media by a network of users, consumers, anti-brand activists, bloggers, influencers, and anyone willing to participate in the debate. According to our case studies, one of the most notable features of the unintentional fashion scandal is that it often concerns issues relating to racism, to so-called “cultural appropriation,” as well as to other sensitive issues such as mental health. These themes were not the gist of the intentional fashion scandal which largely circled around a Western Judeo-Christian puritan notion of sexuality,

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especially that of homosexuality and women’s active sexual desire. In the current scandal, a whole different set of themes is at stake: a clash between nations, different cultural values, questions of power and domination, and questions regarding new forms of identity, such as neurodiversity—a novel viewpoint which defines differences in the brain and not those in the body or behavior. The scope of the unintentional fashion scandal is thus much wider than that of the intentional one. It is harder to define exhaustively, however, it is a phenomenon that has its roots in the wider social and historical discourse of colonialism which has created hierarchies between people and cultures, including that between the” West” and “the Rest” (Hall 1996). The unintentional fashion scandal also points out that rather than talking about “global fashion culture,” it is more appropriate to talk about “glocal fashion cultures”. Although the fashion scandal is often generated locally, it has a global reach, thanks to the internet and social media applications. As fashion is disseminated around the world, ideas that brands generate and disseminate in a certain cultural context become a part of the global culture. At the same time, however, depending on the local culture, the scandals may also be endowed with different meanings and interpretations. The fashion scandal is always interpreted against a specific cultural backdrop: there is no such thing as a single, globally understood meaning or identically shared literacy. Simultaneously, meanings of the scandal can also cross cultures. A scandalized reaction that has been generated in one part of the globe will easily transmit to another part and become the “truth” about the said case. As the world “shrinks” through globalization, so does the array of meanings of the globally transmitted and debated fashion scandals. Especially in the 2010s, certain images and characteristics have transformed into clearly distinguishable signs and symbols of the fashion scandal. When fashion communication transforms race, ethnicity, or nationality into visual symbols such as skin color, items of clothing, accessories, or behavior, a scandal almost certainly will lurk around the corner.

Social Media and New Identity Politics In the 2010s, digital media and platforms have become increasingly important for capitalist production and consumption of affects, emotions, and sentiments (Karppi et al. 2016; Paasonen et al. 2015). Digital media have disrupted fashion and made ordinary people into important actors and meaning makers of fashion (Bendoni 2017). Social media has democratized, disrupted, and shifted fashion communication. It has enabled fashion marketers to become closer to their customers and vice versa. While customers used to be more passive recipients of fashion, after social media, digitally connected audiences have become much

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more vocal and demanding, imposing pressure on the fashion system, especially in terms of ecological sustainability, but also and increasingly of social justice and inclusiveness. Social media has raised the awareness of audiences and enabled participation with the fashion establishment. Dean (2005) has coined the concept of “communicative capitalism” to define the idea that the market is the site of democratic action. It designates “that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies” and where the ideals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation are realized in and through digital communication networks (Dean 2005: 55). Communicative capitalism refers to the ways in which digital media enable capitalism to profit from the democratic ideal of participation (Karppi et al. 2016). As part of communicative capitalism, in the 2010s, questions relating to identity and identity politics have become increasingly important for brands and people outside the commercial sphere. In fact, it could even be argued that this novel interest in identity is largely enabled by the configuration of the platforms, especially those of social networking: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. These are not only designed to blur boundaries between the self and the networked media, but also between the private and the public sphere. The scholar of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Ara Wilson (2016) and the scholar of Media Studies Susanna Paasonen (2018) have suggested that network connectivity is an “infrastructure of intimacy”: it is key in enabling and shaping connections between people and brands. Intimacy, to which Wilson and Paasonen refer to, is a concept that defines close relations, and it covers knowledge about secrets, bodily information, and personal vulnerabilities. It is ”a story about both oneself and others . . . set within zones of familiarity and comfort” (Berlant 1998: 281). Traditionally, intimacy separates public from private, and local from global, however, digital media has shown that these dichotomies do not apply. On the contrary: internet, e-mail, instant messaging, and communication on social media platforms are designed as conduits that enable—even encourage—intimate connections across spatial divides. As infrastructures of intimacy, social media highlights, in various ways, the personal aspects and registers of communication. The platforms encourage communication that is personal and consumed with emotions and affects, ranging from cool observation to heated involvement as is often the case with fashion scandals. Understanding social media platforms as an “infrastructure of intimacy” partly explains why and how questions related to identity have become as important as they have in contemporary fashion communication. The platform infrastructure largely determines the form and content of interaction, nurturing “an aspiration for a narrative about something shared” (Berlant 1998: 281). Intimacy cuts across communication—not only in the narrative style which is personal, emotional and casual, but also in its aim to create a community that shares the

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same sentiments. This is vital for the fashion scandal, which is about pointing out the “wrongdoer,” and seeking ways to remedy the situation, to correct the injustice.

Dismantling White Privilege and Introducing Intersectionality to Fashion To study any hierarchies and problems created in fashion means to analyze how the fashion system reproduces and circulates stereotypical understandings of race, racial hierarchies, prejudice, bias, and discriminatory practices on different levels. Despite globalization, the fashion scandals and the social media debates surrounding them indicate that the fashion system is still built on white Eurocentric values. The systemic racism of fashion becomes visible through the fashion scandal and that even the seemingly one-off forms of insensitivity which the fashion scandal highlights are actually representative of a more profound and much longer history of systemic problems, also beyond fashion. Through the examples, we aim to look at the blatant and more subtle forms of systemic racism in fashion. We build on research of systemic racism articulated by colleagues in fashion theory and history (Slade and Jansen 2020), illustration (Reddy-Best et al. 2018), media (Duan 2017), marketing (Johnson et al. 2019) and modeling (Brown 2019). Although there has been some progress in eradicating racism, there are still gaps that need addressing and systemic problems that need to be solved. We agree with fashion scholars Toby Slade and M. Angela Jansen (2020: 813): we need to unlearn present structures and rebuild the fashion system in a way that the “pleasures of fashioning the body can be had in just, sustainable, non-exploitative, and non-discriminating ways.” At heart of the unintentional fashion scandal lies the critique of Eurocentrism, ideas about white privilege, and a theoretical approach of intersectionality. It understands Eurocentrism as a structural element of cultural practices, including fashion. Central to Eurocentrism is its universalism and the binary logic based on difference: subjectivity is defined as civility, rationality, and self-regulation, while Otherness is defined as its negative counterpart (Braidotti 2013: 15). People who are defined as “Others” are the sexualized and the racialized people; those who are reduced to a less than human position. These hierarchical divisions are also crucial in pointing out where one is speaking from. Differences of location between centers and margins matter and become tangible in the scandal generated by ordinary people who are located outside the center of fashion both metaphorically and concretely. The unintentional fashion scandal is also about dismantling the Eurocentric paradigm of fashion. It implies that the binary logic of the West versus the rest of

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the world is still largely the motor of fashion. It reminds us that the binaries and differences that the fashion scandal fleshes out are stereotypical and essentializing, sometimes even lethal to those who become branded as “Others” (Braidotti 2013; Butler 2004). The fashion scandal lets us see that the terms by which individuals are recognized are different depending on race, gender, ethnicity, and how these differences are seen by others. Although we may all be human, the fashion scandal and the debate around it indicates that some of us are still considered more human than others. But not just this: the scandal may also represent a desire to change these articulations and premises. It represents a wish—a demand—to expand the notion of the human. The unintentional scandal also taps into the recognition of “white privilege” defined by Peggy McIntosh (1989). She describes white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” (McIntosh 1989). What she means by this is that racism works mostly in an unnoticed manner and is based on invisible or unconscious practices. In the case studies, this is often blatantly visible: the aim of a brand was hardly to be deliberately racist in their conduct, but they still manage to be so due to “white privilege.” If brands would try to consider what their materials, be they advertisements or clothes, communicate to people different from themselves, they might have had second thoughts about playing with, e.g. racist stereotypes. In fact, MacIntosh provides a checklist of 26 points that enables individuals and groups of people, which might well include brands, to check whether the fact that they are white may hinder them from seeing how racism works in everyday life. The point of the list is that white people are trained not to see themselves as oppressors but to see themselves as individuals whose morals depend on their individual moral will: “[W]hites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’ ” (McIntosh 1989). The fashion scandal reveals how skin color still affects one’s social position. Whiteness and white privilege are the essence of Eurocentrism and its colonial tradition. Whiteness is deeply ingrained in all parts of contemporary culture, including the fashion industry, where progress is painfully slow, as the scandals astutely indicate. The scandal also shows that fashion has become a battleground because, thanks to social media, it is accessible and, in a way, a “safe,” quick and efficient way of speaking about systemic problems—inequalities, injustice, etc. It is a way to make political claims in the sphere outside of politics, in a sphere of communication that is close to everyone, which also makes these claims immediately heard. Digital media have made fashion into a space for conversation between people. Since the 2010s, this conversation has mostly

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been about systemic inequalities, about fashion as a global problem more generally, especially in terms of the unsustainable production of clothing. Finally, the new identity politics prompted by the scandals connects to intersectionality, a term coined by the African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991: 1241–1242). In her classical essay she first describes how US identity politics have shifted from understanding topics considered to be private, individual, and isolated to understanding them as public, social, and systemic. An example she gives pertains to rape: while it was formerly understood as a private (family) matter, it was redefined by feminists because of a broad-scale system of male domination that affects women as a class. She also recognizes a similar shift in relation to other marginalized groups, such as People of Color and gays and lesbians. Crenshaw’s critique is directed at prevailing feminist discourse of her time: although it used post-structural theories of gender performativity described, for example, by Judith Butler (1990), and deconstructed previous feminist ideas such as “essential womanhood,” she saw that feminism was still largely led by white middle-class women and organized according to a white feminist agenda which especially excluded Women of Color. Crenshaw has been credited for having offered intersectional feminism as a “remedy” for feminism. Intersectional feminism highlights the need to take into account the many different ways women experience discrimination, not just according to their gender but also on the basis of sexuality, class, skin color, size, ability and so forth. It has been argued that her point of view, which stresses intersectionality, has become a new form of feminism which is built on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, and which helps to find alternatives to static notions of identity (Carbin and Edenheim 2013). Crenshaw’s critique did not just look at feminism. She also pointed out that Black women and Black lesbians were also marginalized in the anti-racist movement which had a male bias. In other words, Crenshaw showed that the experiences of Black women and Black lesbians were represented neither in feminism nor in the anti-racist movement. Intersectionality was the tool to change this. It was a promise to carve out a more complex notion of identity, one that accounts for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed and experienced (Crenshaw 1991: 1245). Crenshaw (1991) also distinguished structural, political, and representational intersectionality—a theme that is important for us when we discuss the fashion scandal. In this sense intersectionality encompasses, first, the structural conditions of groups of people, second, the politics toward them and, third, the cultural construction of those groups, with all three dimensions influencing their lived experiences as members of many groups at the same time. The three levels of intersectionality are useful when thinking about the fashion scandal: they repeatedly take up structural, political, and representational issues. At a structural level this may mean that various dimensions of difference must be considered,

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Figure 3.3 Model Kelly Knox presents a creation by British fashion house Teatum Jones for their Spring/Summer 2018 collection on the first day of London Fashion Week in London on September 15, 2017. Photo by: Niklas Hallen/AFP via Getty Images.

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Figure 3.4 Disabled model Jack Eyers, 27, on the catwalk during the Teatum Jones Autumn/ Winter 2017 London Fashion Week show at BFC Show Space, London. Photo by: Isabel Infantes/ PA Images via Getty Images.

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Figure 3.5 Model Tess Holliday walks the runway for Chromat Spring/Summer 2020 during New York Fashion Week: The Shows at Gallery I at Spring Studios on 7 September 2019 in New York City. Photo by: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Chromat.

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for instance, when placing labor in different sectors of the fashion industry, to ensure that it is balanced in terms of race, gender, sexuality, age etc. At the political level, a set of cohesive beliefs between corporations, governments, consumers, and market players are needed to implement changes that are aligned with the principles of intersectionality. Representational level implies that fashion should reassess what kind of “fantastical world” it is when it continues to idealize heterosexual, thin, white, cisgender, and non-disabled bodies (Barry and Drak 2019: 685). On the last level, changes are most palpable: marketing materials and advertising campaigns have started to hire models with visible body differences. Examples include people such as Kelly Knox, whose forearm is missing (Figure 3.3), or Jack Eyers, who has a prosthetic leg (Figure 3.4) (Entwistle et.al 2019: 314). There are also plus-size fashion models such as Ashley Graham or Tess Holliday (Figure 3.5) who have millions of fans worldwide on social media. But this is just the beginning: as long as it is possible to name the people who are different from the rest of the fashion models, for example, a change on a structural level has not really occurred. Quite the contrary: these could be said to be exceptions that confirm the rule, or tokens that reduce to a symbolic gesture the effort to be inclusive to members of minority groups instead of being truly inclusive. The future of fashion is made every day. Making new, more diverse fashion fantasies which build on intersections of body, gender, sexuality, age, body type, physical and mental ability, skin color and so forth are just the beginning.

4 EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON FASHION: CALLING-OUT AND CANCELING Emotions are the main ingredient of a fashion scandal. In this chapter we discuss how brands create emotional messages, either intentionally or unintentionally, and how consumers and other audiences respond. We discuss emotional branding as a way of building and nourishing connections to consumers. We then focus on the emotional effects that brand messages can create. In particular, we discuss consumer outrage in online firestorms. Through this, we show how affective connectivity is necessary to create a contemporary fashion scandal, as well as how social media shapes the consumer’s agency in forms of “calling out” or “canceling” brands. We also ask whether calling out and canceling are new forms of political activism as consumers begin to use the market as an arena for identity politics. We conclude that, regardless of the motivation behind the act of calling a brand out, or canceling it, scandal is a bigger risk for a brand now than ever before: the power is in the hands of the audience.

Emotional Branding Brand marketing strategies build, circulate and challenge identities (Sender 2004; Aspers 2010; Godart 2012; Kellner 2013; Vänskä 2017). Brand identity consists of words and images for which the brand draws from culturally agreed codes that encapsulate understandings about identity, including gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, ability, or race. Some brands challenge these norms intentionally, others do not—yet both can end up in a scandal. Shock tactics and indeliberate shock in brand communication can both be understood in the context of emotions and consumer culture. Emotions have been analyzed in

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conjunction with consumption (Campbell 1987), brand identity building and marketing (Shaw 2014) and capitalism (Illouz 2007). According to British sociologist Colin Campbell (1987: 8, 25), the ideology of Romanticism in the nineteenth century facilitated the emergence of the new, highly emotional, modern middle-class consumer. He also argues that consumerism has never been solely dictated by reason but by hedonism, especially by a search for pleasure and an aim to experience imaginary gratification in material form (Campbell 1987: 99–201). Building and nurturing emotional bonds and reactions is important for contemporary brands and their communication. It has been proposed that most successful brands are those that are able to build a strong emotional relationship with consumers (Magids et al. 2015). Engaging people and creating memorable experiences are highlighted: a product is not enough; it also must meet the customers’ emotional needs (Ho 2017). To generate emotional and affective reactions, brands often resort to visual representation. Images are used to create familiarity and a visual world around the brand, to create emotional affinity with the brand and its identity and, especially, to “stand out from the crowd” (Magids et al., 2015) through “emotional branding” (Gobé 2001). Researchers of emotional branding have indicated that meanings about brands are not controlled by brand managers, but are co-created in a dialogical interaction between the brand and consumers (Fournier 1998; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). This dialogical emotional exchange creates what we call affective fashion. Emotional branding stems from a shift from an industrially driven economy to a “people-driven and consumer-centric economy”; from production to consumption (Cobé 2001: xiii). According to emotional branding expert Marc Gobé (2001, xxi) contemporary consumers want to establish a “multifaceted holistic relationship with [a] brand” which means that consumers expect the brands to have a positive role in their lives. Different types of emotional branding include personality-driven, sensory-driven, appeal-driven and navigation-driven branding (Ho 2017). The first aims to position the brand by facilitating the relationship between a company and its consumers by providing meaningful interaction, the second aims to create meaningful physical encounters with products. The third, “appeal-driven emotional branding,” is seen to be crucial for creating the brand identity in a way that the brand connects with the customers’ attachments and passions for the brand. Methods used include visualizing the brand identity and managing it. The fourth type, “navigation-driven emotional branding,” refers to creating encounters between the brand and its audience, especially on social media. Here, advertising and media campaigns play a huge role, by using tactics that appeal to emotions (Ho 2017). Emotional branding thus involves various strategies by which brands engage consumers on the level of senses and emotions, from a dialogue between the users and the brand to creating appealing encounters with products, enabling

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the making of a visual identity and affective advertising campaigns for the brand. The strategy aims to enhance an affectionate relationship with the brand by nurturing deep and enduring emotional bonds with consumers (Roberts 2004) and making the brand an integral part of people’s lives, memories, and their social networks (Atkin 2004). If this succeeds, consumers can even experience brands as “relationship partners” (Fournier 1998) who help them to accomplish personal goals and resolve dilemmas in their everyday lives. Susan Fournier (1998) and others (Holt 2002; Kates 2004; Zaltman 2003) have proposed that relational meanings such as love/passion, self-connection, and intimacy between people and brands emerge when a brand becomes part of people’s identity projects. Identity and identity work is thus a significant part of emotional branding. It also means that meanings of brands are not controlled by managers but cocreated with people (Fournier 1998; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). Literature on emotional branding defines consumers as “enthusiastic partners” (Gobé 2001) who engage in intimate dialogue with the brand and other users to create identity-enhancing meanings. The previously mentioned fashion companies Benetton, Calvin Klein, and Nike have deliberately associated their products with progressive social thinking by using shock as part of their emotional branding strategies. Through its advertising campaigns by Oliviero Toscani, Benetton cemented its brand image as the advocate of same-sex love, multi-culturalism, and racial harmony; Calvin Klein stands for sexual liberalism, and Nike that, through perseverance, individuals can succeed and rise to fame from the African American ghetto. The brands have adopted a progressive approach toward serious social issues and linked them to their brand image and to their products: they have co-opted the progressive political thinking of their target markets as a way to sell. Social issues and culture have become symbolized as fashion. The Marketing Professor Douglas Holt (2003, n.p., italics added) has summarized shock tactics aptly: “The name of the game is symbolism: The strategic focus is on what the brand stands for.” These brands have managed to build their image as cutting-edge, rebellious, creative, and libertarian. Brands that have been successful in using scandals to their advantage are perceived as rebellious. They have also deliberately appealed to younger consumers—to those who tend to use scandalous tactics to rebel against the values of their elders.

Emotional Reactions and Canceling The distance between brands and consumers has become shorter with the mediatization and platformization of fashion. As a result, it has been much easier for consumers to react to intentional emotional branding or express their opinion in the face of unintentionally unethical brand behavior. Thanks to the “megaphone

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effect,” social media provides easier access to a mass-audience and the opportunity for a single speech act to go viral, and ultimately to have an impact on the broader societal agenda (McQuarrie et al. 2013). This is often the case with a fashion scandal. Social media enables the creation of solidarity and the instigating of a “community of sentiment” where people start feeling things together (Appadurai 1996: 8). An important ingredient in a fashion scandal is the strong emotional reaction of the audience, or “consumer outrage” (Lindenmeier et al. 2012). Consumer outrage is not a new term; it has been used to describe strong negative morally charged reactions against unethical corporate behavior, statements or events and marketing images found to be problematic by some groups in terms of identity recognition. Reactions are expressed as boycotts and buycotts, social media likes and dislikes, posts and reposts, comments, memes, online petitions, articles, and other forms of (online) activism. In this sense, a fashion scandal comes close to “online firestorms” identified as the “sudden discharge of large quantities of messages containing negative word of mouth and complaint behavior against a person, company, or group in social media networks” (Pfeffer et al. 2014: X). Online firestorms imply strong emotions. Emotional reactions can vary and both brand protesters and supporters can contribute to a fashion scandal. In marketing literature, the online “social media firestorms” (Scholz and Smith 2019), refer to risks that branding faces in the era of social media. To be caught up in a social media firestorm is not necessarily a desirable aim for a brand in contemporary culture, as our case studies in the next chapter potently illustrate. On top of boycotts, online firestorms threaten the brand image and lower its value. What brands regard as risky and dangerous is “canceling.” This is a form of audience and social media activism. The American media scholar Meredith D. Clark (2020: 88) explains canceling as an expression of agency, as “a choice to withdraw one’s attention from someone or something whose values, (in)action, or speech are so offensive, one no longer wishes to grace them with their presence, time, and money.” Canceling a person, place, or thing has its origins in the queer communities of color (Clark 2015), but it has also become a “journalistic shorthand wielded as a tool for silencing marginalized people who have adapted earlier resistance strategies for effectiveness in the digital space” (Clark 2020: 88). Canceling is thus a manifold concept: it can be used to silence those at the margins of society or, thanks to social media, it can also be an act of empowerment of the marginalized. A concept related to canceling is “cancel culture.” The term harks back to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, but it has been associated with fashion scandals since around the mid-2010s as part of wider debates on racism and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Clark (2020: 89) explains cancel culture as a phenomenon of the public sphere:

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“Cancel culture” is rooted in Habermasean concept of the public sphere which assumes public discourse is the realm of elites (1962). Earlier examples of discursive accountability practices, including reading, dragging, calling out, in and even canceling, are the creations of Black counterpublics that are conspicuously absent from the American public imaginary . . . Politicians, celebrities, and academics have turned “cancel culture” into a “moral panic,” when they should interpret it as a last call for justice (Clark 2020: 89). Those in power have accused canceling as being toxic, claiming that it “reduces people to their identity of privilege” and makes them stand in for the entire system of oppression (Ahmad 2015; Gerrie 2019). Professor in Journalism and Communication Gwen Bouvier has called canceling as the “demonizing of single individuals” and constructed it as a “folk-devil” (Bouvier 2020: 2, 10). Cancel culture portrays racism, sexism, or homophobia as a “personal trait”, not a systemic problem. In this sense, the debated issues may be hidden due to the nature of social media, which encourages quick, simple, and contradictory comments and debate on a personal level rather than an in-depth discussion on the topic at hand. For instance, a Twitter feed is defined more by a flood of comments divided by distinct polarities of good and evil rather than by rational, reasoned conversation. The so-called “mob mentality” prevails on social media, one which would, for example, struggle to tolerate a wide range of ideas or opinions, while also supporting confirming and familiar narratives. The audience members, according to Bouvier (2020), appreciate sharing similar emotions and moral positions with one another, but this does not necessarily have an impact on the structural problems in society. Emotions and affects are at the heart of what are called “affective communities” on social media. Even though the pleas for justice are sincere, they might be filled with sarcasm, cynicism, aggression and threats. They are also of an ephemeral nature, because the discussion is always shifting. Bouvier is quite skeptical about the outcomes of scandals. According to her (2020: 10), regular people in the audience can be pleased with what seems like a calling-out for discrimination. At the same time, she also believes that consumer outrage does not produce meaningful or significant changes in the overall structure of society. It can even detract from the problems, by focusing on demonizing one single individual. Professor in Media Studies Meredith D. Clark does not consider “cancel culture” as a manifestation of the mob mentality. On the contrary, she sees it as an attack on systemic inequalities rather than individualistic transgressions. Social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, provide a forum for discussing the unjust behavior of fashion brands and seek a remedy. Furthermore, she argues that cancel culture should be recognized as the Other’s “indigenous expressive form” (Clark 2020: 89) meaning that it is a form of critique that comes from the margins, not from the center of (white) power. That is why

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canceling is neither nice nor courteous. Because of the gravity of oppression, it is necessary to shout it out exactly as it is perceived and not sugarcoat the message. Clark (2020: 89) continues, It has been perfected by Black women like our grandmothers, who let us know what they see, even if they don’t directly say it; minors deprived of a sense of agency, who quickly learn how to detect and name adults’ ulterior motives; and queer folk whose first line of defense is withering critique. Clark also writes about “useful anger,” quoting the American Black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde. The perspective of Black feminism is particularly useful for understanding a fashion scandal from the point of view of those seeking justice and considering the scandal’s emotional foundation. In her powerful speech Audre Lorde (1981) stated that her response to racism is anger. However, this anger is directed towards “corrective surgery, not guilt.” Guilt and defensiveness “serve none of our futures,” she claims and continues that when anger is transformed into action in the service of “our vision,” it may become a strong source of energy that serves development and change. It is both liberating and strengthening. Anger is a reaction to hatred against women, People of Color, homosexuals, transgender, fat, or poor people. It is a sentiment geared to fight oppression by forming coalitions and taking meaningful action. Emotional injuries are identity claims. That is why any discussion of the so-called “cancel culture” and “call-out culture” should always address anger. It comes from the structural oppression of groups or subgroups. Intersectionality shapes different experiences for people of different sub-groups. If a subgroup or a group fails to be recognized, there is always a reason for anger. Anger should be used for mutual empowerment, not for evasion of guilt or conflict. According to Clark (2020: 91), one fundamental problem of cancel culture is that it is preoccupied with immediate accountability in digital space and therefore often results in “panicked damage control” rather than real change. The outcome is that coalitions of people, including the marginalized, and their call-outs are reduced to the status of “hyperinflated currency in the attention economy” (Clark 2020: 91).

New Cultural Intermediaries and the Creation of the Unintentional Scandal Due to the highly emotional and less rationalized character of debates, a fashion scandal always attracts one particular group—those who can formulate the call

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from the audience to the perpetrators and act as mediators between the market and culture. Those cultural intermediaries have extremely important roles, enabling subversion in the hierarchies of the fashion field by questioning the actions and legitimacy of an established brand. They also mediate and manage audiences’ attention. The claims made in a fashion scandal must be properly contextualized and explained, translated into the language of claims for social justice. Due to the deeply ingrained nature of insulting words, images and practices in contemporary culture and fashion industry, these problematic situations are not automatically recognized as oppressive when someone faces them. For instance, the mother of the Black child, who was engaged in the H&M fashion scandal, stated that she didn’t see initially a reference to racism. She only saw her child modeling a hoodie (Hosie 2018). It is also necessary to acknowledge these new actors, or new cultural intermediaries, who actively shape the discourse on fashion scandals. One of the most notable is Diet Prada, an Instagram account that was started in 2014 and is run by two fashion insiders, Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler (Figure 4.1). The Business of Fashion discusses the founders in detail (Liu and Schuyler n. d.): (T)hey anonymously founded the Instagram account Diet Prada as a joke, and by the time they both left [accessories, hats and bags brand] Eugenia Kim in 2015, Liu was design director and Schuyler a design and product development associate. Liu subsequently launched a line of casual menswear called You As, which is sold at Opening Ceremony and Mr Porter, and via its own e-commerce site. Schuyler established a consulting practice. Diet Prada has a powerful voice when it comes to creating scandals and critiquing and calling brands out on issues such as cultural appropriation, bigotry, sexism and sexual harassment, lack of diversity and discrimination on the runways, in design, editorials and in marketing campaigns. Diet Prada had 3.4 million followers in 2023, up from 1.5 million followers in September 2019 (Gerrie 2019: 99). The popularity of the account illustrates the interest of people in fashion but especially the call for authenticity and transparency within the fashion industry. The account is a watchdog for the fashion industry and can mobilize people and pressure brands into a dialogue. As one of our case studies indicates, the account has also been instrumental in spreading news about scandals as well as creating them. Alongside Diet Prada, there are also other actors that keep watch over the fashion industry. One such is the site The Fashion Law (www.thefashionlaw. com/), which provides curated, research-driven news and insights into the fashion industry. Both these sites can be called “cultural intermediaries” (Smith McGuire 2014; Skov 2014): they are agents who have the cultural capital and expertise to provide cultural interpretation of the brand’s market activities for

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Figure 4.1 The power duo behind Diet Prada and many fashion scandals Lindsey Schuyler and Tony Liu attending the Max Mara fashion show on 20 February 2020 in Milan, Italy. Photo by: Jacopo Raule/WireImage.

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consumers and the wider public. Cultural intermediaries, according to Professor of Cultural Production and Consumption Jennifer Smith McGuire (2014), are first and foremost market actors who create value by mediating how goods (or services, practices, and people) are perceived and engaged with by others (end consumers and other market actors), and second, their activities are based on their professional expertise within a specific cultural field, which grants them autonomy, authority, and other resources in pursuing their agenda. Buyers, journalists, photographers, bloggers and influencers and model scouts are examples of cultural intermediaries in the fashion industry. Diet Prada frames goods, be they a company’s or a designer’s activities, advertising, other marketing materials and designs, as not worthy of engaging with due to wrongdoing, violation of norms or lack of transparency. The account’s opinions are based on encyclopedic knowledge of fashion history, as well as the nuances that surround each era, trend, and style. Such a wealth of expertise, according to Fashion Studies scholar Vanessa Gerrie (2019: 99), “allocates Diet Prada the cachet necessary when publicly critiquing a brand or designer’s work, it gives them clout and validity by letting the audience and consumers of their content know that they are experts.” Fashion brands face serious repercussions as a result of Diet Prada’s activities, including the cancelation of runway shows as was the case with Dolce & Gabbana’s 2018 show in Shanghai, China; the withdrawal of a problematic design as was the case with a Gucci balaclava sweater that resembled blackface in 2019; the questioning of the diversity of company’s team as was the case with Prada and Gucci in 2019; and the destruction of Philipp Plein’s reputation (Tashjian 2020). Apart from Philipp Plein, we will address the other cases in more detail. Furthermore, we also suggest considering these actors as “norm entrepreneurs,” in other words as those who seek to change the way society thinks or feels about a certain issue (cf. Pozen 2008: 24). This concept describes the role of actors who call brands out within a broader society. Norm entrepreneurs can explore and exploit dissatisfaction with existing norms to move society toward a new norm. They can accomplish this by signaling a need for a change, facilitating the creation of coalitions, exploiting dissatisfaction with existing norms and moving society toward a new, assumedly better, norm (Pozen 2008: 306). The norm entrepreneurs have the potential to impact institutions, identities, organizations, and actions of the actors who want to internalize the suggested new norm order. Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, for instance, is a norm entrepreneur in the area of environmental matters and climate change (Heidrich and Nakonieczna-Bartosiewicz 2021: 120). Her impact, like the impact of norm entrepreneurs more generally, is enabled by digital platforms. They mobilize people to fight against patriarchy, sexism, and racism, to name a few examples of particular normative structures. Their actions are disruptive in the sense that they seek to change those structures, flagging issues and starting

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critical discussions about them. Norm entrepreneurs must be able to capture the zeitgeist in order to grasp what way the wind is blowing and what changes people are willing to talk about and accept. Brands are scared of norm entrepreneurs such as Diet Prada—which is called by Business of Fashion, “the most feared Instagram account in fashion” (Liu and Schuyler n. d.). At the same time, norm entrepreneurs can provide guidance for brands by giving them clues on the most pressing and talked about concerns of our times. Brands can then take these concerns to heart and incorporate them into their organizational activities.

Consumers Empowered to Speak Up Then there is also the question, who reacts to a fashion scandal? Those people who struggle with identity recognition? Or those who just dislike the marketing materials of a brand or the brand itself? Or someone else? As marketing scholars have demonstrated, the rise of social media has altered the visibility and dynamics of brand crises when different groups can directly and publicly criticize the brand for bigger and smaller issues (Scholz and Smith 2019). Although marketing scholars refer to scandals merely as a business issue in the context of brand– consumer relations, we use the term “consumer” in a broader sense, as a figure that encompasses more than a customer and a follower of a particular brand. Contemporary fashion scandals impact both fashion brands and society, and the discussants involved are individuals, consumers, collectives, or concerned citizens. In our examples those who reacted were ordinary people, editors and journalists, celebrities, fashion models and even family members of the involved individuals. A question to ponder is, whether it would make more sense to use the broader category of the “audience” and not just that of the “consumer.” While the consumer refers to one aspect of a person—to that who acquires goods and services, “audience” is a much broader concept. It refers to participation in a (media) event to various degrees and in different ways: either as followers, listeners, onlookers, or more active actors. Especially with the easy access to the internet and social media and its “citizen journalism,” ordinary people and professional journalists alike can participate in, but also steer, the discussion. How do consumers call a brand out? In addition to social media reactions (likes, dislikes, comments, and so on), they can file complaints against a brand, boycott it, or avoid it. One type of a reaction is “consumer advocacy,” which is a form of complaining, sharing negative word-of-mouth, and a strategy to help other community members from getting involved in a negative practice of a brand (Jaysimha et al. 2017). Consumers protect other community members from negative encounters. Closely related to this is a phenomenon of “brand avoidance” and, in particular, “moral brand avoidance” which is a refusal to buy

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(or follow) a brand because of an ideological incompatibility between the brand and a person (Lee et al. 2009). So far, brand avoidance has been discussed mainly in relation to consumer behavior, but it may also be extended to interaction between brands and audience in the digital space. A fashion scandal may lead to brand avoidance because it demonstrates to an individual that the brand represents oppressive or dominating forces or viewpoints; the individual may consider that it is their moral obligation to reject and, therefore, to avoid the brand in question. Brands can be ignored because of sexism, racism, homophobia, or transphobia in their marketing and in organizational activities. Brands can also be ignored if people don’t believe that their diversity initiatives are sincere and authentic. Authenticity is the key issue in the current fashion industry (Gerrie 2019). When people see a discrepancy between what a company says and what it does, they read it as a sign of inauthenticity, irresponsible behavior, marketing manipulation, and as cynicism. This can easily lead to brand avoidance. Some can also express unfavourability as a result of a fashion scandal. For example, according to Brand Intelligence Platform (Gronewold 2018), who polled 25,830 adults about their perception of H&M after the racism scandal in September 2018, the brand showed an 8 percent rise in the company’s unfavourability even though the company had apologized for the photograph on their online shop. African Americans’ dislike of the brand almost tripled and unfavourability among consumers aged 18 to 29, the age group that consistently indicates the most interest in purchasing from H&M had more than doubled. In comparison, among white interviewees, change in this regard was non-existent (Gronewold 2018). Studies have proposed classifications of consumer behavior as a reaction to a brand’s actions. For instance, Canadian scholars ML Wei and Benita Bunjun (2020: 1268) captured the emotions of consumers towards the shoe brand New Balance when it supported the statement made by Donald Trump during the presidential election campaign that he would bring production back to America were he elected president. After New Balance expressed its support for Trump’s idea, American Neo-Nazis declared their shoes as the “Official Shoes of White People,” In an attempt to dispel racist associations, the company tweeted that it “doesn’t tolerate bigotry and hate in any form,” being an employer of people of “all races, genders, cultures” (Wei and Bunjun 2020: 1260). Wei and Bunjun distinguished three main strategies that linked the reaction of consumers to this action of the brand: punishing, advising, and defending. First, the strategy of punishing a brand consisted of negative comments and insinuations about New Balance and there was an implied rejection of its counterracist message. Punishing was done in different ways. In addition to direct economic punishment such as discontinuing purchases of the brand, some people expressed their newfound support for a competitor, such as Nike and

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Adidas. Others utilized sarcasm and mocking as their discursive and emotional techniques for punishing the brand. Second, the strategy of advising the brand was done by commentators who used cautionary tone, detailling first what had gone wrong and then suggesting how the brand could move forward in the best possible way. People offered suggestions of possible marketing actions to make up for the company’s perceived wrongdoing, such as creating an LGBTQI+friendly product design or inviting a Democrat to participate in the company’s promotional activities. Third, the strategy of defending a brand consisted of comments praising the company’s counter-message of diversity, on the one hand, and its commitment to American manufacturing, on the other hand. The audience created a connection with the brand. Some people revealed their support for Trump and for the brand, relying on caricatures of liberals and progressives. Others defended New Balance by diverting their outrage from the brand to other critics, who expressed punishing or advising strategies. Wei and Bunjun (2020) paid particular attention to emotions related to the scandal. They found that among the most common emotions were indignation and hope. The fact that New Balance claimed to value diversity, while also being backed up by white nationalists and Trump, whose campaign was built on harsh policies towards People of Color, triggered their feelings of indignation. As for the feeling of hope, some people gave the company the benefit of the doubt for not supporting Trump and white supremacy genuinely. While expressing hope, they frequently mentioned their love for the brand.

What if a Brand is Canceled? There is no consensus among researchers about the steps a brand should take when confronted with a scandal. Some argue that brands should act quickly (Benoit 1997), respectfully (Grégoire et al. 2015) and fix the problem (Rauschnabel et al. 2016). Others suggest that responding to moral outrage is not always advisable—especially if the outrage is “instigated by a loud minority overpowering a silent majority of people who do not share the same concerns” (Scholz and Smith 2019: 1101). However, since the mediatization of fashion has brought consumers and brands closer together, it has become more difficult for brands to ignore the criticism they receive. Social media enables consumers to react immediately, while it can also make the scandal go viral. On social media, a fashion scandal follows word-of-mouth tactics and issues can be raised by anyone. The digitally connected audience has quick access to fashion brands and can thus also impact their behavior. This has forced brands to be more transparent and more dialogical—to open their formerly closed doors, as it were. This has made fashion communities powerful collective voices (Bendoni 2017).

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Individuals and communities can fuel debate and invite new audiences to join. This is also one of the reasons why brands deal with fashion scandals more cautiously now than before. Contemporary brands need to react to scandals quickly. As we will see further in the book, both H&M and Prada swiftly issued an apology, reinforcing the interpretation that the companies were guilty of (unintended) racism and were able to bring back consumers’ belief in the brand (Gronewold 2018). Dolce & Gabbana initially adopted a “denial strategy” and did not acknowledge the crisis (AFP 2018). The founders of the Italian fashion house later apologized to Chinese customers saying “sorry” in Mandarin in a video posted on a Chinese social media platform (AFP 2018). However, internet users still thought that the brand “hasn’t repented enough for its missteps” (Williams 2020). Dolce & Gabbana have even brought a claim against Diet Prada for defamation of their brand in relation to the #DGLovesChina campaign, asserting that Diet Prada’s commentary on the crisis has cost the company “valuable celebrity partnerships with major figures like Kim Kardashian and Cardi B” (Fraser 2021). Nevertheless, since the scandal, the brand has been eliminated from all major Chinese malls and e-tailers, and searches for the brand on various sites result in error messages (Flora 2019) which is hardly the fault of one Instagram account. It has even been stated that a brand come-back would require that China, as a nation, would forgive the company (Williams 2020). In 2019, the brand felt the economic consequences of the scandal. Although Dolce & Gabbana’s overall revenues grew 4.9 percent in 2019, the Asia-Pacific market shrank from 25 to 22 percent and the company reported it was expecting a further sales decline in Greater China within the next fiscal year (Cristoferi 2019). In 2022, four years after the scandal, Dolce & Gabbana acknowledged that the fallout was “dramatic”, but that the brand had “managed to keep more than a foothold in the market” (Williams 2022). The brand reported that despite the setback to its reputation, revenue increased in 2020 compared to 2019. The company claimed that it had obtained “new awareness” and “new attitude” and is ready to move forward. But the question remains: are the consumers ready? These examples illustrate the longer-term economic consequences of fashion scandals, beyond the emotional reactions. Communities of people can help brands in diminishing or dealing with the negative word-of-mouth effects of fashion scandals that they may be experiencing. When confronted with a firestorm, Pfeffer and colleagues (2013) recommend that brands increase rather than decrease their activity on social media platforms. They encourage the companies to develop communities of consumers and audiences and use long-term fans, who can act as information brokers and convey positive messages if needed. The implementation of this strategy should be a long-term plan that begins before a firestorm erupts. In what follows, we will consider a number of cases that will allow us to have a closer look at how brands react to fashion scandals.

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CASE STUDIES

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In the next section we will look more closely at nine fashion scandals from the latter part of the 2010s. Most of the cases are from well-known global fashion brands but we have also chosen some examples that relate to our respective cultural backgrounds, Russia and Finland. We have chosen the cases based on their publicity: most of them have been widely debated and analyzed both on social and in traditional media. We have selected them because they touch on several sensitive social and cultural issues and identity-related matters that have become the fuel of the debate: same-sex love, gender identity and feminism, racial equality, mental health, and neurodiversity, as well as the rise of far-right identity politics. The cases are revealing in their suggestion of how the consensus of fashion as the social provocateur par excellence has severely changed: there is no single meaning that a scandal can communicate. This might sound like a truism but, as the cases will show, the scandals often stem from an understanding that a brand has not understood the plurality of identity in contemporary culture. The (seeming) social cohesion that was once the foundation of consensus about the meanings of the scandal has been severely fragmented. It has given way to cultural as well as ideological diversity, the former referring to ideas, customs, and social behaviours of people or society, the latter to systems of ideas. Following Francis Fukuyama (2018), we suggest that the cases are part of a search for identity in an ever-more-fragmented global culture, represented e.g., by the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the LGBTQI+ movement. These new or renewed movements largely come together on social media under different hashtags. Their predecessors were the social movements of the 1960s, built around the demands made by African Americans, women, and sexual and gender minorities in the United States and Western Europe. They are fueled by a postcolonial debate and by decolonial thinking that recognizes how the history of colonialism continues today and how we need to dismantle existing colonial structures. The cases shed light on new demands by new groups in the 2010s in different contexts: that of recognizing cultural diversity (the so-called cultural appropriation scandals), neurodiversity, and scandals that speak to ways in which fashion has become a powerful tool utilized by the political far-right in its attempt to become mainstream. The cases show that differences in contexts must be recognized because identity claims and their recognition vary across time, space and culture. We look at scandals in both liberal and conservative environments to see the tensions that fashion reveals in terms of identity recognition, while also demonstrating that liberal and conservative ideas flow across contexts. All case studies illustrate a shift from intentional to unintentional fashion scandals discussed in Part I of the book: apart from perhaps two scandals, that by Reebok and the Finnish fashion brand Ivana Helsinki, none has been admitted as an intentional marketing ploy. Rather, in most instances brands have 68

acknowledged that the scandals in question have been mistakes. In some cases, the brands may not have admitted that they were at fault which has led to reputational damage and significant financial losses. As such the cases tell a revealing story of how the scandal that once was a desirable event has lost its luster and become a liability in the twenty-first century. In many ways these scandals speak to the fact that fashion must evolve and become more democratic, inclusive and diverse. Fashion needs to be redefined in terms that are compatible with the de facto cultural diversity that exists in most contemporary societies. All the case studies have to do with globalization and how it has fragmented traditional identity politics. The cases reveal the Eurocentrism and white privilege of fashion, on the one hand, and the wider social change that is seen in the rise of far-right populism on the other, but also a desire to transform fashion profoundly. The cases address identity from both global and local perspectives, and demonstrate how the scandals and their meanings are negotiated and debated in different ways in different places. Furthermore, the cases allow us to see how people are moved by issues that relate to social recognition. Many of the scandals are about seeking justice and visibility. At the same time, they also show how digital media have exposed the fashion industry and questioned the white dominance of fashion, leading to a fractionalization of media spaces where fashion can be discussed and debated. Many of the scandals have gone viral. As such they also play an important part in the business models of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, whose self-interest lies in virality—fed, in turn by, e.g., narratives of abuse. The structure of the cases follows the principle of “from local to global.” Even though readers might be more familiar with global scandals, and even if they may provide context for the more local Russian and Finnish scandals, we decided to put them last. The order shows that in some parts of the world, Russia in this case, a scandal may still revolve around gender and sexuality issues that may be perceived as “old” in the Western world, although these issues have been at the center of heated discussions launched by right-wing populists. The global scandals provide some context for local scandals, but they also open a window to new emerging topics that can become scandals and further extend the discourses of identity politics. The final global scandal is an example of this: it focuses on mental health and neurodiversity and shows how the nature of a scandal changes when our understanding of identity and identity politics changes.

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5 RUSSIA

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Love is (Not Just) Love This chapter discusses fashion scandals around LGBTQI+ people in Russia. We analyze the online video campaign titled “Love is love” by Dolce and Gabbana (2021). The campaign was disseminated on social media and contained photos and videos featuring couples of different ages, races, sexes and genders, kissing and hugging each other. Among them were three same-sex couples. These particular representations sparked a scandal in Russia when Russian state officials discovered the videos, reported a complaint, and suggested banning the visuals of same-sex couples kissing as they were in conflict with Russian law. The case study discusses changes in attitudes towards representation of LGBTQI+ people in ad campaigns in Russian and in Western contexts and how these representations and attitudes have been evolving during the past decades. The chapter applies Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to offer a reading of the visual images of the campaign.

For an Hour of Love For an hour of love I don’t know what I’d do To be able to touch you I do not know what I would give I close my eyes without you The evenings never end Yellow sun, blue sea MATIA BAZAR, For an hour of love (1975)

These lyrics, translated from Italian, accompany a video called “Love is love” by Dolce & Gabbana.1 The video campaign was launched on Valentine’s Day in 2021, and features couples embracing and kissing each other. They stand on a rotating pedestal against a hot red background and seemingly enjoy each other’s presence. The camera pans the couples from head to toe, focusing on body parts—hands, necks, faces, and the chest area—zooming in on caresses and the brand’s clothes and jewelry. In a press release, the brand explains that the videos celebrate love and were made in support of the campaign #TheTrevorProject, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQI+ young people with whom the brand has been involved since 2020 (Dolce & Gabbana 2020). Aesthetically, the video demonstrates a shift in advertising which previously represented non-heterosexuals as hypersexualised, but which has now moved on to a new advertising format by representing “real individuals’ stories of love and families,” though still glamorized and normatively beautiful (Nölke 2018: 242). In fact, the narrative “love is love” featured in the Dolce & Gabbana video has become the main theme in the majority of contemporary Western LGBTQI+

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commercials. Some researchers have read this tendency as a sign of “neoliberal homonormativity” (Adkins 2002) which “upholds a strict hierarchy of accepted queerness under the veil of acceptance of the politically correct slogan “love is love” (Nölke 2018: 247). In any case, each video, posted on Instagram, received between 100,000 and 360,000 likes; the most likes (362,128) being given to two young white women kissing (dolcegabbana 2021b),2 and the second most (297,404) to two kissing young ephebe-like men (dolcegabbana 2021a).3 Some three months later, the scandal began when Russian officials discovered a YouTube video (Dolce & Gabbana 2021),4 containing all the small video snippets. It also made headlines in English-language media outside Russia. On May 24, 2021, it was reported that a complaint to ban two videos featuring two same-sex couples in a loving embrace, kissing each other, had been filed. Even though same-sex relationships were decriminalized in Russia in 1993, it has been illegal to disseminate “propaganda on non-traditional sexual relations” to minors since 2013 (Russian Prosecutor 2021). The Russian prosecutor requested that Dolce & Gabbana’s Instagram videos portraying same-sex couples kissing be banned in the country, citing the law of illegality of spreading “gay propaganda.” The complaint was filed by Mikhail Romanov, a member of the ruling United Russia party. Russia recognizes neither same-sex marriage, nor other forms of unions for same-sex couples. Moreover, in 2020 President Vladimir Putin ratified such changes in the constitution that emphasize marriage as a union between a man and a woman (Antonova and Starostina 2020). This change cemented the ideology of conservatism and “political homophobia” into Russian politics (cf. Suchland 2018; Paternotte and Kuhar 2017). The press office explained that the video clips had to be taken down because they contain information that “denies family values and promulgates non-traditional sexual relations” (Prokuratura Peterburga 2021). But how can one ban a commercial from a global company on Instagram?

Echoes of the Past: The Dreamy Western Gay Consumer In the Western context the scandal around the videos may seem like a flashback. Its marketing and advertising have portrayed homosexuality and lesbianism as a lifestyle since the 1980s. British cultural historians Frank Mort and Nicholas Green (1988: 32) write: The buzz word is lifestyles—a concept which goes hand-in-hand with the retail revolution. Lifestyle advertising is all about designer-led retailing which reflects changing consumer demand. In essence it is marketing’s bid to get to grips with today’s social agenda.

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Since the late 1980s, it has become increasingly common to portray lesbians and gays as part of consumer culture. Their consumer visibility has created a new cultural myth: the “pink economy” (Gluckman and Reed 1997: 3–10) or “the queer dollar” (Ginder and Byum 2015). Alongside this, there has been an exponential increase in the media coverage of LGBTQI+ in pop culture, political discussion, targeted advertising, and marketing (Ginder and Byun 2015). A new consumer niche has emerged, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom: the gay market (Peñaloza 1996; Sender 2004). This has brought about a wide array of gay- and lesbian-specific services, ranging from travel, food, legal, medical, and financial services to media and communication services. More and more companies have started to attract citizens who consume gay lifestyle magazines, fashion, and popular culture featuring gays and lesbians. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, gays and lesbians have moved from the cultural margin to the cultural center. Gender theorist Suzanna Danuta Walters (2001: 9–10) has summarized the change in the Western context well: whereas the lives of gays and lesbians were previously colored by the problem of invisibility, dual life, and primarily peer-topeer visual and sartorial codes, in the 1990s and early 2000s they became a public and fetish-like spectacle for all to enjoy. The former cultural invisibility of gays and lesbians, which one of the founders of queer theory Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) called the “epistemology of the closet,” has been transformed, with an increasing interest of consumer culture, into a form of hyper-visibility in which gay men, such as the openly homosexual designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, redeemed a place as the stylists and dressers of heterosexuals. Gays and lesbians have also been portrayed as “dream consumers,” because marketing experts noted that especially white and upper middle class, young and middle-aged gay men had the financial means to buy into consumerism. In their study of the nature of the gay and lesbian market, marketing professionals DeLozier and Rodrigue (1996: 205) found that the primary characteristics defining the homosexual consumer were a good education, high income, social and political awareness, dedication to career, and owning a home. Researchers have also found that the best gay consumers were and still are (usually white) men who placed “great importance in friendship networks” (Nölke 2018: 226). Lesbians have featured less in this narrative of the ideal consumer due to their lower income rate and the fact that they have a number of children in their care (Gluckmann and Reed 1997). If the previous decades constructed the ideal gay consumer, the 2010s has tended to normalize homosexuality—or, like Marketing Professor Whitney Ginder and Retail Professor Sang-Eun Byun (2015: 824) put it, heteronormalise it, i.e. to present it as safe and non-threatening in the mainstream consumer culture while also continuing to perpetuate stereotypes and a lack of diversity. Similar criticism is not without its history. At the start of the millennium, the British gender theorist

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Rosemary Hennessy (2000) wrote in a rather bitter tone that taking new consumer groups into account is not about emancipation and acceptance, but about business goals and profit maximization. At the beginning of the 2000s, another British gender theorist, Lisa Duggan (2002: 175–194), even defined the gay and lesbian participation in both the relationship market and consumption with the term homo normativity. Homo normativity is a concept that aims to critically define the assimilationist tendency of the political agenda of the gay and lesbian liberation movement and the transformation of gays into consumers. In particular, Duggan deplored how gays and lesbians, instead of breaking the prevailing sexual hierarchy in society, were content to pursue (and uphold) the same rights as heterosexuals. The American literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner (1999: 45) has also stated that while lesbians and gays have been made into “normal” consumers, the discussion of how and under what conditions normalcy has been achieved, has been forgotten: not through consumerism but through political activism. Previous studies have thus noted a paradox: while LGBTQI+ people have had to fight for equal rights for decades in the Western context, some social institutions, particularly those related with profit making, have been progressive in providing cultural and commercial validity to non-heterosexuals (Ginder and Byun 2015; Peñaloza 1996). Some studies have also shown that even if gays and lesbians consider themselves to embody the stereotype—flamboyant gay maleness or hypermasculine lesbianism—they still prefer advertising that reinforces traditional gender roles and the normalization of the gay and lesbian community (Tsai 2012). The importance of the Dolce & Gabbana campaign is that it opens up space for LGBTQI+ gazing and identification possibilities and legitimates same-sex desire in contexts, where the legal rights are still missing. Even though diversity in general and sexual diversity in particular has become a “hot commodity” and the gay and lesbian liberation movement “has sold its soul to rainbow-branded capitalism” (Tatchell 2019), there are still instances where even stereotypical visibility is needed. One such example is Russia.

Contextualizing the Scandal: LGBTQI+ in Russia In Russia, the LGBTQI+ community has occupied a significant space in media discourse since the early 1990s, when homosexuality was decriminalized. The period of sexual liberation, during which the public sphere exploded with sexrelated images, culminated with the music group t.A.T.u. at the turn of the millennium, when its members, two young women, expressed same-sex love on stage. This created a stir in Russia, making the band a global success. The act was deemed an inauthentic “marketing gimmick”, but it was also embraced among gays and lesbians who were becoming participants in public debate, in

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advertisements, articles in the press, rock music, and popular fiction (Bode and Tolstikova 2006). Since the mid-2000s, the atmosphere in the country has drastically changed. Various regions in Russia have enacted regulations restricting dissemination of LGBTQI+ materials among minors. In 2013 this resulted in a federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values,” known also as the “gay-propaganda law” (Kondakov 2019a, b). This law sent “a message of hatred” towards LGBTQI+ people and influenced the level of prejudice-motivated violence—hate crimes and even purges (Kondakov 2019a, b). The introduction of homophobic anti-LGBT legislation has led to an increase in the discussion of this topic in the Russian media in the 2010s (Pronkina 2016: 72). This increased attention has spilled over from politics into the marketplace where both pro- and anti-LGBTQI+ views are articulated and inevitably result in scandals. Several massive clashes have shaken Russian society in the past few years. For instance, in 2017, the entrepreneur German Sterligov—patriot, monarchist and Orthodox Christian and the owner of the Bread and Salt chain—opened a store in St. Petersburg with the sign “F****s are not welcome.”5 The hateful logo sparked fury. After a local resident (and perhaps many others) complained to the prosecutor’s office, the sign was temporarily removed and then reinstalled. The store was soon shut down. Citizens had defaced the chain’s stores on a regular basis. Once they wrote “homophobe” on the shop window, while another time they broke windows and wrote “Shame on fascism” on them (Feofanov 2017). In 2020, Ekaterina Lakhova, a member of the Russian Senate, complained to Putin about a commercial featuring an ice cream called “Rainbow.” She argued that the ice cream, with its rainbow-colored name and image, would “make our children accustomed to this symbol”, which stands for “non-traditional sexual relationships” (Lokhov 2017). In 2021, a huge scandal erupted around Russian food retailer VkusVill, the first Russian business to place and subsequently remove promotional materials featuring LGBTQI+ families after social media users sent death threats to the company’s social media accounts and those of the families who were in the images (Russian food retailer 2021). In 2021, a “marriage, prohibited on the territory of Russia” i.e., a same-sex marriage, was featured on one of five covers of the Russian issue of the fashion magazine Elle’s June–July issue, devoted to weddings (elle_russia 2021).6 After that, the journalist Anna Mongayt, who interviewed the young couple featured in the image, received death threats, but the cover remained intact (“Dozhd’ ” obratilsia 2021). Overall, in addition to prohibitive regulations and stigmatizing discourse, which created a hostile environment for the LGBTQI+ community, there was a massive conversation about LGBTQI+ in Russian society and, more broadly, on

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the Russian-speaking internet. At least until February 2022, various local and global actors attempted to make Russian market more accepting of sexual diversity. Politicians, who contributed to discrimination and hate by bringing LGBTQI+ to the discussion, raised people’s awareness of the community and their issues. The LGBTQI+ community, in turn, took advantage of the market to acquire visibility. But how were the videos interpreted?

Reading Love is Love: The Videos The video campaign can be examined from the encoding/decoding model developed by Stuart Hall (1973). It is worth noting that Hall writes about television, and that his ideas should be adjusted to social media. Communication, according to Hall (1973: 2), is a circuit that begins with generation of messages and ends with their reception and use. The initial message originates from a perspective of a specific socio-cultural and political system. Audiences serve as both sources and receivers of information. The producer encodes the message, suggesting a preferred or a dominant meaning (Hall 1973: 9). But because signs are polysemic, there is never a single, unambiguous, or definite interpretation. Hall proposes three ways of reading messages: “dominant,” “negotiated,” and “oppositional.” “Dominant” reading refers to an interpretation in which the meaning just seems to be there, easily available, and deciphering it happens almost unconsciously, without a great effort. The dominant encoding is therefore also hegemonic: it is an interpretation which most people within the same cultural context can understand (Hall 1973: 16). “Negotiated” reading is a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings. The audience accepts parts of the sender’s views but has their own views on parts as well. The “oppositional” reading of a text means to reject the dominant reading which is apparent but unacceptable to the reader owing to their social situation (Hall 1973: 17–18). Oppositional reading occurs when the audience rejects the dominant, i.e. preferred reading, and creates their own meaning for the text. This can happen if marketing materials such as advertisements contain controversial or sensitive themes. With sensitive issues, marketers often aim for meanings that are negotiated: they aim for creating representations that can be appreciated by the dominant culture, but which also include the possibility of other meanings. This has especially been the case with advertising representing same-sex desire: it is safe and daring at the same time. This strategy was also evident in the “Love is love” campaign by Dolce & Gabbana. What did the controversial representations include? The Instagram posts represent several couples portrayed as nonheterosexuals. Unlike past fashion advertising which has targeted the gay community more implicitly by primarily featuring discreet gay and lesbian imagery by creating a discourse, which is defined as purposeful polysemy (Tsai 2012) and

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gayspeak (Tharp 2001), the “Love is Love” campaign leaves very little room for oppositional or negotiated interpretation. Through the act of kissing, all couples are easily readable as gay, lesbian, or heterosexual, depending on the constellation of the couple. Although all the models embody normative standards of slimness, beauty and desirability, the campaign still manages to tick many of the boxes of inclusivity: there is a beautiful ephebe gay couple, an equally beautiful biracial femme lesbian couple and a non-binary couple. The dominant message, supported by the lighthearted song, is that love does not look at gender, it belongs to everybody. However, if one exercises oppositional reading it can be asked, who is left out? There are neither butch–femme or butch–butch couples, nor are there Tom of Finland -type gay macho couples nor fat or Black couples. In this sense the videos follow the findings of marketing scholar Ana-Isabel Nölke (2018) of her study of explicit LGBT advertising from 2009 to 2015. Nölke found that, historically, gay men were portrayed as handsome trendsetters, or as hypersexualized, overly effeminate “sissified” men. Lesbians, in turn, were “straightened” and portrayed as hypersexualized “lipstick lesbians” to conform with images seen in mainstream pornography (Nölke 2018: 226; see also Vänskä 2005). Lesbians, who identify as “butch” as well as bisexuals or transgender were almost nonexistent (Nölke 2018: 227). Between 2009 and 2015, however, a shift away from these stereotypes had occurred. A “Neil Patrick Harris” –type; a white stylish and successful middle-class and middle-aged metrosexual, often in a stable relationship, had emerged and was the most preferred image among gay men. As for lesbians, the focus had shifted from the hyper-sexualized “lipstick” type toward a portrayal of “mundane normality”: to regular women who love and have steady relationships and embody the heteronormative ideal of femininity (Nölke 2018: 238). In addition, Nölke’s data also portrayed transgenders as male-to-female, and all trans women looked as if they wanted to achieve the stereotypical feminine appearance and gender role (Nölke, 2018: 227). Furthermore, due to lack of variety in terms of race and ethnicity, class, body shape, and age, advertising that was supposed to be about diversity was not very diverse. As a result, these groups were likely to be further marginalized (Nölke 2018: 243). A similar lack of diversity is also visible in most of the Dolce & Gabbana videos. The video depicting two young women, for example, follows the visual rhetoric of lesbian femininity, or femmeninity (Vänskä 2005). In the video, available on Instagram (dolcegabbana 2021b)7 both women are dressed in 1990s style, the campaign’s stylistic inspiration decade: the other in a flower-printed tight skirt, a see-through nude top and a sequined bra, and pink suede high-heeled shoes, the other in high-waisted blue jeans, a stripy bra and high-heeled shoes with metal studs in the heels. Both also wear delicate jewelry. Clothes and adornments are designed to accentuate stereotypical femininity: the skirt

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and the high-waisted jeans highlight both women’s curvy but slim figures and the high-heeled shoes, the delicateness of both of their ankles. Despite both models’ feminine appearance there are also some small details that hint at the history of the butch/femme (Case 1999). According to the classical standards of butchness, the butch has their hair short, wears no makeup and is dressed in men’s clothes which make their gender ambivalent. The femme sports long hair, make-up, high heels, skirts, and clothes that reveal the contours of the body, following the stereotypical expectations of heterosexual femininity. In the video, the one model has short blue hair and jeans and wears no seeming make-up apart from nude nail polish, while the other has long hair, visible make-up and a body-hugging skirt, as if bowing to the history of the butch/femme. The arrangement also departs from this history by dressing the assumed butch in high heels, high-waisted jeans, and a bra, which feminizes the look. Although neither of the models is represented as passive and they both engage actively in the act of kissing, the assumed butch is represented, in some scenes, as being on top, embracing the other woman from behind and kissing her on the neck, for example, connoting the role of a giver. These almost undetectable gestures pay tribute to the historical struggles of lesbianism while also suggesting that, in contemporary culture, a lesbian can look like “anywoman” (Nölke 2018). Reading the video critically, it can be said to be safe and to participate in the “heteronormalisation” of the public image of lesbianism (Ginder and Byum 2015: 824) as well as in the “market sanitization of homosexuality” (Kates 1999: 34). However, it can also be said that the act of kissing makes it unusual by leaving little to the imagination in terms of sexual desire. For example, the video does not offer the double entendre, so common to fashion advertising, by representing the couple almost kissing. Regardless of the appearance of the models, the sexuality in the video is loud and clear: this is how the brand envisions contemporary lesbian desire: to practice non-heterosexuality, one does not need to resort to signs that are readable to only “those in the know.” While the video casts its gaze backwards in time, to the history of butch–femme, it also looks ahead and argues that the era of the closet is in the past. The status of the gay consumer is not ambivalent for Dolce & Gabbana. The video signifies that the gayness of the brand and its consumers no longer needs to stay in the closet. The same narrative structure and visual arrangement is also present in the video featuring two young men kissing each other tenderly (dolcegabbana 2021a).8 Like the video of the two women, it also makes subtle differences between effeminacy and masculinity, gayness and straightness. The video draws from several sources. One young man is reminiscent of the “southern type” of youth photographed by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, one of the founders of modern homosexual iconography (Frankel 2017) in Taormina, Sicily at the beginning of the twentieth century. The other young man, sporting cropped pink

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hair, references both the 1990s underground music scene and contemporary popular culture: such figures as the bass player Flea from the alternative rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and the contemporary actor Evan Mock who plays a bisexual character in the HBO series Gossip Girl. The styling of the models follows, simultaneously, gay and straight or subcultural and mainstream codes, typical of fashion advertising, but the act of kissing, which is less common, again, leaves no room for speculation. The third non-heterosexual couple is less stereotypical and more in tune with the contemporary discourse of gender and sexuality than the others.9 The video also differs in terms of depiction: it is dimly lit and shows the couple as dark silhouettes against a red backdrop. The first figure sports very long hair, trousers, and Dr. Marten’s style military boots. The second figure has short hair and is wearing a knee-length skirt and chunky biker boots, creating an impression of a stereotypical man–woman embrace. Once the light hits the couple, we see that both figures defy the assumed gender norms. The first figure is a non-binary or gender nonconforming person with light-brown skin. Their hair is bleached and braided, and they are wearing a white tank top, a corset, a necklace and dramatic winged eyeliner. The second figure is white and androgynous, their dark curly hair longer at the back, and they wear a black jacket with visible orange eye shadow. The couple is also depicted kissing but, unlike the other couples, they are not completely immersed in the action. They are aware of the camera and smilingly meet the gaze of the viewer. The video follows the trend that started in the mid-2010s. At that time, several public figures came out as transgender, such as the former Olympic decathlonist Bruce Jenner, now known as Caitlyn. It was also the time when the transgender model Andreja Pejic was regularly featured on the runway, and when fashion brands such as Givenchy featured the model Lea T, the muse of its former creative director Riccardo Tisci, in its advertising campaigns. The video is thus part of a broader shift in Western fashion which has produced what seemed like “a wider ‘ungendering’ of fashion” (Clark and Rossi 2020: 202), reflecting the abundance of fluid gender identification possibilities in contemporary Western culture. The videos, which the brand connects to its own advertising of the 1990s, do indeed reflect the changes regarding theorization and understanding of the lived experiences of gender and sexuality since then. They draw attention to one of the canonical figures of contemporary feminist theory, Judith Butler, who crystallized the idea of gender as performative in their classical book Gender Trouble (1990). Butler emphasized the role of repeated gendered practices in the creation of gender. The videos also show how the critical study of sexuality has developed since the launch of queer studies as an academic field in the early-1990s (de Lauretis 1991). It stressed fluidity of gender and sexuality, arguing that gendered appearance does not necessarily follow sexual orientation and vice versa.

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Furthermore, in a Western context, the videos also draw from intersectional or “post-race” feminism, which has its roots in the intersecting categories of class, gender, sexuality, and race (Crenshaw 1991). While Judith Butler’s critique was directed at feminists who had excluded non-heterosexual women and their experiences from theory and the feminist movement and, ultimately, from representation, Crenshaw’s critique was directed at white feminists who had excluded Black women from the feminist movement by setting a white, middleclass agenda (Carbin and Edenheim 2013). The videos depict a search of alternatives to static conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, be they straight or gay, and built on a promise of complexity. As such, they are a dream of an “all-inclusive” common language—an idea that is encapsulated in the title of the videos, “Love is love.” However, even though the three Dolce & Gabbana videos can be conceptualized as a lighthearted celebration of gender pluralism and sexual antinormativity, the reception of them by the political establishment in Russia demonstrates that the whole world is not undergoing a process of “undoing” (Butler 2004) gender and sexuality. Far from it: the scandal suggests that gender and sexuality are a battlefield in Russia. The global struggle for justice for LGBTQI+ people continues and change does not just happen, but needs to be made. Furthermore, change doesn’t happen in sync but at a different pace in different contexts. A backlashes is always possible. This makes the videos highly political: the scandal is a strong reminder that violence and hate crimes against non-heterosexuals, transgender and gender non-conforming people, especially those of color, is still a severe problem in Russia and across the globe (Fatal violence 2020).

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Feminist Resistance in a Conservative World This case study continues the discussion of fashion scandals in a Russian context. It aims to show how a scandal can become a powerful tool of exposing a wider audience to crowdculture’s values, particularly, feminist values, in a conservative patriarchal environment. This was the case with a Reebok advertisement campaign, which sparked a heated public debate in Russia. The brand launched a localized version of the global #BeMoreHuman campaign. While the global campaign did not stir any significant discussion, that provoked outrage in Russia. The chapter explains why this happened.

The Global #BeMoreHuman Campaign In 2018, the footwear and apparel brand Reebok launched a global #BeMoreHuman advertising campaign, urging consumers to live up to their full potential. The campaign was designed to promote fitness by creating a new vision around it, highlighting and putting value on the human side of sports (Piedra et al. 2020: 4). It featured well-known global athletes and artists, including Katrin Davidsottir, Gal Gadot, Danai Gurira, Gigi Hadid, and Ariana Grande, along with influential and powerful women who have built organizations that “are empowering women and making history” (Reebok celebrates 2018). Among these were Corinne Wainer and Shauny Lamba, co-founders of Shaktibarre, a New York-based yoga-barre studio and a community space actively empowering the feminine in everybody with movement classes and educational experiences. The campaign “celebrated strong women” who “encourage people to be the best possible version of themselves physically, mentally and socially” through their stories of tackling various circumstances (Reebok celebrates 2018). The visual images featured women wearing fitness clothes and footwear as well as slogans. Among these were, for instance, “Just beneath the surface our power is waiting to be tapped,” “Unleash your power” or “Never apologize for being strong.” This well-known rhetoric of women’s empowerment is an example of what the feminist scholar Michelle Lazar (2006) refers to as “powerful femininity.” According to Lazar (2006: 505), it is an effect of a global discourse of popular postfeminism, which incorporates feminist references of emancipation and empowerment and circulates an assumption that feminist struggle has ended. It is important to explain what postfeminism means in this case as it may be confused with a theoretical stream of postfeminism, which it isn’t. The British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist Rosalind Gill (2008) explains that for some, postfeminism signals a historical period in feminist thought and action, a shift from the “second-

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wave” to a so-called “third-wave” of feminism. For others, it represents an epistemological break, and yet for others, it represents a backlash against certain feminist ideas and politics altogether. For Gill, “postfeminism” is a discourse that feminist researchers must analyze critically. She also introduces another concept, that of “postfeminist sensibility”. It refers, in turn, to a set of popularized ideas about femininity, embodiment, and empowerment that circulate across a range of media, for example, in advertising. This postfeminist sensibility has become “almost ubiquitous” in the developed affluent societies in their “postfeminist moment”, notes Gill (2008: 36) who ironizes that this is also a moment when women are “invited to purchase everything from bras to coffee as signs of their power and independence (from men).10” In fashion marketing the increasing significance of this trope has been labeled as “femvertising”: feminist empowerment advertising (Åkestam et al. 2017; Sobande 2019a). By the 2020s, this trope has become commonplace, a cultural orthodoxy, and a safe way of advertising women’s sneakers not only in the English-speaking world and affluent societies, but beyond. Postfeminist sensibility has been criticized by feminist researchers for the appropriation and commodification of feminist values (Prügl 2015; Baer 2016; Rottenberg 2016; 2019). It has also been criticized for disavowing the socioeconomic and cultural structures which shape our lives and for shifting responsibility to a particular “new feminist type of subject, one who accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care” (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019, italics in original). Postfeminist sensibility can be seen as a phenomenon of a neoliberal mode of governance, which transfers responsibility to individuals through such mechanisms as “enterprising self,” “self-empowerment” and “selfcare” (Rose 1992; 1996). In other words, this kind of feminism, also called “neoliberal feminism” (Rottenberg 2016; Banet-Weiser et al. 2019), encourages women to invest in themselves and to express their solidarity through consumption. As a result, it pushes women to take responsibility for their own well-being whilst downplaying the feminist struggle against sexism and patriarchal dominance. Thus, it is not surprising that the use of ideals belonging to cultural orthodoxy in the campaign did not create any scandalous reaction, for instance, in the United States, where this original campaign was featured. Why did a scandal happen in Russia, then?

The Scandal in Russia: She’s Out of Control! There are three ways to bring advertising to local markets—standardization, adaptation and glocalization (Ger et al. 2012). The prevalent recommendation for companies is glocalization, a blend of standardization (the use of the same advertisement across markets) and adaptation (the use of an advert adjusted to a local culture) (Ger et al. 2012). Lazar (2006) suggests that popular postfeminism

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and the myth of women’s empowerment is a global discourse and local ad agencies draw on it in their campaigns, glocalizing it. How did Reebok Russia approach it? On February 7, 2019, Reebok Russia launched the local adaptation of the global #BeMoreHuman campaign. It was not called #BeMoreHuman. Its hashtag can be roughly translated as “Not fit for frames” or “Out of control” (Ni v kakie ramki). It was reminiscent of one of the slogans from the global campaign— “When it doesn’t seem that you fit in, break what it means to fit” (Katrin Davidsdottir n. d.). The Russian campaign featured the European wrestling champion Anjelika Pilyaeva, mixed martial artist Justyna Graczyk, and Zalina Marshenkulova, the co-creator of the feminist Telegram channel Zhenskaya vlast’ (Women’s power). They modeled sports and fitness clothing and shoes. The images, posted on the company’s Instagram, caused outrage and an online firestorm among the audience in the Russian-speaking internet when they appeared. Reebok reacted quickly. First, the brand pulled all the images associated with the campaign. Later, the company returned some of them; they are still available (reebok_russia 2019).11 The brand provided a perplexing explanation saying that the images were removed due to the age restriction policy of the social media platform, i.e., Instagram, adding that the deleted images were still available on the Instagram accounts of the women featured in the campaign (reebok_russia 2019). In February 2019, the post had 13,773 likes; now the comments are turned off. A Google search of the most controversial line from this campaign, “Stop sitting on the needle of men’s approval—start sitting on men’s faces”, returns 11,400 links. The most controversial image of the campaign featured the feminist activist Zalina Marshenkulova whose advertisement included the slogan mentioned above. Marshenkulova, dressed in a black tank top, colorful leggings, and black sneakers, is on her knees, tilting her body slightly forward to the viewer and looks straight to the camera with a smile that is on the verge of a grin (Ponomariova 2019). The pose can be a reference to the sentence; it does not look sexualized, suggestive or submissive, but rather confident and provocative when coupled with the text. The slogan sounds rather strange. It does not refer to any idiom that would be familiar to Russians. It is not a smooth and easily understandable phrase. It expresses a critical take on women’s desire for the approval of men, deeply embedded in Russian culture. The image and text thus aimed to highlight the importance of women’s sexual pleasure in their encounters with men. Marshenkulova’s statement was intended as encouragement for women in their fight against the stereotype and the patriarchal values that underpin it. The Russian audience, however, did not read the advertisement as empowering. It was interpreted as a call for violence against men and as a public insult. Because of the number of unfavorable comments on Reebok’s social media account and in traditional media, the brand soon withdrew the advertisements from its social

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media channels and the campaign’s creator, marketing specialist Alexander Golofast, had to resign from his job at Reebok. Why was the call for women’s sexual pleasure perceived as a public offence?

Contextualizing the Scandal: Women’s Sexuality in Russia The twentieth-century history of sexuality in Russia has had periods of emancipation and periods of conservative backlash. The Finnish sociologist Anna Rotkirch (2000), referencing Russian sexologist Igor Kon, has distinguished four. The first period, from the early years of the Soviet state, from 1917 until the end of 1920s, was defined by women’s emancipation, radical legislation, pluralistic discussions, and experimentation. It was characterized by free abortions, acknowledgement of de facto marriages and the right to divorce (Rotkirch 2000: 21). The second period was “brutal repression” of sexuality and lasted from the early 1930s until the 1950s. It was the time of pushing back all women’s freedoms of the previous period. Abortions were banned until 1955 and homosexuality was criminalized in 1933 (Suchland 2018: 4). Men’s homosexuality was penalized while women’s homosexuality was treated as a mental disorder. The state banned most kinds of discourses on sexuality— educational, entertaining, pornographic, and philosophical (Rotkirch 2000: x). Soviet Russia had no “sexual revolution” like that in the West, except for minor changes in the third, more liberal, period of the 1960s and 1970s (Rotkirch 2000: xi). As gender studies scholars Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova (2015: 299) have noted regarding these changes, divorce became easier, sexual practices became more liberal and the birth rate fell. Some discussions in medical journals as well as scientific research about sexuality was allowed. The normative mode was to support silence on sexual issues in public discourse, abstinence from premarital sex and a more permissive moral standard for men (Rotkirch 2000: 22). There were no gay and lesbian movements that would have pushed the changes. Sexual revolution happened in Russia late, compared to the West, during the fourth period, in the 1980s and 1990s (Rotkirch 2000: x). In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was about to dissolve, sexuality gradually appeared as a topic of public discourse. Condoms and contraceptive pills became widely available as well as porn magazines. In the 1990s, sex was increasingly public and highly contested from liberalizing to highly moral voices (Rotkirch 2000: 23). Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993 and feminism also became part of public discourse (Zdravomyslova 2002: 35). Furthermore, “gender” first appeared in academic discourse and gender studies were successfully established in some leading universities, mainstreaming the term in the society at large. Gender was welcomed as an “application of the Western concepts and theories” (Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2003: 51).

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In the twenty-first century, during the years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, all this changed drastically. The term “gender” became stigmatized in Russia’s official discourse. The right-wing theorist Alexander Dugin claimed that “gender ideology” is a social construct rooted in Western liberalism, the Western idea of human rights and granting rights to LGBTQI+ people, which he saw, in contrast, as a “motion into the abyss” (Moss 2017: 201–202). Moreover, he claimed that once the idea of granting rights is accepted in society, one would need to give rights not only to homosexuals, but to “all of them,” including trans people and gay couples adopting children. Therefore, he rationalized, to oppose Western liberalism, Russia must return to pre-modern, Orthodox norms, namely, to “traditional values” (Moss 2017: 201–202). These have become the core of Russia’s official discourse. They also shape an understanding of and attitude towards human rights, LGBTQI+ people, identities, identity politics, gender, race, and so on. Notably, this antagonism between conservatism and liberalism is not just about Russia and the West. It is also about ideologies and discourses that travel across social and cultural contexts. Feminist scholars Olga Andreevskikh and Marianna Muravyeva (2021) have rightfully stated that the conservative and antifeminist backlash is not only a Russian phenomenon, but also part of a global trend. Indeed, sociologists David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar (2017) have given many examples of the recent mobilization against the so-called “gender ideology” in Europe, in the US, in Latin America and in Africa. It “does not designate gender studies, but is a term initially created to oppose women’s and LGBT rights activism as well as the scholarship deconstructing essentialist and naturalistic assumptions about gender and sexuality” (Paternotte and Kuhar 2017: 5). According to the advocates of this movement, gender ideology brings a number of institutions and practices, including sexual and reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and adoption, new reproductive technologies, sex education, protection against gender violence, and so on which are argued to threaten the society (Paternotte and Kuhar 2017: 5). Those who claim that gender is an ideology may also overlap with right-wing politics. Both reinforce the division between “us” and “them” and seek to give voice to those who are supposedly silenced: the (normal) majority. Both also blame international and supra-national powers for “imposing perversions on powerless people”. Gender ideology activists criticize the West for imposing minority values on average people (Paternotte and Kuhar 2017: 14).

Interpreting the Scandalized Reactions The main antagonism in opinions between actors involved in the fashion scandal similarly lies between the Russia’s official discourse of “traditional values” and the (Western) liberal discourse. An example that illustrates how this antagonism works can be found in a YouTube video of the state-owned Russian-speaking

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news and information TV channel Rossiya24. This video features a discussion about the Reebok scandal from the point of view of the official discourse (Rossiya24 2019).12 The Rossiya24 TV channel communicates the views aligned with the views of the Russian government. The host of the discussion, Dmitry Kiselyov, is a propagandist, who has been on the European Union’s sanctions list for his support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine since 2014. The video was posted on February 11, 2019 and, at the time of writing, has had more than 79,000 views and more than 500 comments. In the video, Kiselyov calls the Reebok advertisement a “perverse ad” that sparked a massive scandal. The advertisement is “perverse,” he claims, because it “encourages men and women to fight.” It is perverse because it assumes that women can exist without men. Kiselyov states that men and women have to “collaborate”, because they are essentially different and were shaped like this by the Creator (that is, God). Hence, they must find “harmony” to co-exist. As we can see, the discourse of “traditional values” mobilizes an essentialist approach to gender, in which women must obey and please men, also sexually. The conversation aggressively opposes those, who are against essentialism. The juxtaposition is not only built between Russia and the West. It is also built between “us” and “them” within the country. It is built, on the one hand, between “perverse” Russian feminists and the “extravagant” creative class, i.e., the producers of the advertising campaign and, on the other hand, “the majority of people”—those who, in Kiselyov’s opinion, share his views. This juxtaposition indicates the problematic relationship that the official discourse has with feminists and the creative class. Their many representatives have refused to support Putin and his government, rallied against it, as well as voted for the political opposition (Beumers et al. 2018). In response to the criticism, the feminist activist Marshenkulova and the marketing director of Reebok Russia Alexander Golofast, the mastermind behind the advertising campaign, emphasized that the campaign was not intended to create a conflict between men and women. Instead, they aimed to encourage men “to come out of their shell and break the stereotypes together with strong women” (Trokov 2018, italics added). Marshenkulova further stated that women must stop subordinating their lives and appearance to their partners or neighbors: “You are an autonomous person, and not an attachment to a man” (Bespalov 2019). The campaign encouraged both women and men to challenge sexism, patriarchy and to advocate for autonomy, independence, and sexual pleasure for both. The campaign intended to challenge the subordinate position of women that is normalized in contemporary Russia. It also advocated for individualism and the idea of being comfortable in one’s own skin. Other statements from the campaign urged people not to think of women as weak and dependent (“When they say to carry [you] on [a man’s] arms, [I] imagine how they carry me in a coffin”), to give her space to speak her mind and finish the sentence (“I have not

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finished”, “That is not it”), to let her make decisions about her own body and appearance (“My body is my business”, “Covered my nipples so you don’t cut yourself”) and self-acceptance (“I accept myself once a day after a meal”). The dichotomy between Russia and the West appears in Kiselyov’s program in the following way. Kiselyov sees the “seemingly respectable Western company” as a victim of the “homegrown (i.e., Russian) PR gurus.” The Western company doesn’t “feel,” namely, understand, Russia and therefore has made this foolish collaboration with Marshenkulova. Western feminism (in its postfeminist sensibility version), in turn, receives some sort of patronizing approval. Kiselyov supported the statement “Never apologize for being strong,” because “we [in Russia] are used to [strong women].” He referred to the gender equality proclaimed during the Soviet times (Chebankova 2016). Simultaneously, however, he argued that contemporary Russian feminists deliberately use shock tactics and resort to sexual metaphor just for the sake of attention on social media. The discussion spread from social media to mainstream media and continued in multiple interviews and articles with opinions from different actors. Marshenkulova agreed that the shock tactic was needed: “No one will listen to some whining about some women somewhere being oppressed.” One needs to be “tough, sarcastic and ironic to be heard” (Pisareva 2019). She was heard indeed! Sexuality was and still is a highly contested issue in Russia. The official discourse leans towards patriarchy and sexism, which made Marshenkulova angry, upset, and critical. She said, “If a woman is an object, then it’s fine—it’s traditional values. If she’s [. . .] being humiliated, then everything is ok. And if a woman is a source of action and initiative, particularly in sex—it’s a catastrophe” (Pisareva 2019). Marshenkulova referred to sexist advertisements, for instance to a vacuum cleaner advert with a slogan “suck for a penny” (a reference to a blow job) in the early 2000s. Reebok’s campaign, in Marshenkulova’s own words, promoted “feminism for beginners” (Pisareva 2019). It fostered discussion about sexism and challenged it, as well as confronted the official discourse of appropriateness. Some critics in digital media, however, redefined this kind of feminist struggle as “bad taste,” “vulgarity” and “lack of dignity”. Mikhail Kozyrev, a well-known Russian journalist and music critic, condemned the campaign as “vulgar”, “pretentious” and “narcissistic”: “The problem is not feminism. The problem is lack of taste” (Ponomariova 2019). In his mind, taste replaces political meaning of the feminist message. By saying so, he ended up contributing to the grand narrative of sexism. The Russian campaign takes an anti-essentialist approach to gender. It portrays women as subjects of sexual pleasure, emphasizing that sexuality is a legitimate part of the public space. By taking this approach, Marshenkulova contributes to the criticism of postfeminist sensibility, in which, as sociologists Suvi Salmenniemi and Maria Adamson (2015: 99) argue, women’s sexuality is harnessed to serve men’s sexual pleasure. It is instrumentalized and conceived as a way to preserve a heterosexual relationship. Instead, Reebok’s Russia

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campaign assumes that women’s sexuality must be a valuable part of women’s own lives. In this sense, the Russian adaptation of the Reebok advertising campaign does not belong to postfeminist sensibility. Instead, we argue that it adopts a critical stance and is probably closer to actionism, similar to that of Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot is a feminist protest punk rock and performance art group which gained fame after a performance against the Orthodox church expressing its support for Vladimir Putin in one of Moscow’s cathedrals in 2012. Following massive Russian protests in 2011–2012 against election fraud and the actions of Pussy Riot, some Russian women adopted radical feminist politics and forms of activism (Turbine 2015). In comparison, postfeminist sensibility does not assume the radically critical stance on sexism, which is seen as an “old battle” (Showden 2009). Rather, it aims at keeping normative (“traditional”) gender order intact and pleads for feminists to loosen up, this way, depoliticizing feminism and privileging personal choice over political action. As a result, the Reebok Russia advertising campaign is neither based on postfeminist sensibility nor on the cultural orthodoxy of “traditional values.” Instead, it is based on the values, as Douglas Holt would say, of “crowdculture”—in this case, a feminist one. In this way, the campaign in Russia is not an unintentional mistake that led to a scandal, but rather an example of cultural branding (Holt 2003, 2004; Holt and Cameron 2012) that can produce a blast—and it did. During the scandal Alexander Golofast had to resign from his position at Reebok. Despite his resignation, the campaign was a great success in Russia. It created 78,000 mentions in five days—an amount that the brand usually amasses in two months. Only 25 percent of the audience were unfavorable to the campaign, while the remainder just laughed about it. Reebok’s previous campaigns have never yielded such results in terms of attention in social media (Gabrukh 2019). The campaign generated a flood of internet memes from both the audience and other firms. To paraphrase researchers of online firestorms Jürgen Pfeffer and colleagues (2014), the most important outcome of a fashion scandal is the attention consumers give to a brand on social and other types of media. This was the case with the Reebok Russia campaign. It sparked a significant fashion scandal first on Instagram and then on other digital platforms and in traditional media. The case shows how fashion scandals can challenge the dominant discourse and foster alternative crowdculture discourses. However, the brand must also deal with the audience’s reactions. In this case, the brand Reebok Russia did not stand behind the campaign; it was the campaign’s creators who did so. As a result, the campaign amplified their names. It particularly enhanced the personal brand of Zalina Marshenkulova, for whom feminist ideas are authentic and genuine. Utilizing the corporation, she has successfully brought feminist ideas to a wider audience beyond her own social media account. A fashion scandal can thus open the door to discussion and possible change—and fame.

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Race Across Time and Space This case study focuses on a scandal that started from an Instagram post by Miroslava Duma, a Russian digital fashion entrepreneur and investor, and the former editor of Harper’s Bazaar Russia and the founder of digital media platform Buro 24/7. The post, disseminated to Duma’s 1.6 million followers, featured an image of roses accompanied by a card Duma had received from the Russian couture fashion designer Ulyana Sergeenko in celebration of her forthcoming fashion show in Paris. Duma and Sergeenko belonged to the so-called “Czarinas,” a group of Russian women who, just over a decade ago, were “the hottest things at couture, embraced not just by fashion, but by the watching world” (Friedman 2022). In addition to Duma and Sergeenko, this group of so-called “It girls” also included the Russian designer Vika Gazinskaya, the model and charity founder Natalia Vodianova, and the model Elena Perminova. Thanks to their offbeat taste, friendliness with photographers, and wealth that allowed them to change their outfits often, they were the darlings of street-style photographers and luxury brands (Friedman 2022). The Western media saw them as representatives of the New Russia of the new millennium—a booming market which provided fashion brands with fresh opportunities. They were also seen to possess a specific power, referred to as “soft power” (Nye 2004), which was thought to shape an attractive image of Russia on a global stage. Since Duma and Sergeenko were well-known in Russia and in the West, the scandal, which their message exchange engendered, was also debated outside Russia. We analyze the scandal around this post and how it reveals how questions of identity and identity politics differ across time, space, and culture. We also continue the discussion of the previous case study and show how recognition of identity claims varies from nation to nation, and from one culture to the next, also historically; and how this depends on historical legacy and on current local policies on identities.

We Just Want to be Cool In January 2018, Miroslava Duma posted on Instagram. The post featured a bouquet of flowers with the note, “To my ni**as in Paris,” referencing a song by the American rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West (Strakhovskaia 2018).13 The post was meant to celebrate a forthcoming fashion show in Paris of Duma’s friend, the Russian couture fashion designer Ulyana Sergeenko. The note was written and signed “Ulyana,” with a smiley-face emoji. Instead of invoking a stream of hearts and good luck wishes for the show, the post caused outrage on social media. The British fashion model Naomi Campbell accused Duma and Sergeenko of racism by reposting the image in her Instagram stories tagging Sergeenko with

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an additional comment, “This better not be real” (Young 2018). The stylist, creative consultant and fashion director Marc Goehring from the English-language German magazine on contemporary culture 032c posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with Duma’s image and a text stating, “Hi My name is Miroslava Duma, I am a racist, I am a homophobe, I am a transphobe” (marcgoehring 2018).14 With the t-shirt Goehring referred to Duma’s previous homophobic and transphobic comments about the transgender fashion model Andreja Pejic´ and the fashion blogger and socialite Bryanboy made in 2012 (diet_prada 2018).15 Back then, her statements did not raise any eyebrows, probably because they were made at some local Russian event, not on a global social media network. When Duma gave a lecture titled “Fashion in the internet space” she was asked: You mentioned Bryanboy, and he has that look—he wears women’s clothes. In particular, now men have begun to participate [as models] in fashion shows [for women’s apparel]. How do you feel about the fact that, for instance, Andrej [now—Andreja] Pejic advertises women’s swimwear? Do you think this is normal at all? To this she replied: Honestly, I have a negative attitude toward this, because a little boy might see him somewhere in a magazine or on TV and probably [might] misunderstand, react wrongly [. . .]. I think there should be some sort of censorship. While Duma’s transphobic views in 2012 didn’t create a scandal, things were different in 2018. This time around, Duma’s post to Sergeenko led Sergeenko having to cancel her show and issue an apology mentioning that Duma posted her a private note. However, it was perceived as a non-apology, which is not a surprise: I was born in a small town in East Kazakhstan, my daughter is half Armenian, I have never divided people on white and black. Kanye West is one of my favorite musicians, and NP is one of my most favorite songs. And yes, we call each other the N-word sometimes when we want to believe that we are just as cool as these guys who sing it. HELLER 2018

Duma replied to her friend’s post: It is true that I come from a culture where words and attitudes may be different than the Western ideals [and] that I, in fact, have come to understand and accept [this]. CHITRAKORN 2018

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These (non-)apologies sparked another wave of outrage summarized in the title of a New York Post article, “Designer’s Racist Apology is Worse than Her Racist Note” (Gollayan and Jones 2018). Callia A. Hargrove, a social media editor of US Teen Vogue, for instance, tweeted: This DISGUSTS me. To see Mira post something on IG so casually using this racial slur, and then have Ulyana defend the usage with such a bs excuse makes my blood boil. So tired of “fashion girls” thinking that listening to one rap song gives them the right. @calliarmelle 201816

The Russian fashion establishment reacted in a somewhat critical but also in an apologetic way after the scandal had already exploded in the Western media. They practically repeated that the exchange of messages was not deliberate racism. Pavel Vardishvili, the editor of L’Officiel, wrote, for example, that “I feel really sorry for these ladies, who are still living in 2012 and do not watch their language. [. . .] But in this case even a child understands that they are not racists. It’s just one rich white girl calling another one ni**a” (Sezonova 2018). As a result of the scandal, Duma was dismissed from the board of The Tot, a children’s clothing company she had co-founded in 2015 with the former Director of Business Development of Buro 24/7 Nasiba Adilova (naceebs 2018), 17Ulyana Sergeenko’s former PR director Olga Chess said in an interview in 2021 that the brand needed roughly a year and a half to recover (Sotnik 2021). She added that the scandal faded fast in Russia and Europe, but it took longer to calm down in the United States (Sotnik 2021). However, because the American market was not significant for the brand, the scandal had little impact on sales. Still, many stylists were not willing to work with the brand for a long time. The scandal impacted the designer and the employees morally. As a result, they engaged in extensive self-education on the matter (Sotnik 2021). This scandal makes visible how identity recognition can differ across time and space. It also reveals that hierarchies, which oppressed identities are part of, can differ in various contexts. Identity claims are recognized differently from one culture to the next, and historically; reactions depend on historical legacy and on current local policies on identities. Identities that are not recognized as oppressed in one context may be perceived as such in another, and vice versa. It is crucial to understand and acknowledge the distinctions between contexts. The scandal can thus be considered as a clash of perceptions of “race” and “racism” in Anglo-Saxon and Russian contexts. There is a long history of addressing race and racism critically in an Anglo-Saxon context and—in particular—in the US (Nicholson 2008). Russia has had no wide public discussion on racism. At the same time, it has its own racialized ethnicities and oppressed populations. This lack of awareness of the problem of racism is reflected in the

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discourse of the scandal in the Russian context. While Duma and Sergeenko responded to criticism they received from the global fashion establishment, they did not ponder on the history of racism either in Russian culture, or in a global context. Without the intervention beyond Russia, their actions might not have been even recognized as racist.

Racism in Russia: Contextualizing the Scandal in Time and Space To understand Duma and Sergeenko’s responses to criticism, it is necessary to look at Russia’s colonial matrix of power in terms of race. As Jennifer Suchland has noted, Russians often think that racism is centered in the United States. That is why it is often overlooked and unchecked (Suchland 2018: 1078). Racism has not been acknowledged in Russia historically as it was not seen as a social problem in the Soviet Union. As a result, there has been an “unprecedented” level of xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia, covering both institutionalized levels of racism and daily racial profiling (Shnirelman 2009, 2011). The Soviet Union was an attempt to create an alternative raceless world, based on the idea of the “friendship of peoples.” This is a type of Soviet multiculturalism which is linked to ethno-national groups, to supporting ethnic differences and to the creation of hierarchies in which ethnic Russians are positioned as the exemplary category (Suchland 2018: 6). Even though the Soviet Union tried to create an alternative raceless world, it nevertheless was “internationalism with the Russian face” (Werner et al. 2017: 1565). This means that the Russians (russkie) were an economically and culturally privileged ethnic group (cf. Werner et al. 2017: 1564; Suchland 2018: 6). Thus, when Sergeenko stated that she was born in Kazakhstan, she referred to the status of Kazakhstan as Russia’s former colony. Still, she did not reflect on the privileged position of the ethnic Russians versus ethnic Kazakhs openly, but instead identified with a Black artist. Moreover, she has built her fashion brand on the omnipresence of Russian (not Kazakh’s) culture, using references to fairytales, folklore, books, films, architecture, and craft. In this sense, her statement does not address racism as the core of the problem at all. Furthermore, scholars argue that the Soviet modernity inherited Eurocentrism, Orientalism and racism in specific forms (cf. Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009: 137). The decolonial researcher and Professor of Postcolonial Feminism Madina Tlostanova (2008, 2012) has called those forms “secondary Eurocentrism,” “secondary Orientalism” and “secondary racism.” She argues that they have duplicated the original forms, meaning in a twisted way, as if there was an unconscious idea that Russia is an Orient for the Western world. This specific position and self-understanding of Russia is connected to its imperial-colonial past.

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Russia is a “paradigmatic second-class empire” which “has always been in the condition of global coloniality vis-a-vis the west, and not direct colonialism [. . .] in the spheres of being, of knowledge and of thinking” (Tlostanova 2012: 135). This has resulted in an inferiority complex that has had a significant impact on many areas of life, including fashion and popular culture. This Russia’s self-understanding, or “self-peripheralization” of sorts, can explain why, for instance, all things “Western” were more popular among consumers in the Soviet Union and why, right after its collapse, it took quite some time for domestic fashion brands to carve their own niche in the Russian fashion market in the post-Soviet times (Gurova 2015). In relation to its own former and current colonies, in particular those that were Muslim, such as Kazakhstan, Russia, however, has acted as a “civilizer.” Caucasus and Central Asia played the role of the “scary and seductive Orient”— biologically inferior and culturally backward—in the Russian imagination. They were racialized in the same way as Europeans have racialized their colonies (Tlostanova and Mingolo 2012: 4). The title of American historian’s Meredith L. Roman’s (2002) article “Making Caucasians Black” reflects this racialization. Roman explains that the darker-skinned non-ethnically Russian people have been racialized since the collapse of the “raceless” multi-ethnic “friendship of peoples” ideology of the Soviet times. This word refers to individuals who do not possess fair complexion and features typical of Slavs such as those from Caucasus and Central Asia. Different racialized groups occupy different positions in Russia’s colonial matrix of power. The American (or European) Blacks may be first and foremost seen as Westerners, and only then as Blacks. That is why their place in the colonial matrix is different from the place of Russia’s “own” racialized population, such as Kazakhs or Armenians. This complex imperial-colonial configuration may partly explain why Sergeenko felt compelled to highlight that she appreciates the American Blacks. For her they were “cool” Westerners, and she felt it necessary to emphasize that she can at least partly relate to them because she and her family came from Russia’s former colonies. In her mind, and taking this context into account, she could have never been a racist.

Identity Politics Versus “Traditional Values” The views of Duma and Sergeenko, which the fashion scandal revealed, provide us with an opportunity to reflect once again on the place of the discourse of identity politics in Russia. It provides one more opportunity to see how conservative and traditionalist ideas, discussed in the previous cases, have a fundamental effect on identity claims in the country. According to the scholar of international relations Cai Wilkinson (2014), Russia has shown skepticism towards the discourse of identity politics and human rights, based on Western liberalism, for some time, but especially during Putin’s third term (2012–2018). The country has become a leading opponent of universal human rights globally

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and among other authoritarian countries, but also among the right-wing populations of democratic countries by promoting “traditional values.” As Suchland (2018) points out, (white) Orthodox Christianity is seen as the primary source of Russian “traditional values.” According to Wilkinson (2014), these “traditional values” pose a substantial threat to the viability of identity-related claims since they are based on a refusal to recognize groups that do not share the majority’s moral values. “Traditional values”, particularly those connected to gender, sexuality, age, and ability, have historically resulted in marginalization and silencing of these groups (Wilkinson 2014). As a result, the concept of “traditional values” legitimizes cultural relativism which basically means oppression vis-à-vis universality of human rights, assumed by the discourse of identity recognition. This kind of so-called cultural relativism is consistent with another assumption inscribed in the dominant political discourse—the idea of Russia as a “distinct unique civilization” that is different from West and East (Shnirelman 2009; 2011). The “civilizational discourse” is crucial for understanding the Russian fashion establishment’s attitude towards racism, sexism and homophobia, as well as Duma’s own response in which she argued that she belongs to a “different civilization.” According to this “civilizational discourse,” Russia is considered as the savior of Europe and the leading defender of the “true European values” (defined through Christianity). As Professor of Modern Languages and Literature Kevin Moss (2017: 95) notes, this position is at the heart of Russia’s political elite’s self-identification vis-à-vis the liberal West.

Color-Blind Racism Sergeenko and Duma’s posts reinforce the argument that racism has not been properly recognized as a serious social and cultural problem in Russia. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, which bolstered the belief that racism is a burning problem in the United States, there is no broad discussion on racism in the statesponsored media in Russia. Nevertheless, racism has gained some attention on social media, where it is discussed among users. Bloggers, vloggers and tiktokers are speaking about racism. Some professionals in the field of fashion have recognized the problem too and speak out in interviews and through their creative work. For example, the photographer and art director Yan Yugay, who has worked for Vogue Russia, among other outlets, has talked about everyday racism and about his own experiences as an Asian working in the Russian fashion industry. Because of his ethnicity, he was mixed with a loader or a delivery man on set and mistaken as a migrant worker from Central Asia by his clients. According to Yugay, fashion models struggle even more due to the privilege of European looks and the “othering” of non-European types of beauty as “exotic” (Oskolkova 2020). Since discussion on racism is limited in the public sphere in Russia and daily racism persists, it is not surprising that Sergeenko and

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Duma were not aware of the racist connotations of the N-word and did not see their words as racist. They attached subcultural meanings to the problematic phrase and compared themselves with the “cool” representatives of Western pop culture. In the eyes of a Westerner, the comments of the Russian fashion establishment bring to mind the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) observations about the so-called “color-blind racism.” This powerful racial ideology, which dominated the US in the late 1960s, is summarized in the statement “we don’t see color, just people.” Most white Americans in the post-civil rights United States, according to Bonilla-Silva (2006: 1), share this view. However, the claim also ignores color-coded inequalities that are fostered by subtle and non-racial mechanisms of institutionalized and systemic racism in society. Sergeenko’s assertion that she does not differentiate people according to skin color fits well in this concept of color-blind racism, which can be observed outside the American context. Some commentators in digital media among the Russian fashion business establishment reframed the racial scandal in terms of class, pointing out that this is a rich girls’ conversation. In Russia, the debate over class differences between the rich and the rest of the population—although also limited—is more pronounced than the debate over race. This “the rich and the rest” situation is sometimes framed as “internal colonization,” when the state, i.e., the ruling elite, exploits and oppresses people within the country’s boundaries in a similar way as colonizers outside it (Etkind 2011). Duma and Sergeenko belong to Russia’s wealthy families (Friedman 2022). Hence, in the narrative of the Russian fashion business establishment, their wealth makes them ignorant, thus enabling the racist slur. An interesting shift in Duma’s thinking illustrates an attempt to switch from the rhetoric of “traditional values” to the discourse of identity politics and human rights under the pressure of the scandal on global stage. In a message from 2018 she states: I am ashamed of my comments from 2012. To be honest, I am shocked, like everyone who views this video today and understands how offensive and harmful my actions were. Today I am no longer the person I was six years ago . . . There is no place for ignorance in my life—it has been replaced by acceptance of people around [me]; discrimination has been replaced by inclusion. I deeply respect people of all backgrounds and believe in equality for all—regardless of ethnicity, gender identity, religion or sexual orientation. I sincerely hope that public discussion around me will help eradicate discrimination once and for all. . . I want to apologize to the people and communities I have offended. MURASHOVA 2018

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In this quote, Duma is talking about changes in her attitude from 2012 to 2018. She claims that she has changed and that “there is no place for ignorance in her life.” The scandal, however, happened because, contrary to what Duma writes, she and Sergeenko continued to address each other in racist terms in 2018 without feeling any apparent discomfort about their actions. As we can see, the chosen damage diminishing strategy did not help Duma and Sergeenko to overcome and resolve the crisis, caused by the fashion scandal. In an interview published in 2021, Sergeenko’s former PR director recalls that they (the brand) did not know how to react to the crisis and that their PR agency, an international brand-building agency Karla Otto, did not offer any solution. Instead, the agency “put up the shutters” and declined to help in any way—as a result, the brand parted ways with the agency (Sotnik 2021). This case shows that an attempt to react to a fashion scandal without accepting the problem at the core of public outrage can be fatally damaging.

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Notes 1

The video has been republished at the time of writing as a collaboration between the brand and the Italian chocolate brand Baci to celebrate the latter’s 100th anniversary (dolcegabbana 2022). Available at: https://bit.ly/3zsgTcY.

2

See https://bit.ly/2XDwEzl.

3

See https://bit.ly/3zsgTcY.

4

See https://bit.ly/3tRPVsm.

5

“F****t” refers to “faggot,” an offensive and abusive term used to disparage a gay person.

6

See https://bit.ly/3kkD3b6, second photo in the carousel.

7

See https://bit.ly/2XDwEzl.

8

See https://bit.ly/3zsgTcY.

9

See https://bit.ly/3lAXXSM.

10 See https://bit.ly/3HiY672. 11 See https://bit.ly/3A0PdeR. 12 See https://bit.ly/3nkhBVR. 13 The original song by Jay-Z and Kanye West from their collaborative album Watch the Throne (2011) is “Ni**as in Paris.” “Ni**a” is the censored version of the word “nigga”, the colloquial form of “nigger”, a racist slur against Black people. 14 See https://bit.ly/3oCnqey. 15 See https://bit.ly/2W2j309, the last post in the carousel. 16 See https://bit.ly/3AXnDiU. 17 See https://bit.ly/2ZCpNGV.

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Maternity Clothes for 12-Year-Old African Girls The fourth case study focuses on a campaign for maternity clothes for 12-yearold African girls from 2018. The campaign was a collaboration between the Finnish fashion designer Paola Suhonen, the photographer Meeri Koutaniemi and Plan International Finland, an independent development and humanitarian organization that advances children’s rights and equality for girls. Plan International Finland raises funds from individual donors, corporate partners, and political bodies in Finland to develop projects in developing countries. The aim of the campaign was to highlight the problem of child pregnancies in Africa and to advocate for girls’ rights. It featured photographs of a visibly pregnant Zambian girl named Fridah, at the time 12 years old, posing as a model for a mock maternity fashion line for young girls. The advertising campaign was showcased at bus stops and replicas of the clothing line were displayed in a shop window at downtown Helsinki’s trendy northern Esplanade. A YouTube video of the designer explaining her aims of helping little girls also formed part of the campaign and it won a “Vuoden Huiput” (Highlights of the Year) award for best creative design in Finland. However, the campaign turned into a fashion scandal, raising questions about the campaign’s ethics, and accusations of perpetuating racist stereotypes, images of colonialism and the white savior as well as of eroticizing and sexualizing black girls. Even though the case was discussed in social media to some extent, the most vocal voice in the case was a black Zimbabwean university researcher/ activist living and working in Finland. The case study exposes the “colorblindness” of white Finnish culture and that in terms of critical discourse of race and racism, Finland is still in its infancy.

Tactics of a Deliberate Scandal In August 2017, the development and humanitarian organization Plan International Finland advancing rights and equality for girls paired up with the creative agency Hasan & Partners and the Finnish fashion designer Paola Suhonen to create an advertising campaign aimed at emphasizing the problem of child pregnancies in Africa. The campaign consisted of photographs taken by the photojournalist Meeri Koutaniemi and they featured a Black pregnant 12-year-old Zambian girl named Fridah, wearing a blue maternity dress. The photographs were reminiscent of fashion advertisements exploiting the tactics of a deliberate scandal: in them, the girl posed like a model, and the photographs accentuated her pregnant body. To further the effect of the shock, the images were accompanied by the text “Maternity wear for a 12-year-old by Paola Suhonen,” and a price tag “€14,90”, as if referring to the price of the dress. In reality, the price referred to a

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monthly donation, explained at the bottom of the image: “Ensure that this clothing collection is not needed. Donate plan.fi” (Kukkonen 2018). The aim of the campaign was to support young African mothers with children to return to school. The purpose was also to prevent child marriages in Africa, as parents often force the parties to marry. The campaign was spread around the city of Helsinki on bus stops, on public transportation and in shop windows, and it was also disseminated on social media. It was a success in that it received several important industry prizes: the graphic designers’ non-profit organization Grafia’s Vuoden Huiput (Highlights of the Year) prize, awarded annually to the best creative Finnish graphic design campaign (Planin 2018), the Art Directors Club of Europe organization’s prize Creative Distinction for its creative design with social and cultural relevance (Perttula 2018), and the Edit Prize awarded by The Finnish Periodical Publishers’ Association for the best magazine campaign of the year (Kukkonen 2018).

An Unintentional Scandal Considering its sensitive content and the deliberately shocking visual rhetoric of the photographs, the campaign sparked remarkably little opposition at first. On the contrary, it was recognized as a very successful campaign by the Finnish (white) advertising establishment. But when it was seen by one single person, the (Black) researcher and activist Dr. Faith Mkwesha, the founder and executive director of the non-profit organization SahWira Africa International, it was called out for racism, sexism, violation of children’s rights, and for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Black girls and women (Wall and Taylerson 2018). Makwesha was soon joined by the boards of two academic associations, the Anti-Racist Research Network (RASTER) and the Finnish Society for Gender Studies (SUNS). Both associations issued a statement against the campaign, drafted by Makwesha’s organization, criticizing the campaign’s “white savior mentality [of ] the colonial exploitation of brown and black women—in this case a young girl— in the name of charity” (Sunsseura 2018; Rasterverkosto 2018). At this point, the mainstream media also became interested in the campaign. A podcast called All Points North interviewed Mkwesha and the then acting fundraising director Eva Anttila of Plan Finland about the campaign. In it, Mkwesha expresses her shock, while Anttila points out that Plan International had followed the wishes of the young model Fridah and her mother throughout the campaign shoot and that the advertisement had the full support her family. The response by the model and her family was thus very similar to the reaction of the mother in the H&M scandal surrounding the advertisement of the sweatshirt with the slogan “Coolest monkey in the jungle” printed on it, mentioned at the beginning of this book. Anttila argued that the campaign was meant to shock,

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and that a fashion shoot had been used deliberately to this end. She also pointed out that the campaign had been successful in this regard: it had created the type of visibility they had been looking for and mobilized financial support for the NGO’s work to safeguard children’s rights (All Points North 2018). Alongside Mkwesha, another opposing voice in the podcast was presented by the Children’s Ombudsman, Tuomas Kurttila. He raised the question of ethical issues of humanitarian campaigns, arguing that adults and organizations should not use children in such a campaign regardless of their willingness, because minors are not able to evaluate the harm or loss of privacy it can cause in the future: “The child’s opinion and the child’s best interest are not always the same” he stated (All Points North 2018). The podcast did not bring the parties any closer to each other; on the contrary, Mkwesha went on to organize a protest at the Plan Finland’s headquarters together with a Finnish artist Sasha Huber (Mkwesha and Huber 2021) and started an online campaign to expose the organization’s “hypocrisy.” She referred to the contradiction that an organization which is meant to advocate children’s rights may end up “exploiting a traumatized child for profit” with a thoughtless campaign (Tessieri 2018). As part of the social media campaign, SahWira Africa International also issued a petition #ProtectBlackGirlsToo, demanding Plan International make a public apology, return the prizes the campaign had received, and to pay the child model for her work (Mkwesha n.d.). The petition was signed by 2,099 supporters. Mkwesha and her organization thus put a lot of pressure on Plan International by making it into a publicly debated spectacle.

Reading the Scandal: “White Survivor Mentality” This scandal is not a fashion scandal in the traditional sense. It was not caused by a fashion brand per se and there was no widespread social media debate around it. Rather, the parties involved were a humanitarian organization and one individual, Mkwesha, reflecting the argument made by Lance Bennett (2012) about “personalized politics.” However, Mkwesha was able to generate enough publicity and participation, especially in the traditional media, the National Broadcasting Company Yle and with organizations focusing on gender and race studies in Finland, to create a scandal. Although it was small-scale in terms of people participating in it, the case illustrates how a fashion scandal is meant to work and how it can fail. The critique of the campaign focused on two issues: that it was realized by two well-known white Finnish creatives, a fashion designer, and a photojournalist, and that the campaign, designed as a scandalous mock fashion advertising campaign, represented a staggeringly white gaze over African women, or, in this case, an underaged Black girl. The reaction indicates that the problem was about how an organization whose aim was to advance the human rights of unprivileged

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children, cast a Western white gaze over a whole continent and utilized a campaign that played on the deliberately shocking Western visual rhetoric: a combination of pregnancy, girliness, Blackness, and Western-style fashion. Part of the debate centered on the designer and the photojournalist, both of whom are successful white women in the Finnish context. Paola Suhonen is an awardwinning designer, artist, entrepreneur, musician, and filmmaker, known for her fashion brand Ivana Helsinki, which she founded in 1998 with her sister Pirjo Suhonen.1 In a word: Suhonen is a household name in Finland, known for being the first Finnish fashion brand to be invited to Paris and New York fashion weeks. Her prints, concepts and products are also known from collaborations with national and international companies including Uniqlo, Topshop, Swarovski, Coca-Cola, and Samsung. Suhonen is also a regular face in the media and news about her brand as well as her personal life are featured in periodicals, tabloids, and TV programs. The photojournalist Meeri Koutaniemi is equally famous. She has documented “stories of struggle and resilience” around the world and has also been awarded for her work, and hosts television programs. Her photographs focus on humanitarian issues and her subjects have included refugees, HIVpositive transgender people in Mexico and the practice of female genital mutilation in Kenya. For the latter she became widely debated when her photographs were showcased in the national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat’s monthly supplement Kuukausiliite (Nousiainen and Koutaniemi 2014). Like Suhonen, Koutaniemi is regularly featured in the periodicals—not least due to her marriage to Finnish rock star, Sam Yaffa, the former bass player of the band Hanoi Rocks. The opposing voices saw these two famous white Finns to be in stark contrast with the campaign featuring a Black little girl. Alongside Mkwesha, another researcher Noora Kotilainen (2018) also argued that the combination portrayed “celebrity humanitarianism” in the Finnish context, comparable to their international counterparts from Madonna to Bono and Angelina Jolie. It was stated that the problem was that the campaign drew attention to the emotions of the celebrities, to their feelings of intolerable injustice when both women had said in an interview how “rough” the photoshoot had been for them, and how “bad” they felt about the little girl (Barakka 2017). Even though both Suhonen and Koutaniemi spoke about the problem of child pregnancies in interviews—that there are up to 7 million child mothers annually, that many of the girls are victims of rape and that child mothers do not have access to education—their opponents still argued that the campaign ended up focusing on the celebrities, “overshadowing the reality of the little girl” (Kotilainen 2018). Instead of relating to the little girl’s suffering, the spectator was directed to identify with the white cosmopolitan celebrities represented as helpers. The little girl became the racialized Other, the object of the pitying gaze, and the source of shock reactions in the hope of donations.

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Circulating Racist Imagery In contrast to the stereotypical visual language of suffering we customarily see in humanitarian campaigns, the campaign was glossy and beautiful, exploiting the lush visual language of fashion advertising. According to Suhonen, she and Koutaniemi did this deliberately: “They are like fashion images familiar to Westerners, like any brochure in a children’s clothing collection, but when you look at the image more closely, you will notice that they are from a completely different world” (Barakka 2017). Indeed, the photographs are like fashion editorials. The little girl is depicted walking in a field, or posing against what appears to be a wall, under a hot sun, wearing a light-blue summer dress and a head wrap, which contrasts with the beige and burnt ochre-tones of the setting. The atmosphere in the images is calm and sophisticated—apart from the little girl’s pregnancy, nothing in the images hints at her suffering which was interpreted to add to the Western stereotype of African women as over-sexualized and in need of control (Mkwesha and Huber 2021). Paradoxically, the problem seemed to be that the campaign did not unambiguously repeat the narrative of Black women’s sexuality defined by sexual trauma and violence even though in this case it was most likely true. The critique against the campaign was stated to conjure up the violent history of colonialist preoccupation with African women’s sexuality from the nineteenth century (Mkwesha and Huber 2021). In this narrative, the image of the over-sexual African woman was linked to that of a sex worker through the capture and public display of the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” the enslaved Sarah Baartmann (Hammonds 1994). She was objectified and placed on public display to the masses, because scientists considered her genitalia and buttocks sensational and extraordinary. Baartmann and other African women’s genitalia were considered as “primitive” and as signs of their uncontrolled sexuality. During her lifetime and after, Baartmann’s body engendered a wide pseudoscientific debate in Europe, and she was brought to “Britain and France to be scientifically studied as a cause célèbre. She was exhibited in Europe [. . . and] transformed into a spectacle” (Ponzanesi 2017: 170). The white gaze that was cast over Baartman, aimed to fix her body and the Black female body more widely in her proper place in the racial hierarchy. As Franz Fanon (1968: 110–111) writes, the gaze steadied her “in order to decode and conformably recode her into its own system of representation.” In other words, Baartmann, the historical figure, became the source of racist representations that still live on today and host a number of racist views about Black people. In nineteenth-century Europe, Baartmann was seen to embody a “missing link” in evolutionary classificatory discourses and to confirm the inferiority of Black people in relation to white people. Simultaneously, she also became the representative of Africa, the “dark continent” which needs saving and civilizing.

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This racist imagery was widely exploited by white European (male) writers and artists. These beliefs became the foundation of Western views about Black African women and their sexuality, as well as the treatment of their bodies—and, as it was argued, continued to be present in the Plan International’s campaign. Like her ancestors, the campaign labelled the girl a “savage” and a “primitive,” neither able to control her body nor her sexuality, and thus in need to be saved and controlled by white Finnish women. When the fashion designer Paola Suhonen was interviewed about the campaign, she admitted that the aim of the campaign was indeed to shock, as if to draw from the colonial past: “Hopefully, the campaign will spark a debate about the conditions in which millions of girls in developing countries live” (Neuvonen and Parkkinen 2017). This statement was interpreted to reflect a hierarchical and colonialist view of the global world—in short, it was seen to represent “white savior mentality” (Kotilainen 2018).

Do Scandals Still Work? Shocking the audience worked in the sense that it was debated and commented upon in the media, unlike many of the organization’s previous campaigns on the same theme. In fact, Plan International Finland has created several prize-winning campaigns on child motherhood in collaboration with the same creative agency, Hasan & Partners. In 2016, for example, the campaign “Maternity pack for 11-year-olds” and in 2017, the campaign “If I could choose” both won a Vuoden Huiput (highlights of the year) prize.2 These campaigns were not debated—most likely because they did not portray any particular child but were more abstract in their approach. This may indicate why the organization chose to use shock tactics: it wanted to raise more public awareness. Although this was not explicitly admitted, the CEO of the organization confessed that these tactics had been used because the issue was shocking: “Sometimes, if you want to raise awareness on sensitive societal issues, you have to create campaigns people will notice” (All Points North 2018). Despite the humanitarian organization’s good intentions, and the debate it created, the campaign eventually turned against the cause. Its critics accused it of restating the dilemma of child pregnancies in all their starkness while not suggesting any real solutions. The campaign was also seen to work more in favor of a fashion shoot than as an educational campaign, and it was also argued to decontextualize actual social problems by placing the campaign within the framework of mock product promotion. The gesture was argued to create a tone of discordant meanings and aesthetization and commodification of real social issues. After long negotiations Plan International finally succumbed and admitted, almost a year later, that they were “sorry some aspects of its campaign have caused offence” (Plan International Finland 2018) and deleted part of the

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campaign videos from YouTube. The organization also stated that it would not accept any future awards for the campaign, and that it would incorporate the received criticism into its future work.

Contextualizing the Scandal: “West and the Rest” The campaign and its critical reception bring forth Stuart Hall’s (1996) discussion of “the West and the Rest.” It is a discourse that defines a juxtaposition between Europe (“West”) and everywhere else (“Rest”). In it, “the West” with capital W refers to “regions or countries lying to the west of a specified or implied point of orientation” and to the “noncommunist countries of Europe and America.”3 The West thus designates geography and location, but also a type of a society. The word “Western,” furthermore, refers to something stemming from the GrecoRoman tradition (“Western culture”) to something relating to the noncommunist countries of Europe and America (“Western powers”) and to something being characteristic of the American West (“Western clothes”).4 These meanings show how the words “West” and “Western” are used beyond geography: to represent complex ideas about a culture, its values and relationship to other cultures set outside its scope. In this sense, they are words and images that point to differences between societies, cultures, and peoples, and as such form a system of representation (Hall 1997) that works with other concepts and images and form a value-based ranking and standards of comparisons. “Western” equals urban and developed while “the Rest” equals agricultural and under-developed. Both words also evoke positive and negative emotions, attitudes, and knowledge about phenomena. Furthermore, the concepts are essentially Western-European and Eurocentric (Hamilton 1996) and work to construct a European identity by contrasting it with other cultures and their identities through a process of differentiation (Hall 1996: 187–188). It also contrasts “Western civilization,” understood as the combination of religion and democracy, intellectual liberties, rationality, science, and economic freedom, from “the Rest” which is defined as childish, innocent, barbaric, closer to nature, idiotic, ignoble, and rude—in a word, in need of education and civilizing (Nemo 2006). The scandalized reaction to the campaign conjures up this juxtaposition that Hall and others have described. In it the representatives of the white West—the humanitarian organization, the fashion designer, the photographer, and the creative agency—assume a position from which to help the less developed and less educated Black Rest i.e., Africa. The problem was that the campaign represented the world as divided according to this simple (and racist) Eurocentric dichotomy. The campaign defined Western people as human and Africans as not fully human, encapsulated in the pregnancy of an underage schoolgirl.

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This dichotomy has, of course, long roots, building on Enlightenment thought and the colonial expansion of Europe to Africa and elsewhere (Hall 1996: 190– 197). A vital part of this colonial discourse is who has the power to decide what the problem is and how it should be solved. The debate argued that the organization held the dominant power and influenced what was seen as the problem and how to fix it, thus Orientalizing Africa (Said 1979): through the figure of the 12-year-old pregnant Zambian girl the whole continent was depicted as the object of help. The campaign images which drew from the visual language of the fashion photograph, created the little girl as the beautiful “noble savage” that could be rescued and civilized with the intervention of the humanitarian organization. The scandal makes a point about how a humanitarian campaign with good intentions can also circulate colonial ideas and ways of knowing and speaking about things and phenomena. In the Finnish context, this type of scandal with a focus on race and colonialism is still quite unique. It required an individual, a researcher and an activist with a cultural heritage in Zimbabwe (Pystynen 2021), to materialize. This may not be surprising: the study and discussion about colonialist discourse is still in its infancy in Finland, and the country’s own colonizing past is only now being unearthed (e.g., Keskinen, Seikkula and Mkwesha, 2021). Projecting the scandal against this backdrop may partly explain why the campaign used such blatantly colonizing (visual) rhetoric—and why this was not seen as a problem either by the humanitarian organization, the designer, the photographer, the creative agency, or the organizations which granted it several prizes. More importantly, however, the case study reveals the power of the colonizing discourse and its global reach: how it has become part of the “Western DNA” but also that it has rules that dictate what can and cannot be said and represented and how, who can speak, and what is identified as relevant and true. Like Michel Foucault (1969/2002) has written, there is always a framework, in this case the colonizing one, which structures the boundaries of what is or is not possible. Even well-intentioned actors who are on the “good side” are formed in and through the colonizing discourse. In this case, it took an individual with background in Africa to point out the colonizing discourse, turn the tables, as it were, and to educate the organization which wished to educate. The case shows that even though the discourse of “the West and the Rest” has been challenged, it is still alive. Discourses do not just disappear; rather they “go on unfolding, changing shape, as they make sense of new circumstances” (Hall 1996: 221). New discourses carry many of the same assumptions as the originals did—and create new assumptions and stereotypes, in this case one relating more directly to fashion and how it can give value to the human (Vänskä, 2018). At the beginning of the twentieth century, German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1904–1957: 546) wrote that fashion separates the

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“civilized man” from the “primitive races.” From the perspective of this fashion scandal, Simmel’s racist and Eurocentric views were also mobilized in the debate, although implicitly. The garment the girl was wearing was from the collection called “Hamptons”. Fashion historians know that a Hampton-style dress symbolizes a world of luxury and a sophisticated clothing style of the wealthy white Americans. The dress and its wearer could not have represented two worlds further apart.

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Flirting with Fascists In the following case study, we will investigate the ways in which political extremists can utilize fashion to reach their goals and become more mainstream and normalized. This case study also comes from Finland and involves a Finnish fashion brand and their former retail dealer. It focuses on a scandal which started in 2018, ebbed away only to resurface in summer 2020 on Finnish Twitter and was resolved only after the brand cut ties with its retailer. The case study discusses the brand promise and the lived reality and asks to what extent they should intertwine. The case also notes the differences between global and local discourses on brand ethics, what consumers may expect from a fashion brand and to what extent consumers can push for change. The case ends with a discussion on the influence of far-right politics on fashion and how extremist political groups resort to fashion in their attempts to normalize their violent ideology.

2018: The Scandal Begins On 15 August 2018 a Finnish municipal councilor Elina Hölttä tweeted that the products of the Finnish menswear clothing company Makia are available in the discount chain store Kärkkäinen: I heard yesterday that clothes from Makia Clothing are sold at Kärkkäinen’s. I wouldn’t have believed that these two would go together. Feeling somewhat sad and betrayed. HÖLTTÄ 20185

The tweet stemmed from an assumed ideological discrepancy between the clothing brand and the brand’s retail dealer. The clothing company is an urban hipster-style Helsinki-based brand, established in 2001 and run by three entrepreneurs, Totti Nyberg, Joni Malmi, and Jesse Hyväri who also have a professional snowboarding background. The brand is known for bringing traditional menswear together with street- and skateboarding wear, as well as for its responsibility stunts—and, for scandals. For example, in 2017 the brand closed its online shop and flagship store for the duration of the Black Friday shopping spree day (Perttula 2017). In 2018, it announced it was abandoning single-use packaging in favor of multiple-use packages in its online shop (Eronen 2018). In 2019, the company was accused of and convicted for plagiarizing three different brand logos—a local yacht club, a local canoeing club and a traditional shampoo brand—in its clothes without permission (Merenkävijät 2019; MTV news, 2019).6 In a book published to celebrate the brand’s twentieth anniversary it is even argued that scandal has been the brand’s chosen marketing

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strategy (Niipola 2021). Despite embracing scandals, the brand also claims to be committed to producing long-lasting design, to using “environmentally preferred materials,” such as recycled cotton and polyester, to manufacturing with longterm partners, and to supporting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals including those related to diminishing poverty, inequality, and justice (Makia Responsibility n.d.).7 The brand has also explained its responsibility campaigns by referring to its brand values: that it wishes to communicate its commitment to sustainable design and its respect for human rights (Kukkonen, 2018). Kärkkäinen, on the other hand, has come to be known as one of the biggest and cheapest discount department store chains and online retailers in Finland. It distributes most Finnish brands, and its online store is the eighth largest in Finland (Kujansuu 2020). The corporation also has subsidiaries, most notably a free paper called Magneettimedia (“Magnet Media” in English), a publication that combines the chain store’s bargain offers with right-wing extremist “fake news” articles. These range from articles spreading conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine and alternative medicine treatments to anti-Semitic articles claiming, for example, that the Holocaust is a “myth,” and that Talmud provokes pedophilia (Kärkkäinen 2017; Nieminen 2018). In its claims, the publication joins the common trend among Anglo-American conspiracy theory right-wing populists and the European Neo-Nazi scene—the latter of which is a phenomenon that the German cultural theorist Theodor Adorno observed already at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s: “We all are also familiar with the readiness today to deny or minimize what happened—no matter how difficult it is to comprehend that people feel no shame in arguing that it was at most only five and not six million Jews who were gassed” (Adorno 1959/1998: 90). The scandal around Makia stemmed from the chain store’s affiliation to Magneettimedia. This was originally published by J. Kärkkäinen Ltd and its CEO Juha Kärkkäinen but, after the CEO was tried and convicted for ethnic agitation and racism due to anti-Semitic articles in 2013, Kärkkäinen gave the publication rights to the Nordic Resistance Movement, whose aim is to establish a totalitarian Neo-Nazi Nordic State instead of the Nordic Countries (Nieminen 2017). The reaction behind the tweet thus connected the discount chain store’s CEO’s openly extremist world view, his Neo-Nazi sympathies to his close relationship with the leaders of the Nordic Resistance Movement. Following Adorno, this is not new: the “survival of National Socialism within democracy” is “potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy” (Adorno 1959/1998: 90).

To Collaborate or Not to Collaborate The tweet quoted at the beginning of this case study thus represents a reaction against these unexpected allies, hinting at a history which still lives on. How

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could a brand, trumpeting its ecological and social responsibility, collaborate with a corporation whose CEO has such an open relationship with a fascist organization and to extremist ideology? The tweet also has a context: many Finnish brands have terminated their collaboration with the chain store due to these affiliations. In 2015, the Finnish textile company Finlayson, for example, announced that they would not renew their contract with Kärkkäinen because of the corporation’s ties to the alt-right free paper (Mannermaa 2015). In 2017, several other Finnish brands made similar announcements, breaking away from political extremism, after the national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat had written about the owner’s fraternization with the Neo-Nazi organization (Nieminen 2017). However, Makia had not cut its ties, and this was at the core of the reactions to which the brand swiftly replied. Instead, the brand stated that it “wants to cater for people also outside the metropolitan area [of Helsinki]” and that, for this purpose, Kärkkäinen “serves most of our customers conveniently” (Kukkonen 2018). Makia thus chose to concentrate on practical matters and geography— drawing from the center–periphery discourse between the “South” and the “Rest” of Finland which is very prominent in the Finnish political speech. The brand made a point about their retail dealer enabling them to cater for all Finns through retail dealer’s shops located in the periphery. The brand also referred to economics: Kärkkäinen was its most important business partner and leaving it would have meant a significant loss in the brand’s turnover (Niipola 2021: 308.). Makia’s responses caused some commotion on Twitter. Altogether 32 Twitterusers replied to the municipal politician’s tweet. Ten of them pointed to Kärkkäinen’s far-right connections and how the brand’s corporate values contravene them, and that the brand should cut their ties with the chain store once and for all. However, most of the replies defended the brand and its collaboration. They stated, for example, that the owner’s political affiliations don’t mean anything or very little in business, or that from now on they would start buying Makia’s clothes—as if coming out as Neo-Nazis themselves, or, as if demonstrating their nonchalant attitude towards the CEO’s worldview (Comments to Hölttä’s tweet 2018.). These sentiments also echoed the brand’s view: it was striving to separate the retail dealer, Kärkkäinen, from its CEO, Juha Kärkkäinen. Accordingly, Makia said that while it does not condone the CEO’s worldview, it has never had a problem with the company (Niipola 2021: 302). The brand also tweeted that it “evaluates their collaboration partners at regular intervals” and that, based on the results of their evaluation, it would take the appropriate action. The brand stated that it does not accept unethical conduct be it “discrimination, intimidation, harassment, or insults,” that it had reviewed Kärkkäinen’s code of conduct in 2017 and, even though they had not noticed anything “alarming,” they would re-evaluate it again (Kukkonen 2018). After this, the Twitter kerfuffle died down—only to resurface two years later, in August 2020.

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2020: The Scandal Continues On August 1, 2020, a Twitter user tweeted: Juha Kärkkäinen, the owner of the retail chain Kärkkäinen, has put the full HD Nazi gear and conspiracy theories on again. Don’t support that guy financially by doing business with Kärkkäinen. Which parties are still cooperating with this? @TiiaMaija 20208

Along with this foreword, the Twitter user posted three screen captures from a Facebook thread in which the CEO of Kärkkäinen Ltd claimed that “democracy is the craziest form of governance,” “Hitler trumped unemployment” and that “Covid-19 is a hoax to make the world run into debt.” Several users replied, tagging Makia and posting, for example, “This is why I have been asking about your collaboration before. You have always stated that you will investigate the matter further and have not seen anything wrong with the collaboration. Don’t you really. You claim to be a responsible brand. This is why I boycott your products. Which is a shame” (Keränen 2020).9 Makia replied by stating that “following the comments by Juha Kärkkäinen lately, we have decided yet again to re-evaluate our collaboration with Kärkkäinen Ltd. We expect further clarification from Kärkkäinen Ltd by 11 August after which we will decide what to do. We will inform you soon” (Makia Clothing 2020).10 Over the next two weeks, Twitter users rekindled a debate very similar to that of 2018. One user, a network analyst, created a graph about the discussion on the continued collaboration between Makia and Kärkkäinen (@mihkal 2020).11 It represented a network of 316 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “@makiaclothing,” or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The top hashtags in the discussion included #kärkkäinen, #makia and #makiaclothing but also #brändinhallinta (“brand management”) and #rasismi (“racism”) as well as #persu which is a nickname used for the Finns Party, the right-wing populist political party comparable to others in Europe and Trump supporters in the U.S. The discussion connected Makia’s conduct to the support of right-wing politics and to racism, to which the brand replied (yet again) that they would review their collaboration. On August 14, Makia Clothing posted two tweets (@makiaclothing 2020):12 Makia Clothing Ltd. has received a detailed account regarding the recent scandal on social media. We have replied to it by declaring our stand directly to Juha Kärkkäinen and will discuss the future personally with him and our managerial team.

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In addition, we have not noticed anything in Kärkkäinen Ltd’s conduct that would call for action, so we have nothing more to add at this point. Even though the tweets, especially the second one, raise questions about whether it is possible to distinguish a CEO from his company, again, the debate waned—only to resurface yet again seven months later, in March 2021.

2021: The Scandal Ends This time around the brand announced that it was going to terminate its collaboration with the discount chain store and its online shop (Lindholm 2021). Contrary to what the brand had stated before, it announced that its withdrawal was due to the discount store owner’s “values and conduct in social media” and because it has had to explain its collaboration “for some time now” (Harjumaa 2021). Makia also stated that it “believes everyone needs a second chance to improve their conduct” and that it just didn’t want to “run away” (Harjumaa 2021). The brand further admitted that it had not made the decision earlier because of revenue but now, since the CEO had not changed his behavior, it had to draw its own conclusions. The retail dealer did not take Makia’s announcement lightly. It published a press release in which it asked how Makia intends to select its collaborators “so that it does not trade with customers who do not represent the same opinions as Makia’s management and owners” and that contrary to Makia, Kärkkäinen “genuinely implements equal treatment of people” catering “now and in the future for all customers and suppliers, regardless of their opinions, political affiliations or beliefs” (Harmaala 2021). In other words, the retail dealer aimed to show that it was open minded, liberal, and a-political and the clothing brand narrow-minded, selecting their collaborators based on their political opinions. The retailer also published an advertising campaign on Facebook, announcing that they would give a 20 percent discount on all sweets with the code “MAKIA”—makia also being a dialect word used for “sweets” in Finnish. After this, the scandal died down. Less than two months later, on May 25, 2021, Makia issued another press release, announcing that a new design brand consolidated corporation and retail dealer Manna & Co. had been established and that the company would be one of its brands from now on (Silvennoinen 2021). The timing of distancing the brand from their former retail dealer raises questions about whether it was a coincidence or a conscious move. What is especially intriguing is that, after the press release, the Makia Clothing Twitter account, including all its tweets, was deleted. The tweets discussed in this chapter have been found by using the digital archive Wayback Machine which allows users to find pages that no longer exist. During the scandal, the brand had also referred to its corporate code of conduct: that it only collaborates with brands that share similar values (Janatuinen

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2019).13 Any references to these “shared values,” however, have also disappeared from the brand’s website and now it merely refers to sustainable production. It is unclear what the brand aims to communicate with these maneuvers—do they want to start fresh, hide any inconvenient information, or pretend that nothing has happened? We tried asking the brand, but they never replied.

A Textbook Example of Crisis Management Still, this case indicates that a scandal can be triggered by several events. Like our other cases, this also shows that a scandal is a result of the audience’s perception that a fashion company has violated a moral or social norm or behaved in an immoral and unethical manner (Rauschnabel et al. 2016). This was also the case with Makia: the communal politician mentioned at the beginning of the case study pointed out that there was a contradiction between the brand’s publicly announced brand values and code of conduct and its collaboration with the chain store retailer well-known for its extremist political underpinnings. Contrary to this, the brand seemed to believe, either naively or opportunistically, that it might be possible to separate the values of a person, even a CEO, from the values of the brand—despite the fact that the CEO and the brand share the same name and are thus inseparable. The debate around the brand also followed the customary logic of a scandal, bringing forth polarized opinions and resolving in one way or another. It brought forth the voices of those who disapproved of the collaboration with Kärkkäinen and who called for a boycott of Makia as well as those who argued that the CEO’s worldview did not mean anything to them, or if it did, it triggered them to defend the brand. Furthermore, while the former protesters clearly expected the brand to take a social stand against right-wing extremism, Makia’s initial reluctance to do so indicates that it was not very concerned that the scandal would affect its business negatively. On the contrary: the brand calculated that leaving the retailer would cause significant economic losses and lead to lay-offs (Niipola 2021: 307). Although the reasoning of the brand may be understandable on some level, it is also true that it goes against the grain of contemporary understanding of corporate responsibility in the post-Trump and post-Covid-19 era: according to industry professionals, weaving together business and social goals alongside ecological ones is, and will continue to be, vital to companies and their success (e.g., McClimon 2021). Excluding its final announcement to cut ties with their retailer, Makia’s conduct throughout the prolonged scandal followed one of the strategies described in the crisis communications literature on morally based scandals: although it responded by promising to investigate the crisis, it did not issue an explanation or an apology. According to crisis communication research, issuing an apology may reinforce the

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perception that the brand is guilty of the moral violation of which it is accused (Coombs 2007; Benoit 1997). Choosing not to admit guilt, Makia adopted a denial strategy, downplaying the crisis and discrediting the Twitter-user’s concerns, while giving excuses such as not wanting to cause any harm to their retail dealer. Furthermore, the brand has also explained its actions by claiming that it wanted to change the retailer from the inside by maintaining a close relationship with its CEO (Niipola 2021: 309–311). However, since the scandal resurfaced and thus continued, the case also indicates that social media has dramatically altered the dynamics of scandals (Scholz and Smith 2019). As long as the scandal remained unresolved, it resurfaced and demanded action from Makia. The brand’s attempt to separate the retailer company from its CEO’s extremist world view did not succeed and eventually the collaboration had to be terminated. The audiences play a central role in a change which sees companies as social and political actors—or even as “political activists” (Moorman 2018) that must take a stand and support basic human rights, for example.

Contextualizing the Scandal: Mainstreaming Extreme Right Politics The case study shows how interlinked fashion is with cultural, political, and economic values. The responses of online audiences have prompted a qualitative shift in fashion from symbolic gestures to demands that brands make concrete actions. These motions, which can be seen as a form of dialogue between the brand and its consumers, are important in building an image and the reality of social responsibility. Actions are understood as evidence of how brands can cultivate and reinforce their image as culturally sensitive and socially responsible actors in the world (Halliday 2021). The scandal around the Makia-Kärkkäinen collaboration suggests that brands are also undergoing a cultural–political shift in which they are held accountable and seen as part of the political sphere (Bartlett 2019). It has made brands more open towards different audiences and more vulnerable to risks and responses. This change is largely due to the rise of social media and its citizen journalism. The goal of public critique, exposure and scandal is to pressure brands to adapt and change. Brands are expected to be flexible, conscious of the changing operational social, political, and cultural environment, and ready and willing to change. This is also the reason why the scandal continued to reignite. We argue that the willingness of brands to “walk the talk” is especially important in contemporary culture where extremist political groups have increasingly started to resort to fashion for their strategic purposes on many fronts (Halliday 2021; Gaugele 2019). Although Makia has no direct links to extremist groups apart from its former retail dealer, the case reflects a current tendency in which the political far right aims to become accepted by mainstream

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Figure 6.1 Members of the Proud Boys appropriating Fred Perry’s Laurel Wreath logo and marching in protest of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo by: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images.

culture, and how it uses fashion to find suitable candidates to influence politically. In the US, for example, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was launched with a red cap that became a symbol of white supremacy. After his election as the 45th president of the United States, the press also began inquiring whether designers would dress the First Lady. The election led to the creation of the neo-fascist group Proud Boys by the Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes in 2016. This has had consequences for several fashion brands. In 2020, for example, the fashion brand Fred Perry decided to pull its famous black/yellow/yellow twin tipped polo shirt and refused to sell it to consumers in the US and Canada, after the shirt had been appropriated by the Proud Boys and the Laurel Wreath had been subverted into the group’s own logo (Elan 2020; Proud Boys 2020) (see Figure 6.1). Towards the end of Trump’s presidency, the riot on Capitol Hill in January 2021 was also an event that highlighted clothing as the chosen and effective “weapon” of right-wing politics (Tashjian 2021.). Furthermore, in a 2018 Business of Fashion conference, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie revealed that “fashion profiling” i.e., the practice of classifying and targeting individuals based on their clothing brand preferences, had been a key metric in building voter profiles prior to the elections (Friedman and Engel Bromwich 2018; Gaugele 2019; see also Nikunen, Hokka

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and Nelimarkka 2021). Political leanings were evaluated based on brand preferences: brands that played “on the myths of the West and the (mostly male) frontier” were connected to the political right and conservatism, while more avant-garde and experimental fashion was seen to indicate “liberal values” (Wylie in Friedman and Engel Bromwich 2018). Appearance has, of course, played a role in estimating individuals’ identities already before social media and algorithm tracking. Alongside class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, profession etc. political views can also be read from clothes—interpreting clothes and making assumptions about a person is one the classical themes in the study of fashion since at least Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen (Gurova 2021). It has also been an important part of the study of gay and lesbian identities since the early sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., Vänskä 2017). The genealogy of the recognizable subcultural far-right styles goes back to the 1980s and 1990s. It has traditionally consisted of working-class racist skinhead style (Perho 2000; Aharoni and Féron 2019): bomber jackets, combat boots, jeans or cargos, braces, t-shirts, and shaved heads. This particular subcultural style, which was connected to the ideology of “white power”, started to change at the beginning of the 2000s when far-right brands such as the German Thor Steinar were established. The new right-wing brands offer high-quality clothes that have more sophisticated features i.e., are less aggressive, and have fewer direct references to history, colonialism, militarism, and mythology (Gaugele 2019). The new far-right brands have created new ways of coding and embedding extremist ideology by replacing explicit subcultural references with implicit ones: codes that are understandable only to those “in the know.” The subcultural style has been replaced by a significantly tidier, more fashionable, and a more mainstream style, which contributes to the normalization of far-right politics. This move from visibility to invisibility is the opposite to that which has defined the development of LGBTQI+ identities for over several decades, as we explained in the case study on Dolce & Gabbana’s “Love is Love” campaign.

New Obscurity in Style: Assimilating Right-wing Extremism The sartorial codification of right-wing populist identity has also been accompanied by other forms of mainstreaming. Not only have several fashion and street-style brands dedicated themselves to catering for the politically extremist consumer niche in the US and in Europe, but a “new obscurity in style” has also been identified (Gaugele 2019). In summer 2017, for example, khakis and white polo shirts, the signature style of the middle-class everyman since the 1990s, became

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Figure 6.2 Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists wearing white shirts and khakis to appear normal in their “Unite the Right” rally at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, USA. Photo by: Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

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known as the signature style of the US white supremacists when they marched across a college campus in Charlottesville shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans in this attire (Newell-Hanson 2017). In preparation for the rally, a prominent white supremacist Andrew Anglin published a blog post arguing that the supporters of white supremacism should look “appealing”, “sexy” and “hip” at their first event. This would be achieved by going to the gym and by wearing buttoned shirts and fitted jeans as well as short hair and well-trimmed beards which would make them “appeal to normal people” (Conti 2017) (see Figure 6.2). What this means is that instead of openly showing their political leanings, right-wing populists deliberately mix up, downplay, and popularize meanings that refer to a “colonialist, white-supremacist, racist, anti-immigration, and nationfirst” political agenda (Gaugele 2019: 714). One reason for downplaying is that several visual codes such as the swastika, are illegal and can subject the wearer to legal trouble. In her book The Extreme Gone Mainstream, a scholar of extremism and radicalization Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2017) writes how right-wing extremist political ideology, and its rhetoric, is currently being mainstreamed and commercialized, and how the clothing has become much tamer. Wearing ordinary clothes enables extremists to become more accepted while also facilitating a more open discussion about far-right politics (Miller-Idriss 2017: 3). However, it has also been noted that the history of normalization has longer roots. Even though the alt-right of today wants to be seen as detached from the unpolished white supremacists of the past, efforts to dress white supremacy in middle-class ideals and respectability have been around since the first organized movements emerged in the late nineteenth century (Baker 2017). What was true over a hundred years ago still applies: appearances matter. They influence the credibility of the speaker. Even if racist far-right politics have been and still are often associated with certain subcultural dress codes and violent behavior, there have been new developments apart from the mere establishment of right-wing fashion brands: the assimilationist tendency of the political far right, i.e. by aiming to take over democratic decision-making institutions such as the U.S. presidency and various parliamentary majorities, and to look and dress like everyone else, and by doing so, to assimilate and to normalize the extremist ideology. Wearing street-styles and traditional garments such as dresses and skirts for women, and suits and ties for men which implies respectability and normalcy, is an effective tool in seeking social acceptance—and a tactic advocated, for example, both by both civil rights activists and gay and lesbian individuals in the United States prior to the liberation movements in the 1950s and 1960s.Therefore, a discussion about the relationship between far-right political groups and fashion must not be limited to brands that associate themselves with a certain political sect but how cases like Makia function as some kind of convenient conveyors of the right-wing political agenda. The Makia case is part of a wider tendency in which the political

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far-right groups exploit social media to “co-opt brands’ ‘mainstream’ cultural associations in the service of extremist politics” (Halliday 2021: 3). The issue of fashion and mainstreaming political extremism is pressing as presently there are several countries in the European Union that are led by farright, nationalist, and xenophobic parties, as well as countries where these parties have a substantial position in opposition (Traverso, 2019). Finland is one such country: in 2011, the nationalist True Finns Party, now called The Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) made political history by five-folding their electoral support in the parliamentary elections, becoming one of the ruling government parties in the 2015 parliamentary elections (Jungar 2016). At the time of writing, the party is in opposition and has elected a new party leader Riikka Purra because the former leader Jussi Halla-Aho stepped down (Finns Party 2021).14 There was much speculation about the reasons for the change as the former leader was still very popular at the time of his resignation. It was suggested, for example, that the party wants to make itself “more qualified for the next government” (Helsingin Sanomat editorial 2021).15 This means that the former leader of the party was also considered a problematic figure among several rightwingers and right-leaning politicians: he openly supports radical anti-immigration and anti-Islam politics and has been convicted by the Supreme Court for breaching the sanctity of religion in a blog post which made a connection between Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, and pedophilia (Äystö 2017). His successor is the former vice chair and Member of the Parliament Riikka Purra who, despite her similar political views, is considered a “softer person” with the ability to possibly attract female voters (Helsingin Sanomat editorial 2021).16 Purra has also become known for her vegetarianism and interest in a healthy lifestyle. In an interview she is said to have brought a “home-made green smoothie” with her (Myllymäki 2021) and the introduction on her Instagram account reads “Healthy food as my passion and medicine! Wholefoods, plantbased, raw. Juiceaholic. Mother, wife, survivor” (@sanrines).17 Not a single image on the account refers to her politics; on the contrary, it looks like one managed by a fashion and life-style influencer. The Makia case is indicative of how sentiments of online users can reflect, circulate, and feed into polarized political opinions. While some users criticized the brand for its continued collaboration with the discount chain store, there were also those who either didn’t think the association to far-right groups mattered or they announced that they would start buying the brand which they hadn’t done before. These opposing comments indicate that fashion has become a way to support or build extremist identities. The case shows how political and politicized discourses and fashion are entangled and especially, how brands can also become political platforms: the scandal was, after all, started by a leftist politician, providing an easy way to make anti-alt-right politics.

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The Makia case also invites us to think how the far-right uses fashion as cultural material to further the infiltration of extremist ideology. The aim of the extreme right is not only to find potential followers but also to actively influence and shape the discourse: to move mainstream society to the right. The methods for achieving the goal are multiple; one important one is to deliberately downplay and obscure the extremist worldview by resorting to mainstream, trendy, and even desirable fashions. As Elke Gaugele (2019) has argued, these tactics are part of the extreme right’s “metapolitics”: a soft way to gain a firm foothold among people.

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Notes 1

See https://bit.ly/3ecbRrT.

2

Grafia archives, see https://bit.ly/3uM55iM, https://bit.ly/3fhsyBQ.

3

Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English, 2021.

4

Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English, 2021.

5

See https://bit.ly/3oHGIR5.

6

See https://bit.ly/3fL8uYV.

7

See https://bit.ly/3fL8uYV.

8

See https://bit.ly/2TLKsG.

9

See https://bit.ly/3yBxZ7m.

10 See https://bit.ly/348Veb7. 11 See https://bit.ly/3fW82an. 12 Available at: https://bit.ly/2SmgCqy. 13 Available at: https://bit.ly/2SmgCqy. 14 See https://bit.ly/3rCF7gG. 15 See https://bit.ly/3BShc1o. 16 See https://bit.ly/3BShc1o. 17 See https://bit.ly/3C47hGp.

7 GLOBAL SCANDALS

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Whose Identity? The Problem with “Cultural Appropriation” The first global fashion scandal investigates the concept of “cultural appropriation” and discusses the tricky question of “being inspired” versus “stealing.” Fashion designers have always drawn inspiration from different traditions and cultures and interpreted them creatively. However, recently, fashion brands have been increasingly accused of misuse or plain stealing of elements from other cultures and accused of cultural appropriation. Quite a few scandals revolve around this theme. In 2017, Louis Vuitton was criticized for using a design pattern that embellishes the blankets worn as coats by the people of the Basotho tribe. Stella McCartney came under fire for using traditional African and Ankara prints in her Spring/Summer 2018 collection. Gucci was accused of appropriating pieces that looked suspiciously like bindis, hijabs, niqabs and Sikh turbans in 2018 while Dior’s pre-Fall 2017 collection included an almost identical copy of a Romanian embroidered folk coat which was called out for plagiarism on social media by several Romanian groups (Euronews 2018). Through these examples, this chapter explores the meanings and the limits of cultural appropriation from the point of view of identity claims. The focus is on discussing how to use elements from other cultures and argues that the discourse of cultural appropriation is not only about a culture that is being appropriated. It is also about identities and the failure to adequately recognize and acknowledge them.

Traditional Versus Modern “Clothing is a shortcut to humanity,” curator and fashion researcher Claire Wilcox (2001: 1) has stated, referring to fashion as a narrative of the history of designing the human. Currently, the debate about the limits of humanity is acute in fashion. It has taken place especially in the context of “cultural appropriation,” referring to an act of a dominant group taking or stealing from a minority group. It has become acute in the fashion industry, partly because of the large sums of money circulating in it, and partly because of a discourse on authorship. One of the earliest (and most enduring) cases of cultural appropriation in the 2010s fashion scene was the lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret. In 2010, its runway featured models wearing animal-print lingerie, surrounded by men in printed sarongs and wrap skirts. All the models were painted with black shapes and lines resembling the body art of indigenous people. In 2012, in one of the most debated cases of cultural appropriation by Victoria’s Secret, the model Karlie Kloss walked the runway wearing a feather headdress, suede fringe, turquoise jewelry, and leopard-print accents. She was accused of glamorizing the genocide of indigenous people by European settlers and American colonists. And in 2016,

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the brand used traditional Chinese-inspired prints to create cascading capes, high-neck crop tops, obi belts, and thigh-high boots. The audience was upset because the traditional Chinese garments were modified into skimpy lingerie looks, and because the models wearing the looks were not Chinese (Matera 2018). In 2017, a debate arose, among other things, about whether the wellknown fashion house Chanel could appropriate an Australian Aboriginal boomerang, attach a brand logo to it and sell the item for $2,000 (Blair 2017). Furthermore, in 2017, the brand Louis Vuitton found itself in the midst of an angry debate after presenting its 2017 menswear collection. The collection took inspiration from Basotho blankets. The Basotho blanket is a distinct and beautiful woolen blanket that is utilized by people living in the Kingdom of Lesotho in South Africa. The history of the blankets has crossovers and can be traced back to the 1800s, when it was brought by European traders and missionaries and presented to the then King of Lesotho. Since then, the blanket has become a part of everyday life, a status symbol, a symbol of ethnic belonging, and a sign of cultural identification in Lesotho. The blankets have been linked to certain rite-of-passage ceremonies for people such as circumcision, wedding, or childbirth as well as national events such as Independence Day (The History 2010). The blankets hold many layers of culturally significant meanings (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Lesotho women dressed in traditional clothing and Basotho-blankets attend a royal wedding. Photo by: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images.

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Looking at the media discussions around Basotho blankets, one dichotomy caught our attention: traditional versus modern. A local lodge that uses Basotho blankets as a part of destination branding for tourists states on its website that “Basotho Blankets [are] a traditional item worn by the native people of Lesotho and also westernized by Louis Vuitton as a 21st century fashion piece” (Louis Vuitton 2017). A Lesotho-born fashion designer Thabo Markhetha-Kwinana claimed that “the traditional blankets are the perfect textile from which to create garments that showcase her culture and heritage in a Western-dominated fashion industry” (Lange 2018, italics added). The quote illustrates a Eurocentric understanding of fashion, which does not consider African design as “fashion” until it is taken up and showcased in the Western fashion system. Similar cases are in full swing on the internet—a search for “fashion and cultural appropriation” yields almost 15 million hits in 0.64 seconds. The problem is instrumentalizing indigenous cultures and reducing them to mere exotic decoration and a raw material for the Western fashion industry. Fashion houses that appropriate other cultures have been seen as an extension of colonialism. If colonialism defined indigenous peoples as backward and regressive and civilized them by forcing people to convert to Christianity and to wear Western clothing (Hansen 2010, 155–159), now indigenous peoples are ignored, while their fabrics, clothing, and patterns have been accepted as suitable for Western designs.

What is the Problem with Cultural Appropriation? The term “appropriation” has become popular in the discourse of fashion. There is no problem in borrowing or being inspired by different cultural elements per se—as Stuart Hall (1990: 222–237) has emphasized, there is no pure, authentic, or original culture. All cultures are in constant contact with other cultures, affected and shaped by each other. No culture resides in a vacuum. Besides, in many ways fashion is built on the idea of appropriation: it could even be argued that fashions change because of appropriation. Appropriating has also become ever easier with digitalization: it has made borrowing, copying, and modifying images and designs very easy. Furthermore, like Susan Kaiser (2021: 48–49) notes, global capitalism, and fashion as part of it are built on the idea that people, materials, and images flow from one context to the next easily. Still, the discourse of cultural appropriation in contemporary fashion is not just about being inspired by or drawing from another culture. In fact, the many cases labeled as cultural appropriation, like those mentioned above, suggest that the whole discourse of cultural appropriation is a complex political and ethical one (Green and Kaiser 2017). In the context of fashion, appropriation is often approached from a narrower legal perspective which

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understands appropriation as “the taking of intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission” (Pozzo 2020: X) meaning that cultural appropriation refers to issues of copyright and financial gain (Härkönen 2021). Conceptually, though, appropriation connects to such concepts as “influence”, “originality” and “intertextuality” (Nelson and Shiff 1996) which indicates that artifacts such as fashion designs always build on previous designs, draw inspiration from many cultures, and are in a dialogical relationship with other cultures and cultural artifacts. The word “appropriation” thus defines a process in which culture works: nothing is created in a vacuum and appropriation happens when “the members of one culture are taking something that originates in another cultural context” (Young and Brunk 2009). Appropriation is a concept that defines a process, it is active doing. This is highlighted in the word’s etymology, which comes from Latin, from the verb appropriare, meaning “to make one’s own” (Nelson and Shiff 1996: 117). Thus, apart from meaning an act of borrowing from or being influenced by something, appropriation underlines motivation: something is made one’s own and when doing so, power over that something is gained (Shapiro 1992). Because of its association with power, appropriation has a negative connotation: it has been linked to cultural processes in which a dominant culture appropriates from a less powerful one. For example, Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1979) is seen as a classical description of cultural appropriation in its emphasis of the West appropriating representations of “the Orient” to reassert its power over it (Nelson and Shiff 1996). As art historian Robert Nelson (1996: 127) writes, “in every cultural appropriation there are those who act and those who are acted upon, and for those whose memories and cultural identities are manipulated by aesthetic, [. . .] or political appropriations, the consequences can be disquieting or painful.” This defines appropriation as a concept that describes a relationship between cultures that are essentially unequal: the dominant culture that appropriates and a subservient culture that the dominant culture uses as its resource to boost its own position. When appropriation is not defined as a cultural process, it becomes a definition of an act of taking—appropriating—elements from another culture without giving credit to that culture, and in the worst case, taking at the expense of the said culture (Ashley and Plesch 2002). Problems arise when a designer or a fashion brand, not from or not familiar with the culture they draw from, uses meanings and elements without acknowledging their source of inspiration and presents the designs as their own invention. Often, in contemporary discourse, cultural appropriation is thus plainly about stealing and abusing e.g., indigenous or sacred designs or the designs of less privileged groups without giving credit or even understanding the meanings or the origin of the design. As a negative concept, cultural appropriation thus addresses the question of power balance (Ashley and Plesch 2002).

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Cultural Appropriation as Continued Colonialism in Fashion Being a term of different degrees of borrowing (from inspiration to theft), appropriation is also a question of design practice as practitioners may be considered authorities who decide what degree of borrowing is ethical to claim as original design (Ayres 2017: 152). We suggest looking at appropriation from a critical socio-cultural perspective and explain cultural appropriation by colonial legacy in the definition of fashion and aesthetics and the colonial legacy in the organization of the fashion industry. We understand the contemporary discourse on cultural appropriation as an attempt to unearth and change the colonial past of fashion. In this sense the discourse is a consequence of colonialism’s longstanding power structures in fashion. Understanding appropriation from this perspective, the question of appropriation shifts focus to a discourse of fashion as Eurocentric by definition. The anthropologist Sandra Niessen (2020) critically analyzes early definitions of fashion—for instance, that by Georg Simmel, whose essay on fashion is considered a classic in fashion studies. “An elite intellectual of comfortable, private means,” Simmel lived during the Enlightenment period when the notion of human progress was associated with Europe and its success. Simmel contrasted fashion in Europe, pointing out that European fashion styles change quickly, with other fashion systems that did not follow a similar logic of change. As Niessen (2020: 862) writes, “the other clothing expressions in the world, from tribal to peasant, are hampered by tradition and exemplify stasis and therefore constitute non-fashion.” Dutch anthropologist M. Angela Jansen (2020) continues this line of thought and emphasizes that “traditional dress” is often defined this way—as traditional—by “colonial powers”—artists, historians, ethnographers, who look at the cultures they study through a colonizing lens and vis-à-vis “modern” European cultures, that are considered dynamic, cosmopolitan, and contemporary. Jansen refers to another classical definition of fashion by British psychologist John Carl Flügel who stated that “modish costume predominates in the western world and is even ‘one of the most characteristic features of modern European civilization,’ while outside the sphere of western influence, dress changes more slowly, is more closely connected with racial and local circumstances, or with social or occupational standing and therefore qualifies as fixed costume” (Jansen 2020: 820). This Eurocentric definition of fashion and the colonial structure of the fashion industry contribute to the discourse of cultural appropriation and define it as an act visualizing an imbalance of power. A design or a pattern, which has originated in the Global South, for example, is not considered fashionable by the very definition of fashion. For similar reasons, African fashion designers, who use Basotho blankets as inspiration or as material base for their design, have not

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received recognition as being fashionable before Louis Vuitton showcased the designs inspired by the said blankets (Figure 7.1). The Western fashion industry had to intervene before the blankets were seen as fashion. What is interesting, though, and which also says something about the internalization of the colonial discourse is that the meanings of the blankets were redefined from “traditional” to “fashionable” even in South Africa only after the Louis Vuitton collection of the blankets sold out within a week in Johannesburg and Cape Town (Niekerk 2017). Thus, what people of the Global South may design, and wear, is not considered to be fashionable until they are “discovered”, presented, and sold by a fashion brand from the Global North. Cultural appropriation is not necessarily a case of “Africa versus West”, it is a case of “traditional versus modern.”

Colonial Hierarchies There are colonial hierarchies and structures of power within Europe, between Europe and Asia, between global fashion brands and indigenous communities, across the world. For instance, Romanian designers accused Dior of plagiarizing traditional designs from the northwestern region of Bihor (Figure 7.2). This design

Figure 7.2 Traditional vests from the Bihor northwestern region of Romania. Romanian dressmakers rode a wave of demand for their folk designs after Dior showcased their craft in its 2017 Pre-Fall collection. Photo by: Daniel Mihailescu / AFP via Getty Images.

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was shown as a part of Dior’s Pre-Fall 2017 collection and no credit was given to the original makers (Romanian designers 2018), leading to accusations of cultural appropriation. Gucci was similarly accused of appropriating pieces that resembled bindis, hijabs, niqabs and Sikh turbans in 2018 (Jackson 2019) and the brand Anthropologie was called out in 2021 by indigenous-owned sustainable brand Orenda Tribe for their “Monika” blouse in which not only the cut and design were suspiciously similar to the Indigenous design, but also the handwoven Oaxacan rainbow stripe fabric of the original item was turned into a “soulless, mass produced digital print” (diet_prada 2021).1 In all these cases the fashion house treated the different cultures like they treat anonymous designers working in them: no credit is given to the designers, and no credit is given to ethnic cultures. The long-standing logic of the houses has been that all designs belong to it and not any individual designer. In contemporary culture, this tactic seems to have been challenged, resulting in the debates on cultural appropriation. The next step may be that both representatives of cultures and anonymous designers who contribute to the brands, will start claiming the rights to their designs. Fashion has an aesthetic dimension. The construction and perception of aesthetics is defined by this broader colonial matrix of power in a similar logic. Decolonial thinkers Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez (2013) claim that aesthetics is a Eurocentric concept, and its meanings can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Aesthetics was defined as the theory of sensibility, sentiment, sensations, and, briefly, emotions, in contrast with the obsession for the rational. At the same time, the philosopher Immanuel Kant made aesthetics into a key concept regulating the sense of the beautiful and the sublime. Since then, aesthetics has been colonized in two ways: “In time, it established the standards in and from the European present, and, in space, it was projected to the entire population of the planet” (Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). Visual elements travel across cultural contexts and become “fashionable” once they are attached to global fashion brands. Stella McCartney was accused of cultural appropriation on social media for appropriating the visual appearance of African women’s dress and African wax prints known also as Ankara or Dutch wax prints, popular among Africans, particularly among West African women. The Ankara design and prints were recognized as “fashionable” only when they were used by the Western brand. On top of that, the brand modelled the borrowed designs predominantly on white models, while Black models were underrepresented in the show (Feldman 2017).

Resolving the Problem of Cultural Appropriation How to resolve the problem of cultural appropriation, if it is analyzed from the perspective of decoloniality? It is important to recognize the colonial wounds caused

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by the current organization of the fashion industry, to rethink the main categories of fashion, modernity and tradition, to rethink the knowledge regulating aesthetics of fashion, and to contribute to making visible decolonial subjectivities of local producers (cf. Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). This would mean putting the non-Eurocentric definition of fashion developed in recent fashion studies scholarship (Jansen 2020; Niessen 2020, Gaugele and Titton 2019) into practice. On a practical level, and in addition to a discussion of cases of cultural appropriation, the requirement is to include local designers and people in the global fashion industry in ways that are not colonial. It is not enough to just name the source of inspiration. It is important to closely engage and collaborate with people who are often culturally and economically marginalized in the current fashion system. Thabo Markhetha-Kwinana, a fashion designer from Lesotho, says exactly this: “It would have been better had Louis Vuitton collaborated with the Basotho people when developing its collections” (BBC 2017). This would have made the local designers, producers, and models visible. Gucci’s mistake, in turn, was that it presented the turban on white models, even though it could have hired Sikh models instead (Jackson 2019). A similar solution could have also worked for Stella McCartney who could have hired more Black models to showcase her designs. Cultural appropriation is not only a question of culture, but it is also a question of economics. Another way to acknowledge the colonial structure of fashion is to give part of the profits back to local communities. This is particularly important, because the price gap between items sold by global fashion houses compared to original items is wide. For instance, a Louis Vuitton men’s silk shirt from the collection called “Basotho Plaid” sporting Basotho-style prints was priced at more than $2,400 (When does cultural borrowing 2017). As another source states, the Louis Vuitton shirt was sold for 33,000 South African Rands which converts to approximately $2,000, while an original Basotho blanket retailed for no more than 1,000 South African rands which is approximately $65 (Louis Vuitton 2017). The copy of the Romanian embroidered vest by Dior, in turn, was sold at a price of $30,000 (Romania knocks out 2018) which is about 100 times more than the price of the original. As for giving back, the founder of the brand Orenda Tribe Amy Yeung asked Anthropologie to give the profits from their “Monika” blouse, which Yeung alleged was borrowed from her brand, to support their fundraising for Diné Skate Garden Project, a safe and inclusive skatepark project for the native indigenous community in Navajo Nation, the largest land area retained by an indigenous tribe in the United States (Di Sandro 2021). Anthropologie appears not to have publicly responded to the “borrowing” claim. However, the blouse has since been removed from its website (Ho 2021). Another way is just not to borrow designs if their use outside their initial context can be perceived as an offense to representatives of a given culture. This

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especially applies to items symbolizing religious beliefs, such as the Sikh turban appropriated by Gucci (Jackson 2019): here, fashion brands should be especially careful and sensitive. Overall, fashion brands should be more aware and care about the discourse related to the global colonial matrix of power as well as about the colonial legacy which affects the fashion industry. This is the only way to become culturally sensitive while also being inspired by the richness of world design heritage.

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Casual Racism: “Eating with Chopsticks” This case study analyses Dolce & Gabbana’s online marketing campaign, titled “DG Loves China” (2018). The campaign consisted of a series of promotional videos about the brand’s upcoming show in Shanghai, which were posted on its social media accounts in Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo. The videos were meant to pay tribute to the country and its consumers. However, the campaign failed, and Chinese social media users were appalled by the clips. The videos quickly went viral, and in the end, the brand was forced to cancel its runway show and deal with long-term economic consequences in the Chinese market. We explain the power of social media in controlling brands by consumers and possible short- and long-term consequences of consumer outrage.

#DGLovesChina On November 19, 2018, the Italian fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana posted a series of promotional videos on its social media accounts Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo, about the brand’s upcoming show in Shanghai, China. The posts were marked by hashtags #DGLovesChina and #DGTheGreatShow, indicating the brand’s enthusiastic intention to charm the Chinese fashion market and to export Italian culture to the Chinese. In the promotional videos, a young Asian model is depicted wearing a red sequin Dolce & Gabbana dress and heavy golden jewelry. She is sitting at a table in a scene reminiscent of a Chinese-Italian restaurant, eating pizza, spaghetti, and cannoli, depending on the version of the video, visually encapsulating Italian identity as love for food. However, the gist of the video is not the celebration of Chineseness or Italianness or a cultural encounter between the two but to show how a non-Italian, in this case a young Asian woman, struggles to understand Italian / European customs by not understanding how to eat pizza: instead of using her hands or cutlery, she tries to eat the food with Chinese chopsticks. With stereotypical Chinese folk music playing in the background, a male-narrator gives instructions in Chinese on how to eat the food correctly while mispronouncing the brand’s name. The brand claimed that the campaign was meant to pay tribute to China and its people. However, it failed. The supposedly playful take on cultural difference was not appreciated by the Chinese. On the contrary, Chinese social media users were astounded by the video. They saw it as a stereotypical, racist and a disrespectful representation of Asian women and argued that it portrayed them as the “Oriental stereotype.” The setting of the video—a red background with Chinese lanterns—and the music were also criticized for being stereotypical and outdated while the mispronunciation of the brand name was seen as mocking the Chinese (Chung and Holland 2018). With the debate, the video quickly went viral, and anger spread across platforms both in China and elsewhere. In the

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West, the video was called out by Diet Prada, the influential industry watchdog. The account spread the news about the scandal in China and commented on the video on their Instagram account (Diet Prada 2018).2 The controversy in and outside China centered on the critique of how a global brand with Western European roots portrays another culture in such a demeaning manner. The debate centered on cultural identity and especially on stereotypical notions of national identities and how they are hierarchically positioned against one another. The dominant culture, in this case Italy, as the embodiment of Dolce & Gabbana, was seen to be premised on its difference from the “Other,” the assumedly unsophisticated, uncultured, and childish China. This “clash of the nations”—Italy / West versus China / East—eventually led to the video being deleted less than 24 hours after its release (Hall and Suen 2018; Pan 2018). This did not help as a “boycott Dolce” campaign ensued on Weibo. The brand made things worse when an emotional, aggressive, and racist rant was posted on Stefano Gabbana’s personal Instagram account: If the Chinese feel offended by a girl who spells pizza or pasta with chopsticks means that those Chinese feel inferior and then it’s a problem not ours!!! The whole world knows that the Chinese eat with chopsticks and that the Westerners with a fork and knife!!! Is this racism?? (Rodriguez 2018, misspellings in the original post) In the end, the feud escalated to the national and global level. First China’s governmental body, the Cultural and Tourism Department, forced Dolce & Gabbana to cancel its runway show in Shanghai only a few hours before it was scheduled to take place (Zheng and Pan 2018), about which Diet Prada (2018) also posted.3 When the scandal was taken up by the Western media beyond Diet Prada, the brand lost all its celebrity ambassadors and e-tailer presence in China. The American reality-TV celebrity and socialite Kim Kardashian deleted an Instagram post of her wearing the brand (Flora 2019) and the brand was ostracized from red-carpet events both in China and in the West. In an attempt to save face, the brand announced that the designer’s account, as well as the official account of the brand, had been hacked. This did not help: the runway show remained canceled, and Dolce & Gabbana was forced out of China.

A Narrative of Continued Colonialism The case tells a story about European imperialism, how the tradition of colonialism still continues in fashion, and how this old “world order” has been challenged and no longer applies. It is also a potent example of the global power of social media:

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the debate spread globally with the help of Diet Prada. The case also exemplifies how a state, in this case China, can use fashion as means to create a unified identity of itself. The source of the scandal was the colonial representation of China, visible in the visual, auditive and textual rhetoric of the video. In it, Asia was seen as a feminine continent, embodied by the Chinese model. Furthermore, following the tradition of Western representations of the Far East, Asian people are also depicted as delicate, passive, and simple—hence the giggling woman who does not understand how to eat pizza. The audience and eventually the political leaders of the country reacted against this stuffy colonialist stereotype of China and Chineseness and the colonizing “white gaze” and “optical colonialism”; the tradition of the objectifying gaze which derives equally from the nineteenth-century racialist theories and the imagery of “primitive peoples” (McClintock 1995; Loomba 1998.). The concept of the stereotype is applicable here: it refers to a simplistic, eyecatching, and easy-to-understand representation that encapsulates a large amount of complex information and connotations (Dyer 1999). The stereotypical colonial thinking comes through from the video on many levels. It represents China as part of the Orient, i.e., the Far East, as a feminine continent, embodied by the model. She is shown stereotypically, as a delicate, childish, and stupid creature. The problem with stereotypes is that they create a hierarchy of values between “us” and “them”—in this case between Italy and China. A stereotype only tells one part of the story, from a single perspective—nevertheless, stereotypes are used as if they were able to tell the “whole truth” about the phenomenon in question which also means that they are often used in valuing phenomena, cultures, and people against one another. Stereotypes are thus always linked to distribution of power in society: the dominant party, in this case the Italian brand Dolce & Gabbana, reinforced its own identity by marginalizing and stereotyping others, in this case China and the Chinese. The video forces “Chineseness” into the mold of certain fetishized and generalized properties that are well-known from the racist stereotype. At the same time, the video manifests the colonialist “white gaze”: the Western brand’s (failed) attempt to control the Chinese. This kind of “othering” is characteristic not only of Dolce & Gabbana but to brands more generally (Holt 2002). By making use of Otherness in their brand communication, fashion brands suggest that they can also be a part of some of the symbolic meanings related to the other culture in question. They use stereotypes perhaps to show that contemporary fashion is a multicultural phenomenon of the global world. However, like the Dolce & Gabbana video and the scandal suggest, brands too often resort to recycling stuffy stereotypes that have been used many times over by Western popular culture and that have already been recognized as racist. The challenge for brands is to come up with representations that understand and respect cultural differences.

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The scandal was thus about respect and recognition. The debaters argued that the brand didn’t respect the market it aimed for and that it didn’t recognize its imperialist attitude encapsulated by the video. For a scandal to function, it needs an “us”—the brand and its followers—as well as “them” against which values are positioned. A successful scandal always needs an “enemy” which “we” can laugh at and ridicule. Who was the “we” here? And who were “they”? According to the debate, “we” were the white Italian / European culture and “they,” China and the Chinese. The video campaign didn’t work because the brand positioned their desired audience as the enemy. The creation of “we” would have required the brand to invite the Chinese to laugh at the outdated colonialist stereotypes by ridiculing the white European culture and its colonialist values, for example. The scandalized reactions and the brand’s response show that by juxtaposing the Western / Italian identity and culture with an Asian / Chinese one, Dolce & Gabbana conjured up the colonial history of fashion. The problem was that they didn’t question it but cast the white voyeuristic, exoticizing and infantilizing gaze (Said 1979) over the Chinese.

On the Logic of Othering The critique of the video explains the racism in which “the East” is still constructed in Western cultural texts and imagination. In his book Orientalism (1979) Edward Said analyzes the various discourses and institutions which produced and constituted “the Orient” as an object of knowledge. He calls this discourse “Orientalism” (1979: 207–208) and describes it as an “exclusively male province” in which “women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid . . .” According to this ideological representation the Orient is not only possessed but it is also “static, frozen, fixed eternally.” Although Said looked into the Middle East and to Islamic people, it can also be applied to discussion about China and the Chinese. Said’s book shows how the “European culture gained in strengths and identity by setting itself off against the Orient” (Said, 1979: 3). The power of Orientalism relies on othering. Said argues that there are several features which occur again and again in texts about colonized countries and people and how these are related to larger-scale belief systems. Colonial discourse does not merely refer to a body of texts, but to a set of practices, rules and beliefs which produced those texts in the first place and that organize the thinking underlying them (Mills, 2004: 95). The Orient was produced in relation to the West and how it differed from it. According to Said (1979), the colonized countries were described in ways which denigrated them and represented them as the “Other” to produce a positive, “civilized”, image of the West. This tradition of representation has had far-reaching effects. It has informed racist knowledge production about cultures and peoples. It has dehumanized the colonized people in cultural texts (both

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written and visual) and practices, and informed ways in which “race” is still discussed in contemporary culture. Orientalism “is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” (Said 1979: 2). At stake are relations of power, domination, and hegemony (Said 1979: 5) which position “the Occident” in a hierarchically superior position compared to “the Orient” (Said 1979: 7).

Ending Racism—Recognizing White Privilege Over forty years after Said’s book, things are still largely the same, as the scandal vividly shows. In his essay “What We (Still) Need to Learn: Stuart Hall and the Struggle Against Racism,” media studies scholar Gilbert B. Rodman (2020: 79) laments that “we really do know a lot about [. . .] racism [. . .], however, we still know absolutely nothing useful about how to blow it up.” The case study seems to underlie this sad fact: despite the end of colonialism and an increasing body of knowledge about decoloniality, racism and antiracist movements, the colonial and racist hierarchies still live strong. Racism doesn’t seem to disappear but always finds new ways of expression in places one would not expect. The case also seems to suggest what Stuart Hall (1994/2017) pointed out in one of his lectures: neither knowledge nor analysis are sufficient to defeat racism. Even though it has been common knowledge for over a century that what is called “race” is not a scientifically proven fact, it still continues to function as if it were. In one of his interviews on racism, Hall even stated the following, as if directly addressing the aggressive statement posted on Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account: A large body of work in cultural studies and critical theory generally thinks that if you unmask an essentialism, it’s finished. You’ve shown it’s contradictory. You’ve shown the binary doesn’t work. Well, what more are you going to do? Out there, the essentialism is roaring away just as it ever was. It doesn’t give a damn. It does not care a bit. It’s not that the act of deconstruction is wrong, but that the deconstruction has to come back. It has to affect the practice in the real world, the people and the relationships and the institutions and what they do in the real world. So, you’ve completed half the task (Hall 2013: 769, italics in original). In the case of this particular scandal, something came back: China’s response. It responded by throwing the brand out, which does not necessarily help in overcoming negative stereotypes. It may have increased them, on both sides. Still the brand could have been more sensitive if it had wanted to. The problem is that even if there is plenty of knowledge about how racism works in its myriad

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forms and shapes, it is not the same thing as knowing how to stop it from working. This does not mean that there is nothing to be done—on the contrary, it is important to know what racism is and how it works to even begin the work of stopping it. The philosopher’s stone is to find ways that will actually help in this endeavor. Gilbert Rodman (2020: 84–85) offers three points to this end: 1 We need to separate racism from bigotry. 2 We need to recognize that those who created and established racism are also responsible for ending it. 3 We need to recognize privilege i.e., understand how maintaining racism grants benefits to some people and thus also gives them an often unrecognized stake in keeping the system in place. In the first instance it is important to understand that if racism and bigotry are not clearly separated, it is impossible to end racism. Rodman also maintains that, for many, “racism” and “bigotry” are interchangeable synonyms. However, synonymizing “serves to erase awareness of structural/institutional forms of oppression (racism) by reducing the problem to personal/individual examples of prejudice (bigotry)” (Rodman 2020: 84). In the case of Dolce & Gabbana, this is how the Chinse read the text on Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account: not as just one individual’s bigoted ranting, but as a representation of the brand’s bigoted values and racist attitude against the Chinese. The second point is a more difficult one: those who have created the racist system of dividing people according to their skin color, or cultural heritage, for example, are long gone. The same applies to fashion: those who established the understanding of fashion as a Eurocentric phenomenon, only suitable for white peole, are also long gone. What is important to recognize now is that we—the fashion industry and its representatives, researchers included—are responsible for “cleaning up” the mess. This scandal indicates that the Chinese took this point seriously: when the brand refused to take responsibility and clean up the mess they created, they boycotted the brand to show that this was not how they wanted to be represented and addressed. The brand suffered the consequences of their actions by being forced out of the country and by losing face and credibility in the eyes of the Chinese. The third point connects to the previous one: it should not have been up to the Chinese to recognize the racist approach of the brand in the first place. It should have been the brand—it should have understood that these kinds of representations are simply not ok or funny. This means recognition of “white privilege” described by feminist and anti-racism activist Peggy McIntosh (1989) as “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports,

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codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” (McIntosh 1989). What McIntosh means is that racism mostly works in an unnoticed manner and is based on mainly invisible or unconscious practices. In the case of Dolce & Gabbana, this is blatantly clear: it was hardly the aim of the brand to publish a racist video, but it still managed to do so because they were oblivious of their white privilege. If the brand had tried to consider what their video might communicate to the Chinese, they might have had second thoughts about playing with the racist stereotypes. In fact, MacIntosh provides a checklist of 26 points that enables individuals and groups of people to check whether the fact that they are white may hinder them from seeing how racism works in everyday life situations. The point of the list is that white people are trained not to see themselves as oppressors but as individuals whose morals depend on their individual moral will. This applies to the scandal and how the brand replied to it: they wanted to celebrate China and the Chinese, ergo, the video could not have been racist. The response by the brand is almost like a textbook example described by McIntosh (1989: n. p.): “[W]hites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’ ”—them in this case being the Chinese and us the Italians / Europeans. The actions around the video thus ended up revealing that the inhumane treatment of People of Color globally is not only centuries old and systemic, but that it is also deeply ingrained in all parts of contemporary culture, including the fashion industry. It also revealed that despite efforts to end racism, progress is painfully slow if not non-existent. The video encapsulated ideologies that were described more than 100 years ago—despite the assumed “globalized” and “multicultural” fashion of the 2020s. It exposed how persistent racism and other forms of xenophobia still are in fashion. It also revealed how the brand didn’t recognize that Chinese culture is equally developed and appreciated as Italian culture. The scandal, in this case, is therefore one of cultural blindness and white privilege. Instead of critiquing Orientalism and the colonialist tradition, and racist attitudes ingrained in both, by making these into the mutual enemy of the brand and its desired customers, the brand ended up reinforcing the stuffy colonial and racist discourse.

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Blackface and Structural Racism in the Fashion Industry This case study focuses on fashion scandals that centered on the circulation of blackface imagery. It shows how scandals connected to racism have become a recurring theme in contemporary fashion. We analyze two cases featuring the Italian brands Prada and Gucci, and the consequences the scandals had for these brands. In 2018, the Italian brand Prada found itself embroiled in a blackface scandal, and in 2019 another Italian high-fashion brand Gucci was accused of the same. Neither brand acknowledged racism at first, which led to heated debate on online platforms, and in the mainstream media. In the end both brands were forced to acknowledge that their actions were insensitive and had caused unintentional distress. We discuss both scandals as examples of the continued use of racist imagery which draws from the history of racism, slavery, lynching and white colonialism. We also discuss them as examples of the deep-seated structural racism of the fashion industry: how it circulates racist imagery and excludes People of Color from important positions. The case studies show how ordinary people assumed the power to determine the meaning of fashion instead of the brands.

One Part Prada, One Part Gucci, One Part Racism On December 15, 2018, the Italian brand Prada found itself embroiled in a racism scandal. It was caused by its “Pradamalia” bric-a-brac project. In its press release, the brand defines the project as “a new family of mysterious tiny creatures that are one part biological, one part technological, all parts Prada. The seven new creatures [. . .] exhibit supernatural powers.”4 The description reads as harmless, playful, and childish—associations that also define the brand’s signature identity. A video accompanying the press release shows cartoon- or toy-like knick-knacks clearly aimed at the younger consumer. However, when the paraphernalia—key chains and small figurines—were launched, they quickly created a scandal and a social media boycott using the hashtag #BoycottPrada. It was started by the New York based civil rights attorney Chinyere Ezie who called out the brand in her Facebook-post. In it, Ezie described the figurines, especially a monkey trinket with big red lips as “racist and denigrating blackface imagery” (Ezie 2018; Murray 2018).5 She had seen the figurines in the Prada shop window and inside a boutique in SoHo New York and claimed that they exemplify the Western fashion’s lack of interest in People of Color as consumers. The post was soon taken up by the American TV-program The Daily Show (2018). It stated that if the brand had any People of Color in the management team, they would have been able to avoid the scandal, thus arguing that the

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incident witnessed a severe lack of knowledge about issues on race and ethnicity due to the employment structure of the company. In this case, then, the scandal was about ignorance and what effects it can have. The problem with the lack of People of Color or their limited “niche” prospects among marketing and management professionals in business is known (Foster Davis 2018). Unlike its peer Dolce & Gabbana, Prada admitted their mistake, pulled the figurines, and announced that they “never had the intention of offending anyone” and that they “abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery” (The Guardian, 2018). A year later, in March 2019, the company’s chairman finally professed that Prada headquarters didn’t have any Black employees and that they should have (Friedman 2020). Following in the wake of Prada’s “monkey keychain” scandal, another Italian high-fashion brand Gucci also came under fire on social media. On February 14, 2019 the brand was accused of utilizing the blackface in its $890 Balaclava turtleneck sweater. It could be pulled up to the level of eyes like a balaclava, and it included a hole for the mouth surrounded by a red oval shape, reminiscent of large red lips. A Twitter-user posted a picture of the garment accompanied by a sarcastic line, “Happy Black History month y’all” (@evilrashida 2019).6 The tweet quickly went viral and escalated into a heated social media debate. In their defense, Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, issued a letter to the company’s 18,000 employees, stating that the design was a “tribute to Leigh Bowery, an Australian performance artist, club promoter and fashion designer known for his flamboyant makeup and costumes” (Zargani 2019). The following day, despite some users defending the brand, the fashion house issued an apology: “Gucci deeply apologizes for the offense caused by the wool balaclava jumper [. . .]. We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected and at the forefront of every decision we make. We are fully committed to increasing diversity throughout our organization and turning this incident into a powerful learning moment for the Gucci team and beyond.” (@gucci 2019).7 The brand stated that they had withdrawn the sweater from all its brick-andmortar stores as well as from its online shops.

A Brief History of Blackface Both scandals bring to the fore the casual use of racist imagery. The figurine, like the sweater, were interpreted to draw from and to continue the history of racism, slavery, lynching and white colonialism, especially the history of the racist blackface imagery despite what the brands stated. Blackface was originally a painted mask that was used by white posers who “intentionally exhibit all the artifice of their performance, exaggerated gestures, blackface makeup” and which also worked to mock socially marginalized Black people and to suggest the superiority of the white over Black (Williams 2001). Although the history of the blackface within European colonialist tradition in art is well-known (McClintock

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1995), it historically started in the context of theatrical minstrels where the mask was used to replace Black performers. During the twentieth century the mask became a widely used racist stereotype in other media when minstrels lost their cultural relevance (Byrne 2016). Film, advertising and, as the scandals indicate, fashion, have worked to mainstream blackface as a tool of objectifying Black identity. The invention of photography popularized the racist blackface representations and thus made them part of the mainstream popular culture, creating “a link between the presupposed scientific construction and the artistic representation of the racialized [. . .] body” (Ponzanesi 2017: 171). New media and new contexts have granted this single racist image a much wider reach than theater. Alongside the blackface, Italian popular culture also circulated the Black Venus (Ponzanesi 2017). The key chain figurine was defined as blackface by the debaters on social media, but it clearly also draws from the quintessential emblem of the Black Venus in its lush round shape. The cases thus connect to these wider traditions of minstrels and European art which produced and reproduced blackface and the Black Venus. These also connect more directly to Italy: to the country’s own colonial past and to Black immigrants who had worked in domestic service in the country since the beginning of the twentieth century (Andall 2000; Purpura 2014). Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies Sandra Ponzanesi (2017) writes that Italian popular culture and fashion have a long tradition of constructing the colonized Black Other as different and subordinate from the Italian identity. The tradition of the racist blackface as well as Black Venus connect to Italian fascism under Mussolini. Racist representations were supported by Italy’s expansion into Africa, serving to project an image of a great Italy, echoing the mythic role of Ancient Rome. The fascist ideology utilized mass media which in turn created a new popular culture where racist representations were circulated and constructed as a dichotomy between the colonizer (Italy) and the colonized (Africa). The colonized Other was created as different and as subordinate to white Italianness through blackface and Black Venus imagery. They were also positioned at the center of Italian fascist propaganda: “In order to create a clear binarism between colonizer and colonized, Italy had to construct an image of itself in direct hegemonic opposition to that of the locals [in the colonies]” (Ponzanesi 2017: 172). During the heyday of Italian colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s, Italy produced and circulated photographs of the Black Venus, aimed at portraying “truthful and realistic” portrayals of native women (Hall and Sealy 2001: 39). These cases show how the tradition of racial othering continues at the highest level of Italian fashion, reproducing fixed and biased images of Blackness (as well as whiteness). Ponzanesi suggests that this is partly because, unlike in Britain and in France, where the post-colonial debate has aimed to reverse and respond to the hegemonic and stereotyped constructions of the colonizers, a similar

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discourse is still largely missing in Italy where there has been “a long period of general amnesia, both at historical and literary level” (Ponzaneri 2017: 179). This has inhibited a critical evaluation of racist imagery produced by Italian colonialism and the fascist propaganda machinery, and which still lives on in contemporary Italian visual culture. Italian fashion brands still represent the Black body in its immutable otherness in their advertising, for example, and keep it alive through keychains and even in clothing designs. The contemporary representations entrap Black bodies with the Orientalist gaze which is not that different from the fascist period. These sorry examples represent this dismal history that is yet to be profoundly discussed and analyzed in order to be left behind.

Addressing Systemic Racism of Fashion: Sensitivity Training The scandalized reactions might, in fact, be an attempt in this direction. They exposed, in both cases, an equation: “colonization = thingification” (Loomba 2014: 204). “Thingification” reduces the colonized to objects: the figurine and the blackface. The reactions stemmed from the historical use of certain representations but they also took a stand against the profound problem, that of systemic racism in fashion. Rather than addressing the historical context of the blackface imagery, both scandals conjured debate about the policies, practices, representations, and norms of fashion that still reinforce racial inequality, and privilege “whiteness” over “Color” (Lawrence et al. 2004). The scandals are not reducible to any single event; they are a result of historically accumulated white privilege that is reinforced by contemporary popular culture, in this case fashion. As a result of the Prada scandal, in summer 2020, The New York Times reported that the Council of Fashion Designers of America had drafted a statement to end systemic racism in the fashion industry (Tillet and Friedman 2020). According to the statement, the fashion system needs to end racial injustice by “placing black talent in all sectors of the fashion business to help achieve a racially balanced industry.”8 What is especially interesting is that neither the Black Venus figurines nor the blackface sweater were taken up by Italians. They were addressed by Americans: in the case of Prada by a New York-based lawyer and an American TV program, and in the case of Gucci by a San Francisco-based fashion writer and a New York-based fashion designer. The host of the TV-program echoed what fashion writer Tansy Hoskins (2014: 131) has noted: how the fashion industry routinely excludes non-white people from important positions and privileges white people. The range of racist practices extends from the lower salaried non-white models to their editorial portrayals drawing from racist imaginaries, and from non-white industry workers in sweatshops outside the West to the top jobs in the companies

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almost exclusively occupied by white people. These voices repeat what the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, as well one of the founders of postcolonial theory, Aimé Césaire (2001: 16) has ironized succinctly: Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honour; . . . a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro. . .; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Perhaps the biggest scandal with Prada was, in the end, that even a brand known for having been led by one of the very few women in the fashion world, Miuccia Prada, can still fall foul of systemic racism, because of not having dealt with its own colonial and fascist past. The same can be said of Gucci: despite the brand’s swift apology, the sweater was called out by the Black designer Dapper Dan, who is known for his collaborations with Gucci. In a statement Dapper Dan posted on Instagram he urged the brand to become more inclusive: “I am a Black man before I am a brand. Another fashion house has gotten it outrageously wrong. There is no excuse nor apology that can erase this kind of insult. The CEO of Gucci has agreed to come from Italy to Harlem to meet with me, along with members of the community and other industry leaders. There cannot be inclusivity without accountability. I will hold everyone accountable.” (dapperdanharlem 2019).9 The scandals make a point about Italy’s own unresolved colonial past and how the history of fascism has dominated fashion as well as politics. As the fashion scholar Eugenia Paulicelli (2004) has pointed out, the development of an Italian national identity in fashion was deliberately aimed at separating it from other European—especially French—identities as well as from non-European—especially African—ones. Similar tendencies are found elsewhere in Europe, especially from Nazi Germany where clothing also played a central role in constructing the “pure Aryan” identity (Guenther 2004). Although the Prada-figurine and the blackfacesweater are products of this history, the scandals around both objects linked them to the history of American slavery and racist imagery and not to the European or Italian fascist and racist past. This suggests that the discourse on race and racism is dominated by North American voices. This is also visible in the outcome of the scandal: in February 2019, The New York Times reported that the New York City Commission on Human Rights, a law enforcement agency of the municipal government, was going to oversee that all employees at Prada in New York and executives in Milan took “sensitivity training” including “racial equity training” (Friedman 2020). In the case of Gucci, the discourse was largely conducted between the brand and the Harlem designer. Actors involved were American even though more local knowledge and understanding of race and racism was clearly also needed in both cases. Contemporary consumers and fashion companies alike need to accumulate their cultural competence, understanding and knowledge of their own cultural heritage—and not just that of other cultures.

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“Mental Health is not Fashion” Our last case study opens into a new field of identity-related scandals: that of mental health and neurodiversity. The issue brings a new dimension to the fashion scandal and to the identity politics we have discussed in previous cases. We examine how and why mental health has been discussed in fashion through two scandals: one which, it was argued, made mental illness into a fashion statement (Gucci) and another which appeared to celebrate suicide (Burberry). On the one hand, the brands were accused of “glamorizing insanity,” while on the other hand, they were praised for serving as platforms to question conventional views on disability. The case study links mental health discussions to the rise of emotional capitalism and therapeutic narrative. It concludes with a discussion of the fashion industry’s new interest in neurodiversity, claiming that its visibility is a prerequisite for a broader social change.

Glamorizing Mental Disorders? Mental health became a hot topic on September 22, 2019 at Milan Fashion Week. One of the models, a non-binary artist and musician Ayesha Tan Jones, was walking the runway in a Gucci show. They had written “mental health is not fashion” on the palms of their hands (Marriott 2019). On Instagram, Jones stated the following: I choose to protest Gucci S/S 20 runway show as I believe [. . .] that the stigma around mental health must end [. . .]. Many people with mental health issues are stigmatized in the workplace and in daily life while many people still do not consider mental health issues as “real illnesses” as they may not be visible [. . .]. Presenting these struggles as props for selling clothes in today’s capitalist climate is vulgar [. . .]. ayeshatanjones 201910

At the time of writing, the post has been liked more than 20,000 times. The protest was related to Gucci’s runway show which played on the concept and style of the straitjacket, a garment shaped like a jacket with long sleeves that surpass the tips of the wearer’s fingers. The most typical use of this piece of clothing is to restrain people who may cause harm to themselves or others. It is used in, e.g., mental health institutions and Jones argued that the use of the garment in a fashion context minimizes problems associated with mental health. It did not help that the garment was meant as a statement in the show and was not going to be sold in shops (Marriott 2019). The show and the jacket were accompanied by a press release, written by the Professor of Urban Planning Giovanni Attili, a collaborator and partner of Gucci’s

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creative director Alessandro Michele. Attili explained that fashion is a tool of selfexpression—a tool “to let people walk through fields of possibilities, giving hints and evoking openness, cultivating promises of beauty, offering testimonies and prophecies, sacralizing every form of diversity, feeding indispensable selfdetermination skills” (Tashjian 2019). The straitjacket was, in his sense, a metaphor for a society that disciplines and restricts the creativity of those who want to express themselves through fashion. According to reports from the runway show, the press release was seen to allude to the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concepts of “biopolitics” and “microphysics of power” which operate in society and impose behavioral rules and norms which individuals internalize (Marriott 2019; @VVFriedman).11 The Foucaultian concepts were described as references to new forms of subjugation that do not act from the top down but more molecularly, through blocks and bans, impeding the free circulation of ideas or discourses, thus creating a disciplinary society. This power produces, the press release added, only certain legitimate ways of being and prescribes “thresholds of normalcy”, condemning those who don’t conform, to invisibility (Gucci cited @VVFriedman).12 The press release concluded that this calls for resistance in order to overcome the pressure of discipline and punishment. Ayesha Tan Jones’ protest encapsulated both discipline and resistance. In this sense, their performance was exceptionally well aligned with the concept of the show. While some attendees found the idea and concept of the runway show confusing and exploitative, others defended it. For instance, the actor and model Hari Nef stated that “[i]t was more a provocative reminder of submission than a glamorization of insanity” (Marriott 2019). Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman echoed this sentiment, writing that “the mere fact that the conversation exists is a good thing. It is part of fashion’s job to provoke; to challenge conventional wisdom and forms of identity; to give physical expression to emotional ideas” (Friedman 2019). The beauty entrepreneur and a founder of the ASAP initiative for mental awareness Sheikha Majda Al Sabah, also a victim of depression, continued: I think it’s brilliant to spread awareness through fashion, for mental health issues and suicide within the field are common. Models, designers, and professionals are often subject to long hours and high stress in a demanding work setting. To put the spotlight on this critical issue in a place where the world is watching is a smart move in gaining attention. I think we need every platform we can get to remove the stigma from mental health and highlight it and this will certainly start conversations. TROTTER 2019

The Gucci press officer declared, however, that the action by Jones was not planned (Marriott 2019). The straitjacket was more than just a shock tactic that

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created a stir around Gucci’s runway show. It reopened a discussion about mental health issues that have a long history within fashion.

Playing with Suicide Earlier the same year, in February 2019, a model for the British brand Burberry walked in a hoodie with strings in the shape of a noose placed around the neck at its London Fashion Week runway show. The fashion model Liz Kennedy, who was present at the show, wrote on her Instagram that “suicide is not fashion. It is not glamorous nor edgy [. . .].” She also added that since the show was dedicated to youth expressing their voice, she couldn’t stay silent and that the Burberry team had failed to see the many interpretations of the noose: lynching, increasing numbers of suicide among the young and her own experience of suicide in her family. She further declared that she had tried to talk to someone responsible for the show, but that her concerns had not been heard and that she had been told that the noose is only “fashion” and that “[n]obody cares what’s going on in your personal life so just keep it to yourself.” Triggered by such arrogance, Kennedy wrote the Instagram post which has gained more than 10,000 likes at the time of writing (liz.kennedy_ 2018).13 Pressured by publicity, Burberry eventually issued an apology and stated that the hoodie would be removed from its upcoming collection (Picheta 2019). The above-mentioned incidents differ from the other scandals in content and may trigger a question as to whether they constitute similar questions concerning identity as the others clearly do. We argue that they do: both cases tap into an ongoing discussion about mental wellbeing and the role fashion plays in it, as well as whether some conditions that are described as illnesses should actually be seen as differences in the brain and therefore not situated on the spectrum of being well and being ill, but on the spectrum of natural variation. This case study thus addresses a wider notion of mental wellbeing, a critique of prevailing medical and psychiatric definitions that describe what mental health is and what “being normal” means. But before we go there, we will discuss themes that connect directly to the above-mentioned scandals which unearth, in our mind, severe structural problems of the fashion industry.

Fashion and Mental Health Fashion is a social institute that reproduces problematic structural conditions. Fashion and mental health have long gone together. Debates over body image and modeling have a long history, and in contemporary culture it also connects to challenges of creative labor. We make this detour because we want to

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emphasize that a fashion scandal is not an individualized reaction, but a call for structural change. In an interview, Aysha Tan Jones reflected on their actions at Gucci’s S/S 20 runway show and said that they, as a model, are not given a space to have a voice when it comes to what designers put on their body and that they got fed up with that. Jones felt that even though they had worked as a model over a decade, they still felt “contradictory” in speaking out about issues they felt strongly about (Gucci model 2019). One of the problems was that models are both weapons and victims of the media machine, which creates a problematic body image and causes, in turn, mental health issues, but the models are not given any opportunity to speak about these issues.

Body Image and Eating Disorders The word “fashion” has been often rhymed with the word “obsession”, such as with a particular body ideal. The feminist writer Kim Chernin (1981) argued in her book Obsession: The Tyranny of Slenderness that fashion has been blamed for shaping and promoting unhealthy beauty ideals, for exercising “tyranny” over the body and for “obsession” that it poses on individuals, mostly, although not exclusively, women. In the 1980s and 1990s, prior to fashion becoming a postfeminist tactic of (White middle-class) women’s empowerment, feminist scholars such as Chernin, Susan Bordo or Sandra Bartky investigated cultural images of the body and their formative role in triggering mental illnesses of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa (Chernin 1981; Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993). They argued that both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa had developed to the scale of an epidemic as the consequence of the fashion industry’s increased emphasis on slenderness. They argued that the beauty ideal, which was considered extreme in the past, had, at the time, become the dominant norm: The current body of fashion is taut, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, and of a slimness bordering on emaciation; it is a silhouette that seems more appropriate to an adolescent boy or newly pubescent girl than to an adult woman. BARTKY 1990: 95

Images of the fashionable body—often filtered, smoothed, polished and rearranged—train the eye to see the body in a specific way, to distinguish between what is faulty and what is normal (Bordo 1993: xviii). According to the American philosopher and cultural critic Susan Bordo (1993: 201) these images fuel the consumer’s need to control and master their bodies in ways that may lead to severe eating disorders. Because the body is one of the few possible

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venues of control that are left in a post-modern “risk society” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991), one is prone to acquire a desperate fixation on it as an arena of control (Bordo 1993). Culture has trained people, especially women, through different media (film, television, magazines, advertisements, social media) to be uneasy about their bodies, constantly monitoring themselves for evidence of imperfections and faults and engaging in improvements, which are at the root of anxiety and depression. As a result of this training, the “docile body” which, through systematic observation and discipline, can be easily “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 1995: 129), emerges. The feminist theorist Sandra Bartky has used Foucault’s metaphors of the “docile body” and the “disciplinary society” in her analysis of women’s eating disorders. Foucault’s idea of the “disciplinary society” is based on the idea of Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panopticon, a model prison, in which the prisoners are always surveilled by onlooking guards. According to Bartky (1990: 95), fashion and its representations operate as a contemporary version of the panopticon. She likens fashion to a prison, in which women are subjected to exhaustive policing of their bodies, but not only through the society’s (male) gaze but through their own internalized gaze. In other words, Bartky suggests that in a patriarchy, women’s bodies especially become prisons where women suffer from eating disorders and mental illnesses because of the imagery (fashion) media circulates (Bartky 1990: 95–96). She also lists numerous ways in which women’s bodies are divided into small parts and controlled, including body size, poses, gestures, posture, movement, surface, general bodily comportment, the surface of the skin. She goes on to say: A woman’s skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth; ideally, it should betray no sign of wear, experience, age, or deep thought. Hair must be removed not only from the face but from large surfaces of the body as well, from legs and thighs, an operation accomplished by shaving, buffing with fine sandpaper, or foul-smelling depilatories. BARTKY 1990: 98

As we have discussed above, social media has broadened the monolithic beauty standard of women since the time of Bordo and Bartky’s writings in the 1990s. Nonetheless, it has also been recently noted that the culture industry, visual media in particular, is responsible for the fashion industry’s and fashion consumers’ continuous desire to adjust their decisions according to the ideal of slenderness (Volonte 2019: 252). Despite the fashion imagery that nowadays may also include other than thin white models, the slender body ideal is still the dominant one. The ideal is stagnant because it has been incorporated into habits, routines, objects, and the bodies themselves. It has become so ingrained in the cultural DNA that it is not easily changed or erased.

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A fashion scandal is a breaker of established routines that enables the ideal and the practice to change. One example, which reflects such a change, occurred with Victoria’s Secret, a high street underwear brand. In 2017, the brand’s fantastically popular show was watched by 1 billion people worldwide. Its three highest-profile models of the time—Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid—had more than 163 million Instagram followers combined, and the biggest names in the entertainment industry participated in the shows, including Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Ariana Grande as well as Sting and Lady Gaga. Now things have drastically changed. Media have been asking whether Victoria’s Secret sells a “dangerous fantasy” and whether its models send a “harmful message” to the audience (Stevens 2018). The images of the so-called “Angels,” i.e., those models who have been signed by the brand, have also been questioned. Being an “Angel” has meant exercise: training, toning, boxing, skipping, using the hashtag “#trainlikeanangel” but now it has become a symbol of “eating disorder porn” promoting thinner and thinner models (Stevens 2018). The models themselves have spoken about the pressure of being an “Angel”. In 2016, a former Victoria’s Secret model Erin Heatherton claimed that the fashion house pressured her to lose weight and that despite working out twice a day, she couldn’t fulfill the brand’s requirement for her body weight (Elan 2016). While New York, where Victoria’s Secret is based, has laws to protect underage fashion models, there is no legislation regulating a fashion model’s weight—and the brand seems not to have neither confirmed nor denied Heatherton’s claims. In 2018, the fashion model Bridget Malcolm, who modeled in the 2015 and 2016 shows, apologized for making public her “damaging eating habits” and exercise regime (Stevens 2018). Other models explained the details of extreme diets that the brand had expected them to follow to stay in shape. Again, the models can be said to be both contributors and victims of anorexia and bulimia. As a result of scandals, callouts and incidents of anorexia among fashion models, as well as acknowledging the destructive influence of the thin models on ordinary women and girls, many countries such as France, Italy, Spain, and Israel, have established a mandatory minimum body mass index (BMI) for professional fashion models to be legally employed. But Victoria’s Secret has not just been accused of spreading eating disorders. In 2018, the chief marketing officer Ed Razek, of the brand’s parent company, L Brands, became embroiled in the scandal after telling Vogue that he didn’t want transgender models in the show because it would ruin the “fantasy.” In the same interview, he also stated that he had no desire to portray a greater diversity of sizes and shapes (Stevens 2018; Phelps 2018). The scandal which obviously ensued after these statements signaled that Razek was dead wrong. The fantasy of a thin and over-sexualized body image was already gradually being replaced under the pressure of society’s request for diversity and inclusion.

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This scandal most likely also influenced Victoria’s Secret sales, which declined between 2015 and 2018 (Hanbury 2021). The show, which hosted skinny bombshells, had suddenly become an anachronism in a world that increasingly values the diversity of bodies. In other words, Victoria’s Secret’s brand image failed to align with the changing social attitudes. One of the reasons for the company’s failure to connect with the changing zeitgeist could be that nine out of eleven board directors of Victoria’s Secret were men (Hanbury 2021). During the same period the body-positive brands, such as Aerie and ThirdLove, began to take market share from Victoria’s Secret, while the brand’s market share dropped from 33 to 24 percent between 2016 and 2018. Another brand, Savage x Fenty underwear, launched by the pop-star Rihanna, was praised for offering women lingerie “for themselves” in seven “nude” shades and up to a 44DD cup size vis-à-vis the sexualized skimpy underwear that arguably subjects women to male desire (Cochrane 2018). In its 2020 collection, the brand aimed to acknowledge one more category: “plus-size men,” thus expanding the diversity of its body image, although not the body image of women (Representation matters 2020). Still, the Body Positivity Movement, models of different sizes in fashion shows, and the acceptance of diversity as a market ideology are changing the way bodies are viewed in fashion, at least in some parts of the world. This can be a positive change for those facing severe mental health issues, including eating disorders and disordered eating. However, as the Italian fashion scholar Paolo Volonte (2019) has pointed out, the fashion industry still has a long way to go.

Unbearable State of Creative Labor Another structural issue linked to mental health is how creative labor in the fashion industry is organized (Elzenbaumer and Giuliani 2014; McRobbie 2015; Gurova and Morozova 2018). Many creative workers, including fashion models and fashion designers, are often self-employed, underemployed, or unemployed. In the research on socio-economic conditions of designers (not only in fashion), conducted in Italy, the design scholar Bianca Elzenbaumer and the creative professional Caterina Giuliani discovered that 58 percent of creatives worked as freelancers without a contract (Elzenbaumer and Giuliani 2014: 455). More than a third of them worked at other jobs. These secondary jobs were in both design and non-design related sectors. To make ends meet, a third of the designers stated that they relied on the help of their families and friends. A further third of the designers are barely breaking even: they have debts, a bank loan, or have utilized personal savings to cover living expenses. Only 16 percent of designers described themselves as autonomous and “well-off,” able to save money. Angela McRobbie, the British sociologist, claims that the dark side of creative professions is its “precarization” (McRobbie 2015: 293). Furthermore, McRobbie

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has also written that in the UK and Western Europe creative professions are shaped by “passionate dispositif” that assumes a self-enterprising labor regime and ecstatic enthusiasm. Indeed, deep attachment to the job and the idea of self-actualization via work have all been continuous characteristics of creative labor (Gill and Pratt 2008: 15). This is also true for Russia (Gurova and Morozova 2018). As a result, designers who are emotionally devoted to their employment (Elzenbaumer and Giuliani 2014: 455), regard failure as personal, and live with the ongoing stress and anxiety of not having a stable job (McRobbie 2011: 13). The nature of entrepreneurial employment, in which many designers are involved, has created a persistent sense of insecurity, lengthy working hours, and a lack of consistent cash flow, all of which harm mental health (Gurova and Morozova 2018: 719). The media links competitiveness and the inhumane work pace of the industry to the suicide of creative workers. The most well-known designer is perhaps Alexander McQueen. He “climbed to the top of his profession” but committed suicide in 2010 “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”, as The Guardian wrote, suggesting that he suffered from anxiety and depression and that “the designer’s workload had a direct effect on his mental state” (Jones 2010). McQueen felt pressured by his work, and after shows he experienced a comedown, feeling isolated and low. Influential British fashion journalist and critic Suzy Menkes wrote in an article for The New Yok Times Style Magazine that the suicides and burnouts among fashion professionals have been propelled by several issues: lack of time, the need to keep up with a punishing schedule, media pressure, social media frenzy, the need to produce a growing number of collections, the need to deal with an oversaturated and unstable market, bad work-life balance, a precarious lifestyle, pressure from stakeholders and so forth (Menkes 2015). Moreover, the glamorous image of fashion as well as the stigma associated with mental illnesses and concerns over privacy explain why family members or colleagues are hesitant to discuss any mental-health-related issues of the deceased. Still, a discussion should be had: issues of mental health are linked to even the early stages of the profession, fashion education. In 2018, The Business of Fashion published an article “Antwerp Academy Student Suicide Calls Teaching Methods into Question” (Sherman 2018). This alarming article discusses the suicide of a student who “suffered from depression” related to his studies at the Academy (Sherman 2018). One of the reasons could be the toxic and damaging culture of the design school which imitates the industry’s practices where some students are treated like “stars,” while others are left feeling worthless. Students and graduates mentioned the culture of abuse and bullying in both fashion schools and the fashion industry. Some regarded fashion school as preparation for work in the “real world” in this sense, while others developed depression and drug abuse as the

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result of study pressure, workload, and unrealistic expectations. Still others developed an eating disorder, because they didn’t have time to eat, while some suffered from sleep deprivation. This is not unheard of in other prestigious fashion schools that should take the mental health of students seriously and prepare students to manage stress and wellbeing in the future profession (Sherman 2018).

Mental Health, Fashion, and Emotional Capitalism We might ask why fashion has become a platform for speaking about mental health and supporting neurodiversity. To answer this question, we turn to the ideas of the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz. She has argued that emotions became a conscious object of knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century. The making of capitalism went hand-in-hand with the making of an intensely specialized emotional culture, therefore she describes contemporary capitalism as emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007: 5). Unlike the traditional Marxist view which understands commodity and capitalism as a-emotionality, Illouz argues that the development of modern capitalism coincided with the development of a new emotional culture where “emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other” (Illouz 2007: 5). She also disagrees with Marx, who defined capitalism as a-emotional, and argues that what Marx actually refers to are negative emotions: anxiety, indifference, and guilt (Illouz 2007: 2). Far from being emotionless, emotions are deeply ingrained in the (visual) language of economics. As her point of reference, llouz uses the therapeutic emotional culture developed in the USA. It enabled a novel system of managing people and provided a link between individuals’ self-understanding in the private and the public sphere. Following Illouz, we argue that the scandal is part of “emotional capitalism”. Emotions transcend the private sphere and are no longer a private matter. On the contrary, they have begun to be widely discussed in the public sphere of which the fashion scandal is an excellent example. It is a platform which can be used to reach a wide audience. Using that platform, people can talk about how they feel, what bothers them, and openly share pleasure and especially pain publicly. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2007) has noted, our society is a “confessional society,” known for blurring the boundaries that separate public and private spheres and for publicly exposing the private. These confessional tendencies grew with the rise of reality television, talk shows and make-over shows, and were exacerbated by the rise of social media, which people use to “tell the ordinary,” to live their lives online and celebrate the mundane, making private affairs public (Beer and Burrows 2007; Beer 2008; Bauman 2007). Moreover, at the heart of emotional capitalism is a “therapeutic narrative” that has also become ubiquitous. “Therapeutic narrative makes emotions [. . .] into

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public objects to be exposed, discussed, and argued over” (Illouz 2007: 145). It is thus a narrative of self-awareness and acceptance. One feels “complete” when one’s story is told, and one’s experience is acknowledged and accepted by the audience. It is related to the experiences and interests of various groups. Therapeutic culture privileges suffering and trauma because “one’s suffering becomes constitutive of one’s identity” (Illouz 2007: 149). Moreover, the therapeutic narrative has become institutionalized and “deposited” in our mental frame in such a way that it is almost the main framework through which we can express ourselves and our sentiments. Therapeutic narratives have become a routine in the marketplace where individuals and groups express a desire for the recognition of their suffering and seeking for alleviation. In this sense, the fashion scandal can be considered as a therapeutic narrative. It, like a Freudian slip—as we called it earlier—may help in identifying a traumatic issue, connecting it to the past, analyzing its effects on the present and, as a result, taking a step toward liberating oneself from suffering. Public discussion of a scandalous issue is a form of a mental health therapy session for society. A scandal, like a therapeutic narrative, has a wide cultural resonance (cf. Illouz 2007). It addresses and explains contradictory feelings: whether one feels offended or not; whether there was discrimination or not; whether rights were violated or not. It is simultaneously regressive and progressive: regressive because it critically assesses the experience of the past and progressive because it requires changes in the future. Furthermore, the scandal is performative in nature. It narrates an experience which is recognized when it is voiced. The scandal is a symbolic structure that provides patterns of emotional behavior that could be multiplied and used by different groups on different occasions. In addition, it is a media product that can be commodified, discussed by a wide array of professionals and media outlets. Therapeutic narrative, as well as fashion scandal, may look like an individual issue, but it points to certain structural conditions and to a need for change.

Neurodiversity It is safe to say that fashion can put a lot of pressure on people and that suicides and mental disorders are a recurring theme within the industry. These have also been the topic of fashion scandals more than once during the 2010s. In addition to the unintentional scandals mentioned above, fashion has become an increasingly important platform to speak out about mental health issues intentionally, thus widening the understanding of what counts as normal in terms of mental wellbeing. This discourse relates to a growing literature around issues relating to mental differences, or to neurological diversity, or “neurodiversity”. The term suggests that identity-related issues not only concern differences in gender, sexuality, skin-color, body shape, etc. but also those in the brain. The term “neurodiversity” was coined by the sociologist Judy Singer in her thesis published in 1998 about the experiences

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Figure 7.3 Madeline Stuart walks the runway during Domingo Zapata At New York Fashion Week, February 8, 2020 in New York City. Photo by: Arun Nevader/Getty Images for Art Hearts Fashion.

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of women situated on the “Autistic Spectrum” (Singer 2016). The term was aimed at critiquing the discourse that defined some forms of being—such as Aspergers and Autism—as mental illnesses even though they were, according to Singer, “disabilities of social communication” (Singer 2016, 10). The discourse also highlighted that people with these disabilities have wrongly been institutionalized and portrayed as being ill because of what counts as “normal” in our society. In other words, Singer, and later, the Neurodiversity Movement which originated as an online community by some autists, wanted to redifine certain mental conditions such as autism as natural variation or as a different way of being, and not as deficit, illness, or impairment. According to the science writer Steve Silberman (2016), the Neurodiversity Movement is based on “cerebral pluralism” i.e., on an idea that each brain—like each body—is different. Silberman also connects the Neurodiversity Movement to the dis/ability rights movement which is dedicated to eradicating stigmas associated with neurological difference, and in clarifying that the history of medical and social misunderstandings and maltreatment of people with differing brains (i.e., putting them in mental hospitals) have caused a great deal of suffering and prevented neurodiverse people from thriving. This has led, in many cases, to drastic measures such as suicide, unnecessary hospitalization of some, and lack of access to help of others. In this sense, questions around mental health represent a new opening to the discourse of identity and subject formation in fashion. In 2016, a London-based fashion label ZDDZ, founded by the Russian-born designer Daria Selyanova, released a collection titled “Help yourself” triggered by Selyanova’s own depression and memories from when she was 17 and did not know who she was (Selyanova 2016). The main message of the collection was about self-acceptance and being comfortable in your own skin. Another example is the Lebanese social enterprise Sarah’s Bag from 2021. The colorful and eyecatching bags belong to a Retail Therapy collection and look like packs of antidepressants such as Prozac and Xanax. The designer has used humor to encourage people to talk about this taboo topic. This time around we see handbags that are “elevated handcrafted fashion pieces to empower both the women who make them and those who wear them” (@sarahsbag).14 One of the most notable examples concerning neurodiversity as a form of identity in the fashion industry is Madeline Stuart (Figure 7.3). She is an Australianborn model who lives with Down’s syndrome, a genetic condition caused by the presence of an extra chromosome. It is characterized by specific facial features as well as peculiarities of physical growth and intellectual capacity. Stuart has been walking in various fashion weeks and events throughout the world since 2015, including New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, Runway Dubai, and Mercedes Benz Fashion Week China, among others. She has been featured in many prominent fashion and lifestyle magazines, including Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan and others.15 Stuart has grown her visibility on social media to

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a degree that no other social media user with disability has achieved (Raun and Christensen-Strynø 2021: 4). At the time of writing, she has approximately 650,000 followers on Facebook and 350,000 followers on Instagram. Stuart mobilizes her power as a disability and Down’s syndrome advocate by leveraging her “subcultural micro-celebrity” status and “Instafame” on social media (Christensen-Stryn and Bruun Eriksen 2020: 39). Her body bears visible signs of disability, which are not intended to be concealed. Her body exists in the context of the fashion business, which is built on the idealization of able-bodied models with tall, slender, and symmetrical bodies and faces, and it defies established beauty standards (Christensen-Stryn and Bruun Eriksen 2020: 45). Stuart re-imagines the Down’s syndrome body as “something extra” that gives an opportunity to stand out rather than a sign of “sickness” or “lack” or a “devalued form of identity and embodiment”. The disability is transformed into a “different ability” and a distinct marketable brand (Christensen-Strynø and Bruun Eriksen 2020: 39). In the “affective economy”, such a brand can be a form of “emotional currency” when disability is associated with something positive rather than viewed as a source of fear, disgust, and pity. Stuart’s presence in the fashion industry stems from a desire for visibility and inclusion of people with different abilities. As media and culture scholar Tobias Raun and Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø (2021: 4) emphasize, visuality is “a main ingredient” in the identity battle, because it is intrinsically empowering when it comes to minorities. Visibility is an individualized form of identity politics that provides an opportunity for acceptance, understanding, pride and self-worth. Visibility can impact lives and is a prerequisite for social change.

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Notes 1

See https://bit.ly/2X3lF1w.

2

See https://bit.ly/3lLocb2.

3

This was not the first time Dolce & Gabbana caused controversy in China. In 2017, the fashion brand stirred public debate over photographs shot in Beijing. This time the scandal centered around questioning why Dolce & Gabbana only depicted “underdeveloped parts of Beijing and impoverished residents” and not its skyscrapers (Pan 2017).

4

See https://bit.ly/2Xahukt.

5

The “blackface” is a concept which refers to an act of coloring a white face black in order to represent a caricature of a Black person. Used originally in a theatrical context, the blackface is now highly problematic. Its persistence reveals “the desirability of the Black Other for white audiences” (Duan 2017: 87).

6

See https://bit.ly/2XeDXgq.

7

See https://bit.ly/3iw7w5b.

8

See https://bit.ly/2K8MYkx.

9

See https://bit.ly/3xC7nSa.

10 See https://bit.ly/3E5jRWD. 11 See https://bit.ly/3hjL3HC. 12 See https://bit.ly/3hjL3HC. 13 See https://bit.ly/2YJ0geW. 14 See https://bit.ly/3t4Tddy. 15 See https://bit.ly/3t4Tddy.

PART THREE

THE RESPONSE TO FASHION SCANDALS

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8 JUST DON’T DO IT! In this last section of the book, we will draw the scandals together by looking at how different stakeholders have reacted to them. We will look at the responses from three different angles: (a) responses of the corporate world; (b) responses of the academic world; and (c) responses of the political world. Corporate responsibility covers brand activism, sustainability, and the establishment of new roles of the diversity officers at brands. The academic responses cover criticism of the diversity discourse on one hand and calls for changes in the fashion curriculum on the other. Political responses remove the fashion scandal from the context of fashion and make it a more general political issue. On this level the fashion scandal may become a national issue or a target of new policies.

Corporate World Response, Part One: Corporate Social Responsibility The fashion scandal is a (social) media event that has a specific logic. Scandalous stories sell newspapers, amass clicks, and begin emotionally charged debates. Scandals have been an important means to create brand identity, brand communities, and market products. A fashion scandal always presupposes violation of norms which creates affective reactions, most often anger and disbelief. Scandals are the fuel of “emotional capitalism” (Illouz 2007) and they tend to shake communities. In the past, before networked media, a fashion scandal was a lucrative marketing ploy that gave brands much-needed visibility. However, in contemporary culture, fashion scandals have lost their luster and become something to be avoided. This is partly due to changing expectations around companies. They are increasingly being challenged to become more accountable to society in the face of global problems such as pandemics, gender inequality, racism, poverty, and the climate emergency. A range of terms describe these relationships between brands and society, among them corporate social responsibility (CSR) and brand activism, which can be seen as an evolved version of CSR. These terms contain 161

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the promise of companies to society and to their employees, consumers, and other stockholders to be socially and environmentally responsible, ethical, diverse, inclusive, and sustainable. However, one of the causes of the fashion scandal is that there is a discrepancy between what companies say and what they do. Fashion scandals are caused by actions of companies that consumers perceive as wrongdoings. Facing the scandal, companies are forced to acknowledge the problem and react to it. Sometimes brands also try to implement preventive measures through their CSR, for example. CSR is a part of corporate marketing, a type of marketing communication which is intended to rebuild and strengthen society’s trust in business. Its main goal is to establish “good reputation” for the organization and to articulate its “moral compass” (Hill and McDonagh 2021). British marketing scholars Tim Hill and Pierre McDonagh (2021: 50) provide the following descriptive definition of CSR in the context of corporate communication: At a time of human history when organizations are being quizzed and called to account on issues as varied as their impact on the environment, their treatment of people of differing genders, pay inequality and labour practices at home or in their supply chain the tired arsenal of traditional marketing communications needed to be reinforced or strengthened. As a consequence, it has expanded into sophisticated messaging that draws on the techniques of lobbying, PR event management, doing good through CSR storytelling and outreach programmes, and celebrating the positive related to the organization through social media platforms. In contemporary business, CSR is no longer considered sufficient, however. Consumers expect that brands not only act responsibly and respond to challenges, but that they are also proactively political and express their views on pressing socio-cultural issues (Sarkar and Kotler 2018). Many core activities of CSR or brand activism revolve around sustainability. Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have contemplated the role of marketing in relation to sustainable development as well as its positioning vis-àvis societal, social, and so-called “green marketing” (e.g., Belz and Peattie 2009). Thanks to the increasing awareness of environmental issues in fashion, sustainability has become the main priority for companies. However, more recently other dimensions of sustainability have become similarly vital, among them cultural sustainability, as well as a more diverse and equal take on fashion and it’s marketing, as our case studies also testify. The sustainability discourse in the fashion industry has already started to look beyond environmental concerns but it should do even more (Mora et al. 2014) so that scandals like those we have discussed in this book could be better avoided.

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The new discourse of sustainability should refer to both material and immaterial components of brands. The immaterial part of fashion includes, for instance, images that communicate brand identity, and if they are homogenizing and stereotypical, then the brand has not, in our opinion, reached its claims for sustainability. Changing the supply chain must be accompanied by creating (visual) fantasies that are consistent with the values of equality, fairness, justice, and humanity. This should not only be fantasy, but also part of the actual code of conduct of the brand: brands should implement practices that nurture fairness on all levels from manufacturing to marketing, branding, and human resources, among others. Moreover, it is not enough just to implement sustainable values, but an active social position in promoting them is expected. In what follows, we will show that the imaginary should be supplemented by organizational and business activities to ensure that the whole company’s chain is socially and culturally sustainable.

Corporate World Response, Part Two: Brands as Political Actors Businesses are not only expected to report to society as a part of their CSR strategy, but also to be agents of change which means that fashion companies are expected to do more than just stay neutral and participate in discussions. According to entrepreneur/activist Christian Sarkar and professor of marketing Philip Kotler, brands should take the side of society and become “activists”. By “brand activism” Sarkar and Kotler (2018: 574) mean “business efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, and/or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to promote or impede improvements in society.” The fashion scandal indicates that this is also the wish of the people who have reacted. Many brands refer to ethical or environmental values on their websites or communicate such values in their marketing materials and ad campaigns, but this does not make them activist brands. Brand activism assumes a political position on the matter and leadership on its promotion within the company, in the marketplace and in a broader society. Brand activism is a form of public statement rather than just being part of some reports or marketing slogans. Although activist brands may use cultural branding e.g., a disruptive way of talking about the chosen socio-cultural issues, or cause marketing, they implement the communicated values in business decisions. One example of an activist brand is the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia. As Patagonia’s marketing director says, the company is used as a platform to affect changes that are important for the company and for society. To do that, Patagonia engages in political debate. For

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instance, in 2020 they published a slogan “Vote the a**holes out” on the flip side of their short’s tags, referring to all politicians who deny climate change and don’t believe in science (Evans 2020). Moreover, Patagonia closes its stores, distribution customer service and headquarters in the US to give employees a paid day off on Election Day “to encourage customers, employees and citizens to head to the polls, champion local environmental issues and engage in civil democracy” (Don’t sit this 2020). “Brand activism” (Moorman 2020; Sarkar and Kotler 2018) can be seen as a novel marketing tactic which brands utilize to “stand out in a fragmented marketplace by taking public stances on social and political issues” (Vredenburg et al. 2020). At the same time, it is part of the change where society expects brands to position themselves on often polarized issues. For instance, fashion brands who have supported public health efforts such as wearing a face mask during the Covid-19 pandemic have faced boycotts from those who have deemed the issue controversial (Walansky 2020). Fashion brands have also created controversy when they have defended civil rights. Nike is an example of brand activism in their defense of civil rights. In its campaign from 2020, the brand revised its classical slogan “Just do it” into “Just don’t do it” (italics added). The campaign was published as a 60-second-long text-only video which the brand released on May 29, 2020 across its social media channels with the hashtag #UntilWeAllWin in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police (Nike 2020a, Nike 2020b).1 The video followed the brand’s re-creation as a political activist involved in the fight against racism and police violence in the United States—even though the brand has also been accused of using cheap labor to produce its sneakers. At the time of writing, the campaign has received over 16 million views on Instagram, and has also garnered more than 280,000 likes and 93,000 retweets on Twitter. Among these is one of the brand’s rivals, the German sportswear brand Adidas. It retweeted the video with two accompanying sentences, “Together is how we move forward. Together is how we make a change” (Adidas 2020a).2 The brand also posted a series of tweets, stating that it is “time to own up to our silence” while African Americans decry racial injustice and police brutality following several deaths of Black Americans (Adidas 2020b).3 Yet another example of brands becoming political activists is the American brand Brother Vellies which was founded in 2013 by designer Aurora James. The label specializes in luxury accessories that pay homage to African cultural history and aims at cultural appreciation instead of appropriation: it wishes to honor the people and places behind its pieces, to treat every part of the design and production process with respect and to care for its artisans, customers, and the planet. The brand became famous in 2021 when the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress with the slogan “Tax the Rich” printed on it, designed by James (see Figure 8.1). The white off-the-shoulder gown referenced the

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Figure 8.1 “Tax the rich”—politics is re-entering fashion. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (L) wearing a gown by the designer Aurora James (R) of Brother Vellies at the 2021 Met Gala Celebrating in America: A Lexicon of Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021 in New York. Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images.

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history of the American suffrage movement, bringing politics back into fashion (Fashion has never 2021).4 It also joined Ocasio-Cortez with other powerful American female politicians such as Hillary Clinton who have often used clothing to make a statement. Apart from these examples, the display of solidarity and taking a political stand is still rather unusual in fashion. They were noted, praised, and criticized by (social) media. In the case of Nike, it was thought that showing solidarity and calling for an end to racism is a positive sign (Campbell and Galina 2020) while in the case of Ocasio-Cortez it was argued that, while fashion is never apolitical, the

Figure 8.2 In September 2018, Nike included the American NFL football player Colin Kaepernick in its thirtieth anniversary ad campaign with its “Just Do It” slogan. Photo by: Robert Alexander/ Getty Images.

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message of the dress was unsuited for an occasion where the tickets cost $35,000 a piece (Karni 2021). Being political is nevertheless supported by studies made about the opinions of marketing experts. They suggest that 47 percent of the respondents think it is appropriate to “make changes to products and services in response to political issues” (Moorman 2020: 388). These findings are further supported by another survey according to which 73 percent of polled marketing leaders reported that their companies are likely to “change their products and/or services” to reduce the negative impact of their products and services to the environment (Moorman 2020: 388.). The pressure on companies to take a public stand on issues of societal importance is driven by citizens and businesses alike. Nike is known for its long-standing work as the proponent of civil rights in the US, and as the supporter of #BlackLivesMatter and acts such as Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem in the National Football League’s (NFL) match in 2016 (see Figure 8.2). The same goes with Adidas which is widely known for equipping politically engaged bands such as RunDMC with shell-toe sneakers, for helping to boost African American neighborhoods in the United States, and for stating that they will fill at least 30 percent of their job vacancies with Black and Hispanic employees (Brooks 2020). The designer Aurora James of Brother Vellies is also known as the creator of the campaign 15 % pledge which calls for retailers to commit 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses (Spellings 2021). If a brand has a political mission, like Patagonia, Nike, Adidas, or Brother Vellies, it must be linked to the fundamental reason why the brand exists, how it operates and how its products and services make changes in the world. The last view of a brand becoming an activist stress engaging and retaining employees. This tactic relates especially to millennials and to generation Z (those born between mid-1990s and early-2000s): they seek jobs that are meaningful, that enable them to participate in important social debates, and that allow them to be involved in activities important to the world (Moorman 2020; see also Homburg, Wieseke and Hoyer 2009). Whether or not a generational shift might do the trick, brands seem to have become more comfortable in supporting the chosen side and alienating some consumers to address polarizing sociopolitical issues from sexual harassment, racism, and mental health to LGBTQI+ and civil rights, gun control, or immigration (Vredenburg et al. 2020; Moorman 2020; Wettstein and Baur 2016). However, becoming an activist may also come with a cost. It may bring risks, not only the loss of customers, but also the risk of scrutiny and criticism from the brands taking a particular stand. This was the case with Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, and the Finnish brand Makia that we have discussed earlier in the book. Another risk is that people may not believe the brand even though they also expect them and their chief executive officers to take a stand on social issues (Vredenburg

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et al. 2020). This means that brands must align their purpose and values with their marketing messaging and practice what they preach. This refers to the Reebok case in Russia and the Makia and Kärkkäinen case in Finland. Otherwise, they risk being criticized for “virtue signaling” (Ritson 2020) and “woke washing” i.e., for “social awareness washing” (Vredenburg et al. 2018) which means that marketing communication about sociopolitical issues is not truly aligned with the brand’s purpose, values, or its corporate practice. Virtue signaling and woke washing are evoked when “brands [that] have unclear or indeterminate records of social cause practices” (Vredenburg et al. 2018, n. pag.) attempt “to market themselves as being concerned with issues of inequality and social injustice” (Sobande 2019b: 18), highlighting inconsistencies between messaging and conduct (Vredenburg et al. 2018).

Corporate World Response, Part Three: Diversity Officers As a response to scandals, companies have signaled to society that they take identity claims seriously by introducing organizational changes and a new role of diversity officers. An in-depth report on the global fashion industry, co-published by the Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company in 2020, states that while diversity previously appeared as tokenistic and random representations, some substantial improvements are on the way: “For many years, ‘diversity’ in fashion meant occasionally putting a non-white face on a magazine cover. Diversity was often more about visual impact than being representative. Today, these token nods to diversity are beginning to give way to real inclusivity as the industry moves from eye-catching imagery towards meaningful change in the workforce” (The year ahead 2020). Even though it is still early to evaluate how profound this shift will be, and this might be just a sign of capitalism subsuming its criticism, something has happened, and this is visible in the new roles within brands and outside: that of the diversity officer. Fashion scandals have played a significant role in the proliferation of this new role or profession. The contemporary fashion scandal is a regulatory mechanism, a means of consumer governance over brands, and consumers are increasingly demanding that brands be more diverse. The year 2019 was a watershed for hiring diversity officers within brands. The first to announce the position was H&M which, as a reaction to the fashion scandal concerning a racist image on their online store, appointed their “global leader for diversity and inclusiveness”, Annie Wu, in February (Blanchard 2018). In an interview Wu talks about her new role and explains her mission of bringing awareness of diversity and inclusivity to H&M. She states that even though the brand would have established this role

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anyway, the “terrible mistake” accelerated the process (Interview with Annie Wu 2018). Prada soon followed and established a “Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council” of their own, chaired by the director Ava DuVernay and the artist Theaster Gates (Prada announces 2019). Burberry did the same: having been caught up in the London Fashion Week fashion scandal for showcasing a hoodie with string ties resembling a noose around the neck, the brand announced a series of diversity and inclusivity initiatives with an aim of making “real change happen” in February (Devaney 2019). In July, Gucci and Chanel joined the club. Gucci, which had already initiated a magazine promoting gender equality Chime for Change in 2013, announced that it would hire its first-ever “head of diversity, equity, and inclusion” (Bramley 2019)5 after the brand was accused of racism for the blackface-resembling balaclava sweater we discussed in one of the case studies (Bobb 2019). The French haute-couture giant Chanel was also reported to aim to “amplify voices of color” by hiring its first global head of diversity and inclusion (Newbold 2019). This hire didn’t follow a scandal—instead, it was the result of the brand’s aim to be more transparent about its operations and values. In its “Report to Society 2018,” Chanel announced that while enhancing women’s rights and gender equality has always been part of the brand’s DNA, enhancing inclusion and diversity is “an ongoing opportunity” (Report to Society 2018: 60). Other professional organizations followed. The British Fashion Council established a Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee in 2020 and proclaimed a “commitment to champion diversity, equity and inclusion” (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion n. d.), while the Council of Fashion Designers of America released the report the “State of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Fashion” (2021). It calls for next measures to move towards a more representative and an equitable workplace in the American fashion industry (Maglieri 2021). At the end of 2019, Condé Nast stated that diversity is one of the “Vogue Values” to drive its vision into the next decade (Barry 2020). In 2020, the Finnish Marimekko also hired its first “People & Culture Development Lead” responsible for overseeing the implementation of the brand’s values in diversity, inclusion and equity. As we can see, the discourse of diversity proliferates in high fashion and its institutions, and it also affects change in the fashion houses’ managerial teams. Within high-street fashion, the word “diversity” seems also to be frequently used alone or in conjunction with the words “inclusion” and “equity.” The word “diversity” refers to individuals, their personal characteristics and their recognition, “inclusivity” to groups of people that it happens when diverse people are accepted regardless of their personal characteristics. “Equity” means, in turn, that diverse people with various characteristics are unique and contribute from their perspective to the common good. A glance at the LinkedIn profiles of employees of the global fashion companies reveals that many brands have employed diversity officers.

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The positions have only slightly different names: Chief Diversity Officer— Global Head of Inclusion & Diversity (H&M), Diversity & Inclusion Officer (Inditex), Chief Diversity Officer (Victoria’s Secret), Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion (Burberry), Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer (Prada), Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (Gucci) and Vice President, Diversity and Inclusion (Louis Vuitton), Head of Diversity and Inclusion—Global (Chanel). The diversity officers are usually responsible for a wide array of functions that may include building a strategic plan for diversity and inclusion and monitoring the process of achieving the strategic goals of the plan in a company.

Academic Response, Part One: The Danger of “Diversity Washing” This new social role of brands provokes mixed responses though, which is seen in the following positions of academics. Some of them, like the Italian scholar C. Anthony di Benedetto (2017: 3), argue that if a company takes CSR or brand activism seriously and makes it a part of their business model, it can truly make a difference. Others, like Tim Hill and Pierre McDonagh (2021), are more skeptical and critical about the efforts of brands. They argue that companies talk about social and environmental troubles because they need to explain how they contribute to, rather than detract from, the planet’s well-being. Corporations strive to promote themselves as solution providers, yet there is little public awareness on how hazardous their activities have been for society. For them, it is often all about “appearance” and that has little to do with actual deeds. Furthermore, Hill and McDonagh (2021: 55) alert academics that they just lose time debating definitions of sustainability as well as of CSR, while corporations are already shaping these very discourses the way they want. Their main goal is to create profit, but they must also position organizations as more caring when interacting with stakeholders in order to maintain trust, credibility and the ability to do business. Fashion scandals prove that the industry still has a long way to go to be the advocate of diversity. Even though fashion is a “fantastical world,” it still mostly caters for the heterosexual, thin, white, cisgender, and able bodies (Barry and Drak 2019: 685). Participants on the panel on fashion diversity at the symposium “Fashion and Physique” at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2018 reported that even though the new role of the diversity officer has been established, lack of diversity is still palatable, because the changes in the reality of the industry are still small, sporadic, and slow (Entwistle et al. 2019; The year ahead 2020). In terms of skin color, it is a positive sign that nearly twice as many models of Color walked the runway in Autumn 2019 shows compared to the

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Spring 2015 shows; however, most casting agents are still white (Entwistle et al. 2019) and there are only a few People of Color among creative directors of fashion brands (The year ahead 2020). Other differences are rarely even discussed which means that the discourse on “diversity” is itself often rather limited. Advertising campaigns are also said to have become more diverse, however, the number of models diverging from the thin white cisgendered norm are still exceptions and variations regarding size, curves, age, and abilities remain a novelty (Entwistle et al. 2019; Foster and Pettiniccio 2021). Overall, some segments of the fashion industry have become more diverse in terms of gender expression while others have not. Despite the slowness and limitedness of change, recent brand efforts have mostly been encountered with praise among professionals and society, however some have been more skeptical. Even though becoming diverse is a timeconsuming process, it has still been argued that brands should already know better—for example, not sell clothes with racist or otherwise insensitive imagery. The idea is that since fashion is such an important force in society in creating and disseminating the desirable human image, it should have changed its ideals a long time ago. Secondly, insiders and fashion commentators have also noted that fashion brands are “in the business of publicity,” and should know how to avoid negative attention (Burberry, Gucci and Prada 2019). Thirdly, more academic research is needed to evaluate whether diversity claims by brands are aligned with their other business activities and organizational practices, or whether the brands just implement “diversity washing,” i.e., creating a false impression or presenting misleading information about a company’s diversity and inclusion practices, instead of making actual changes (Henderson and Hamerling 2021).

Academic Response, Part Two: the “Glossification of Diversity” Scholars have also been critical of managerial diversity discourse. The feminist scholar Sara Ahmed and the scholar in management Elaine Swan (2006) critically examined the diversity discourse in organizations at the turn of the millennium. At that time, diversity was paired with “equality,” which is a result of diversity, ensuring that individuals who are different are welcomed at a company. Since then, the term “equality” has been substituted by “equity.” While equality refers to everyone having access to the same resources or opportunities and to the idea of people being treated in the same way, equity recognizes that everyone is unique and provides the exact resources and opportunities

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required to achieve an equal result. Even though diversity, inclusion, and equity are the current keywords for this new profession in fashion companies, diversity discourse is also constantly evolving and changing. Certain terms are disappearing for various reasons, including the perception that they are “dated,” or professionals and the society are “sick” and “tired” of their repeated use, while organizations do not adhere to their own principles, as Sara Ahmed (2012) argues in her book On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Furthermore, according to Ahmed and Swan (2006: 96), the politics of this shift toward diversity “has been much debated within critical race and postcolonial studies, feminist studies, as well as critical management studies.” The first problem is in the concept of “diversity” itself. It “individuates difference, conceals inequalities and neutralizes histories of antagonism and struggle” (Ahmed and Swan 2006: 96). Since “diversity” does not specify a particular category of identity, such as gender, ethnicity, or age, it can obscure how discrimination actually occurs. Some identities may, in fact, vanish as a result of the diversity discourse’s emphasis on inclusion of “everyone.” Furthermore, Ahmed and Swan (2006: 97) also note that the diversity discourse has become a component of organizations’ “performance culture,” or an example of “performativity of the system” and a way of doing “the right kind of things” (see also Ahmed 2012: 84). The danger in diversity discourse, when diversity is seen as a problem of individuals, is that it may prevent companies from looking more deeply at their organizational structure and making change on a structural level. As Judith Butler (1993) argues, performativity is supposed to produce an effect. Diversity discourse becomes a “non-performative” if it does not produce the effect that it names on a structural level (Ahmed 2012: 116–117). If this is the case, diversity discourse becomes a form of organizational pride and celebration, which can even prevent inequalities inside organizations from being recognized. If diversity is utilized as a mere marketing tool or a part of organizational branding without changes in business processes and in the organization’s structure, it is “diversity washing.” Yet another problem is that the language of the diversity discourse can be extremely pumped-up and neoliberal, underlining excellence and ableness: diversity officers in the fashion industry present themselves on LinkedIn as “award-winning,” “global leaders and influencers,” or belonging to top lists of “diversity stars.” They are also extraordinary personalities who fight to develop “pioneering” and “innovative” programs with “global” and “world class” vision and “brilliant” outcomes, while also “elevating inclusiveness” and “implementing best practices.” Such rhetoric is, of course, affected by LinkedIn’s nature as a social network meant to enforce self-promotion. Nevertheless, we can also see a “glossification of diversity” (Ahmed and Swan 2006: 98) in the rhetoric describing the reorganizational management of fashion. The glossy

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diversity discourse may thus come across as a façade, with tokenistic, objectifying, and voyeuristic inclusion of people who just look different while hiding an organization’s discriminatory practices and organizational structure (cf. Crenshaw 1992: 1261; Ahmed 2012). Examples of the “glossification of diversity” are not hard to find. For example, the diversity officer of H&M, Annie Wu, argues that employees of H&M believe in and are committed to diversity beyond communication. According to her, “[t]here is a genuine belief internally that H&M is a diverse, fair and equal company. And everyone is determined to make sure that this is also what the outside world sees and believes—not through communications but just because it’s true” (Interview 2021). Moreover, in its Code of Ethics, H&M also states that their work focuses on “champion(ing) inclusion and diversity” (Goals and ambition n. d.). However, a quick glance at the images of the CEO and the board of directors of H&M on their website shows that even though there is some gender variation in the scale of women–men on the board (8 women and 6 men), all fourteen members of the Board are white (Board of directors n.d.), making the organization white too. Other examples include luxury conglomerates. We tried asking about diversity efforts from companies managing luxury brands: Kering (Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and many others), LVMH and Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman). Unfortunately, none of the diversity officers in these conglomerates and their brands replied to our queries. This proves that the fashion industry is still a closed system, regardless of its promises to be more open and diverse. So, we looked at the leadership teams of these companies and drew some conclusions mostly based on images. Even though we understand that many differences are not visible, and that a deeper analysis is needed, we also think that visual representations do reveal something about claims to be diverse. Visibility is the key for diversity. The results of our visual investigation were not very encouraging. Tapestry’s leadership team is entirely white; there are only four women against eight men. However, Tapestry states on their website that they plan to increase ethnic diversity in their North American team by 2025 (Responsibility n. d.). The situation is even worse at LVMH. The executive committee is all white and only one out of the ten members is woman. Still, LVMH has the nerve to claim in their Code of Conduct that “diversity, a gender-balanced workforce and gender equality are embedded in the LVMH culture” (Code of conduct n. d., italics added). Things are not much better at Kering either. Its executive committee consists of eight men and four women, all white. Kering still states that they are committed to “greater diversity and gender parity in all roles and positions, and at all levels in the Group hierarchy, in particular by putting an end to the waste of female talent through the whole chain of command” (Code of ethics n. d.).

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As Sara Ahmed (2012) would say, the commitment to diversity in the above-mentioned companies is “non-performative” at this point regardless of what they may state: there is no gender diversity in any of the conglomerates’ governance. H&M is an exception: its board has more women than men. However, we don’t see many (if any) People of Color on any of these boards, let alone people with other differences. This is in contrast with what some of the diversity officers have stated. According to Annie Wu, for example, communication should be in line with the beliefs of both leaders and workers. We don’t see this being the case. Truly inclusive practices should comprise three dimensions: structural conditions of groups of people, politics toward them, and the cultural construction of those groups, with all three influencing the lived experiences of people as members of many groups simultaneously (Crenshaw 1992: 1241–1242). If this were the case, we would see how textual, visual, and actual representation align with the political will of the companies to be inclusive and diverse. If this is not the case, the freshly hired diversity officers are reduced to hyper-visible tokens in the otherwise homogeneous organizations. This may, in fact, lead to further ignorance of acute problems. When commenting on her experiences as a Person of Color in a race equality team, Ahmed (2012: 4, italics in the original) noted that: There are problems and pitfalls in becoming a diversity person as a person of color. There is a script that stops anyone reading the situation as a becoming. You already embody diversity by providing an institute of whiteness with color. What Ahmed means is that by ticking a box of diversity demands, change does not necessarily happen, even if it may seem that it does. First, change may not be structural but individualized. Secondly, it may also reduce the person to one aspect of their identity—in Ahmed’s case to the color of her skin. Alongside Ahmed, there are also others who are rather critical about diversity management understood as “practices, policies, and programs directed at facilitating the integration of multiple social identity groups (e.g., women, disadvantaged racial groups, and ethnic minorities, etc.) within organizations” (Prasad et al. 2010: 704). A high level of “organizational cynicism” that stems from superficial “trendy” and “fashionable” initiatives that lack actual relevance has been observed. Because of this, some have taken a rather unexpected approach to diversity, arguing that, in many cases, it reduces to a “trendy” and “fashionable” discourse (Prasad et al. 2011), in other words, to “diversity washing”. This is somewhat true in the fashion industry as well. When looking at the LinkedIn profiles of the diversity officers, we cannot know where they were born

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or what their cultural heritage might be, but we can see that many of them have been educated in the United States. What does it mean for the new profession and for the fashion industry at large, if one cultural and political context is overrepresented? This may have an impact on what is considered as diversity in the first place—which dimensions are prioritized, and which are overlooked. Furthermore, many diversity officers come from HR and/or marketing and not for example from critical studies of culture, gender or race, and almost all of them have started working in their current positions recently. If diversity discourse is trendy now, what will happen to the positions of diversity officers when it is no longer so?

Academic Response, Part Three: Reimagining the Fashion Curriculum To become a reality, the change needs to go through the whole fashion system, and it also must include the fashion design and fashion business education—in the same manner, we argue, as issues on ethics and sustainability in fashion production are currently penetrating the fashion curriculum. The pioneer in sustainable fashion, Timo Rissanen (2017) has argued that the most pressing “design problem” in terms of sustainability is the economic model on which the fashion industry is built. We argue that the most pressing design problem in terms of social and cultural sustainability, of which diversity is a part, is the Eurocentric paradigm of fashion. It is also a problem that cannot be solved in the same quantifiable or technical manner as many of the other problems pertaining to unsustainability. It is more about dismantling a whole set of ideas and ways of thinking, a worldview. It is about undoing the current values of the Eurocentric fashion system and using approaches that draw from the socalled “soft” sciences: the humanities, social sciences and critical studies of race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as from novel fields such as indigenous studies. This is a call addressed by a recent shift towards the decolonization of fashion education. This need is tangible amongst the students we teach. We both share the experience that young fashion design students, millennials, and generation Z’ers, do not want to contribute to the injustices of the fashion system, be it unsustainable clothing production, injustices related to identity, or the working conditions of textile workers. We also share the experience that many students feel anxious when they realize that their studies for their “dream job” are still preparing them for a future in an industry that is largely built on the “continuing legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization, which spread

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a white supremacist, binaristic, ableist and fatphobic worldview and associated practices” (Barry 2021: 124). Due to the contrast between the values that are upheld by the fashion industry, and the values of young aspiring designers, many experience feelings of disillusionment, stress, and even depression when they understand that they may not be able to work as designers. We share this concern as teachers and feel it necessary to do something about it. A positive thing is that fashion design is a problem-solving occupation. It is work that is equipped to tackle the many problems of unsustainable production—so, why would it not be equipped to solve problems that have to do with other ethical questions? In a manifesto on decolonial fashion education Ben Barry (2021) suggests many strategies to help fashion education to heal: educators and institutions should publicly recognize that the curriculum has been built on white privilege, on ignoring Black histories of fashion, on discarding ideas that pertain to race (sexuality and body size might also be included) and so on. Here he is at the root of the problem: the scandals that we write about are often the result of precisely these narratives. A good and doable starting point, we argue, is to reformulate existing study modules and develop new ones by drawing from research that addresses issues of difference and justice, also considering local context—as our book shows, the problems need to be contextualized. Instead of blowing up the whole curriculum and the whole fashion school system, as Barry demands, we suggest starting with changes that people are willing to make and which make sense for institutions. We do not think that being more sensitive to difference means abandoning the tradition on which the current fashion school curricula are built. However, we do think that they need to be diversified and critiqued, and that knowledge from other fields is vital to incorporate. We call for studies that are cross-disciplinary. We call for study modules that draw from feminist theories, gender studies, postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking, and bring those discussions to the context of fashion design. We also call for cross-institutional collaboration. One such attempt can be found from Aalto University in Finland: at the beginning of 2021, the university joined the National Gender Studies Network Hilma,6 which consists of ten Finnish universities and their gender studies units. The main purpose of the network is to organize online courses for degree students on undergraduate and postgraduate levels of the partner universities. It also offers modules of feminist pedagogics for faculty members to diversify and widen their competence as teachers, and to learn teaching methods that are more sensitive to difference. Through this network both faculty and students from different disciplinary backgrounds, including fashion design, can thus participate in courses where questions of gender, race, intersectionality, equality, and diversity are the core learning objectives. It also enables the inclusion of

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theoretical and practical studies to design that are necessary in today’s knowledge-driven fashion world. This kind of development is, we believe, a necessary step that needs to be taken to change fashion. The future designers not only compete using their design skills but also with competences in knowledge beyond design practice— knowledge that is provided by disciplines other than design. This will help in “embedding inclusion into fashion curricula” (Barry 2021), and it will also take some pressure off the fashion design study programs which traditionally have small numbers of staff. This is not to say that things should stay the same—on the contrary, it is to say that a wider body of people with different skills and disciplinary backgrounds should inform the education of future fashion designers. This would ultimately trickle down to the practices of fashion—and, we hope, help to avoid unintentional fashion scandals. We also advocate for lifelong education for fashion practitioners. Current industry professionals can benefit from broadening their expertise by learning about the most recent debates from academics. The activities of Beinopen, a dynamic Russian community of fashion experts, are one example.7 Beinopen is a digital platform which started to be noticed as a forum for the “new fashion industry” in 2015 and has since grown to become a powerful force by using educational projects; a diverse range of media content, such as articles, lectures, roundtables, and a film festival; a program for the regional brands acceleration, hackathon, and more. They speak about eco-problems, cultural appropriation, local codes in fashion, feminism, new masculinities, among others. The platform’s activities revolve around the concept of networking. They believe that to thrive, the actors of the fashion industry should interact, and Beinopen creates opportunities for that. This allows experts from various fields that could be useful for fashion such as educational institutions, to communicate with each other, share knowledge and get educated. Overall, the fashion industry could and should engage with academia much more as the knowledge on cultures, current debates in social and cultural theory, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking, is not only changing but will be key for understanding the worlds of today and tomorrow.

Political Response, Part One: Supply Chains and Human Rights The diversity discourse concerns mainly fashion brands’ offices and white-collar workers. But what about other parts of the fashion industry’s supply chain? How does it connect to, for example, the production of fashion which builds on a colonial structure? It is a well-known fact that the global production of fashion

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suffers from severe problems, including slave and child labor, low wages, abhorrent working conditions, and racial discrimination. Diversity officers should talk more about these problems, although this human rights discourse related to labor issues is far from the glossified discourse of diversity discussed above. It is also not enough. It is known that supply chains in fashion are global; so political leaders and activists from all over the world should address the human rights concerns that exist in different parts of supply chains. Fashion scandals point them in the right direction to force corporations to change their practices and rectify wrongdoings. One such scandal, which served as a wake-up call to confront problems related to labor rights and forced governments to act was the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh in 2013, a building that housed five garment factories who made clothes for Prada, Gucci, Versace, Benetton, and other brands. At least 1,132 people were killed and more than 1,500 were injured (The Rana Plaza 2013). The scandalous tragedy indicates the coloniality of global brands’ production: how they not only exploit natural resources but also garment workers, primarily women and young girls. The Rana Plaza catastrophe is not one of its kind— the problem has existed for a long time in fashion production and has been documented in many reports of the International Labour Organization (ILO). The Rana Plaza tragedy ignited a discussion of immense significance about the fashion business and human rights, modern slavery, a necessity for corporate social responsibility and transparency in all parts of the supply chain, not just in representations or in offices of fashion companies. Governments and politicians, advocacy groups and non-governmental organizations, academics, regular consumers as well as the actors of the fashion industry took part in it. Since then, in 2015 the UK introduced and in 2018 Australia executed The Modern Slavery Act aimed at combating modern slavery and human trafficking (The Modern Slavery n. d.; Modern Slavery Act 2018). The developments also continued in 2021 in the US when California passed the Garment Worker Protection Act which means just and fair pay for garment workers in California. This Act is a game changer for the industry in the country and a step towards making fashion business more accountable (Preuss 2021). Since supply chains in the fashion industry are global, problems exist in many parts of the world, including the use of cheap slave labor. In the Moscow region of Russia in 2012, for example, fourteen Vietnamese migrant workers were burnt alive and four more were injured because of a fire in an illegal garment factory due to deplorable living and working conditions (Bogdanov 2012). In 2021, a fire at another illegal garment factory in same region injured twenty-seven people (Dvadtsat’ sem’ rabotnikov 2021).

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As these as well as many other instances show, the fashion industry’s colonial structure is systemic, and is replicated by large corporations and anonymous moneymakers in areas across the world which anthropologist and fashion scholar Sandra Niessen (2019) has described as “sacrifice zones” of fashion. The concept refers to resource-rich areas where fashion companies exploit human labor, natural resources and design ideas for profit or use them as sites to dump waste (Niessen 2019: 864–865). So, what should companies do?

Political Response, Part Two: Advocacy Groups Benchmarking Business When investigated, luxury fashion brands turned out to be among the worst when it comes to exploitation and forced labor in their supply chains. One of the instruments of making them accountable is benchmarking current corporate practices. One such initiative is by the advocacy group KnowTheChain which rates companies according to their efforts to address forced labor in their supply chains. As the website of the advocacy group states, The KnowTheChain methodology assesses companies’ efforts to address forced labor risks in their supply chains. It is based on the UN [United Nation] Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and covers policy commitments, due diligence, and remedy. The methodology uses the ILO [International Labour Organization] core labor standards (which cover the human rights that the ILO has declared to be fundamental rights at work: freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, and the elimination of forced labor, child labor, and discrimination) as a baseline standard”. Subset of indicators 2019: 1

This rating compares fashion companies with the goal of identifying leaders and those that need to improve their practices. Prada, for instance, received a five out of 100 rating, whereas Tapestry received 16 out of 100. Kering received 41 and Hugo Boss 49. On average, the fashion industry’s thirty-seven largest global companies fail to even hit the 50 percent mark, which means that the room for improvement is vast (Apparel and footwear 2021). This also means that the leading fashion brands fail to safeguard workers in their supply chains from forced labor and other forms of discrimination. While fashion companies claim to be committed to corporate social responsibility and have codes of conduct and ethical principles, these policies do not seem to prevent the use of forced labor and other related problems.

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There are some other solutions to measure corporate responsibility. In environmentally sustainable fashion, different types of certificates, and eco- and sustainability labels such as Nordic Swan, EU Eco-Flower or the German Blue Angel label serve as certification of sustainable production when the valued attribute is not directly observable (Daugbjerg et al. 2014) and different types of applications have also been developed to evaluate brands’ sustainability (on the discussion of various apps, see e.g., Turunen and Halme 2021). Following this development, similar strategies could also be developed for social and cultural sustainability. Social issues of equality, equity, justice, diversity, and inclusiveness could become part of the wider sustainability reporting systems which already monitor how ethical fashion brands fair in terms of labor and environmental management. They could be included in environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings to drive investors, and could also become part of Euromonitor International’s Ethical Label passport database which has been created in response to the growing movement towards sustainability, social responsibility, and transparency around labels (Hudson 2016). There are some current initiatives that have developed tools to make the fashion industries more just. One such initiative is the Global Slavery Index which “provides a country by country ranking of the number of people in modern slavery, as well as an analysis of the actions governments are taking to respond, and the factors that make people vulnerable” (The Global Slavery Index, n.d.).8 Another is The Fashion Transparency Index which pushes the world’s biggest fashion brands to be more transparent about their social and environmental efforts (Fashion Revolution 2021). 9

Conclusion: A Call for Cultural and Social Sustainability While the fashion industry is well on its way to becoming more environmentally sustainable, and there are many research initiatives, study programs, and public discussion around sustainable fashion (e.g., Fletcher and Tham 2015), the same does not (yet) apply to the cultural and social sustainability of fashion even though it is often mentioned as one of the pillars of sustainability. This is partly because the methods of measuring cultural and social sustainability, or justness of fashion, are not clear cut: they require consideration of social and cultural values. For fashion to be understood as a space of diversity and inclusion, social and cultural criteria on both material and immaterial values of fashion are needed. However, these dimensions are not easy to define or measure in a globalized world like the case studies indicate. A long history of using natural resources has been important in the development of fashion into the modern industry it is today. The

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historical evolution of fashion business by using natural resources initially focused on economic growth, and the historical fashion scandal as a savvy marketing ploy was part of this development. The contemporary fashion scandal is not merely a media event or a marketing tool. It actually suggests the opposite: a scandal is part of the development through which fashion is called to consider the other dimensions of sustainability as well. In this sense the fashion scandal can be a point of growth for fashion and society by enhancing a dialogical engagement between brands and consumers. The scandal mobilizes different actors in the industry and beyond—common people, governments, and advocacy groups—to join their efforts in tackling global issues. The scandals have also enabled—or forced—brands to become more open and transparent about their processes and conduct. Scandals offer brands an opportunity to change for the better. The dialogue between all actors, as problematic as it can be, can become a moving force for social and cultural change. By participating in this dialogue, fashion brands position themselves as contributors to the current socio-cultural discussion on identity politics, diversity, and intersectionality. The changing nature of scandalized reactions and their negative effects on brands from decreasing sales and brand value may prove that brands are expected to be socially and culturally sensitive and responsible actors—even active makers of identity politics. We want to emphasize that diversity must concern all parts of the supply chain—from designing, resourcing materials and production to visual representations and marketing materials—commercials and websites, and organizational processes. Although some problems have been acknowledged, such as the position of diversity officers introduced by fashion brands, one key problem persists. Even though fashion brands say that they value diversity, they do not always commit to it. We have aimed to show throughout the book that brands must learn to navigate their activities around groups with opposite interests and deliver what they promise. The introduction of the diversity officer who can help to direct the brand in the murky waters of the contemporary cultural landscape seems like a step in the right direction. However, it is vital that they should not become token figures. In this book we have shown that the fashion industry is built on Eurocentric values and grounded in the history of colonization. It bears the scars of many structural ills that plague our society, such as racism, sexism, ableism, to name just a few. We have described how the fashion industry, as well fashion education, has started to recognize these problems and the need for a paradigmatic shift. This, along with the debate in the academic community and in broader society— sparked by fashion scandals—is beginning to bear fruit. We are already starting to see more young designers building their brands on nondiscriminatory or critical ideas. Time will tell whether fashion will undergo this paradigmatic shift. We remain hopeful.

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Notes 1

See https://bit.ly/2VAM2vw; https://bit.ly/3fOVzWz.

2

See https://bit.ly/2XeUAbR.

3

See https://bit.ly/3n068dI.

4

See https://bit.ly/2XY5H9e.

5

See https://chime.gucci.com.

6

See https://bit.ly/2V3gT3o.

7

See https://beinopen.ru/.

8

See https://bit.ly/3CKobtg.

9

See https://bit.ly/3EKwpmN.

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9 THE COUNTER NARRATIVE We want to end the book on a positive note and acknowledge that many designers and up-and-coming small-scale fashion brands are conscious of the systemic problems that the case studies reveal. They work to make fashion a more just and inclusive place. We were inspired by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton’s (2019) idea of a post-colonial counter-archive of fashion and decided to create a counter-narrative of the fashion scandal. Gaugele and Titton draw from the work of the African American writer and historian, civil rights activist, and the visual theorist of race and racism, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois introduces the concept of “double consciousness” as a seminal part of Black identity formation. The concept refers to how Black people are, in their identity formation, aware of their belonging to a Black culture and simultaneous inferior position within white culture. To challenge this, Du Bois systematically strove to annul racist images, changing the white gaze on Black people, and resisting the scientific legitimization of white supremacy. He also curated exhibitions that opened up new ways of seeing Black people—among them the exhibition American Negro shown at the American Section at the Paris World Fair in 1900 where he showed the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation (see Figure 9.1). In our case creating a counter-narrative of fashion meant searching and curating a selection of projects, designs, and images from young lesser-known designers and brands. They also deal with sensitive and potentially scandalizing issues, but aim to educate their audience. The designers want to change the power dynamics of fashion production and, eventually, to change how fashion can be perceived and understood; they also provide a node to the set of values and questions which inform the work of many contemporary designers. This curated selection offers one possible counter narrative, a double consciousness of sorts, by presenting how designers can tackle themes and issues of sensitive nature in a non-harming way. The chosen examples follow the themes of the scandalizing examples. We decided to stress the visual over the textual in this section partly because we wanted to give space for the images when the first parts of the book are so text heavy. But we also wanted to give the chosen examples a chance to tell their own story and to show that it is possible to handle sensitive and scandalous issues fairly and delicately. 185

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Figure 9.1 A map of Georgia, by African-American writer and historian W. E. B. Du Bois, showing the number of acres owned by African-Americans in each county in the period 1890–1900. Chart prepared by Du Bois for the Negro Exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

The examples also suggest that the discussion on diversity and inclusion of fashion has clearly grown bigger during the past years. It is a discourse designers and brands want to be part of through their work. They represent the new wave of fashion—one that will hopefully lead to a new space where diversity can flourish. The selected designers offer a path to move fashion forward by creating

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alternative narratives and values. While the contemporary scandal largely builds on negation, these examples offer a more positive interpretation. The “counter narrative” is thus our attempt to make space to deal with difficult and challenging issues. Our message is also that scandals channel the feelings of those who feel oppressed. They offer a chance for these voices to unite, thus opening up space to create counter narratives. In this sense the counter narrative functions as community building and as resistance to, for example, the coloniality of modernity which has split us into “atomic, homogeneous, separable categories” (Lugones 2010: 742) of gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, or nationality and which define our position in different hierarchies. Our counter narrative includes designers and brands who address different aspects of colonization. Beyond the selected creators we maintain that the counter narrative is a common voice of a coalition of fashion resistance. It is resistance which is not based on anger or frustration, like those in a fashion scandal, but a coalition which is based on empathy. In creating the visual counter narrative, we also drew from Hazel Clark (2019). She has developed a “sustainable + fashion discourse” that she calls “women’s wisdom.” To create the discourse, Clark explored designers and brands in which women have a significant role and whose practices respect “feminine strategies and values” by drawing from the “long-established existence of beliefs and methods common to women that can also pre-date and transcend capitalism, modernity, and Eurocentricity, and which are not formed on the basis of patriarchy” (Clark 2019: 310). Clark draws from multiple sources: everyday values, history, sensory studies, micro-phenomenology, and fashion design practices that indicate the potential for a systemic change in fashion. We also draw from feminist interventions such as the idea of “oppositional gaze” defined by bell hooks (1992, 307–319). hooks defines this as a gaze that politicizes the premises of seeing and challenges and unpacks the norms and power relations of that cultural gaze which positions certain bodies as objects. Similarly, our counter narrative aims to politicize the premises of using certain cultures and bodies as the source of inspiration and thus aims to challenge those relations of power that define what fashion is and how it should be understood. Furthermore, we have also developed the idea of the counter narrative by drawing from the discourse of the scandal: from those issues that have been identified as the root problem now, in this time, and have tried to find alternative ways to address similar issues in a non-violent and respectful way. Our examples draw from various traditions and cultures: from feminist practices, Black and queer histories, ethnic and indigenous crafting and clothing traditions, transgender fashion, and non-binary representations. The designers and brands have another kind of a story to tell—that which goes from opening up and explaining, even educating. We deliberately selected designers who come from various cultural backgrounds and geographical locations, from our own

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respective cultures and their near regions. Some examples may be shocking since they do challenge the status quo of fashion. But we feel that they shock in a way that aims to correct and explain, opening up—not to ridicule, mock, and hurt. These stories are not about shock for shock’s sake but about challenging norms that prevent fashion from becoming truly inclusive. We think that these—and other—examples are desperately needed so that a shift in the white Eurocentric fashion status quo can truly happen. The counter narrative is also a call to participation: we hope that you, our dear readers, will start creating your own counter narratives. We also hope that you will let us know about them so that we can collect your narratives and put them up on a digital platform and make the counter-narrative accessible to everyone. This will, in the long run, hopefully contribute to the change in fashion that is still largely the domain of the rich, white, thin, cis-gendered, able-bodied, and upper-class, and mostly populated by whites in the design, leadership and decision-making roles. A critical mass is needed to make a shift towards producing other ways of designing, marketing, communicating, selecting, and doing business, as well as changing the almost invisible position of white Europeanness as the natural condition of fashion. A shift of this magnitude will allow us to see that it is not just the scandals that reveal that, for most of the time, the discussion around fashion centers on a very narrow worldview. This blindness has not only produced the contemporary fashion scandal. It has also created, in the form of the counter narrative, a new opening to replace hurt in a positive manner. It has enabled other realities and truths to surface. The counter narrative indicates that there are examples out there that show another way of doing and thinking fashion. These are the norm breakers and the game changers. Those who lead the way.

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Heidi Karjalainen, Finland Heidi Karjalainen is a Finnish designer who has graduated from Aalto University and who was selected as Young Designer of the year in 2017. An important part of her approach to clothing design is to see designing as serving the needs of people and human communities and not just as self-expression. Karjalainen’s concept of clothing is an encounter between ecological ideas and feminist design. She uses the Zero Waste method in designing the structure, or pattern, of the garment so that the entire width of the fabric is utilized. This method minimizes the number of offcuts. Feminism is another cornerstone of Karjalainen’s design philosophy, meaning that she combines her personal political values with her design principles. Karjalainen sets out to challenge the vanity embedded in women’s fashion as well as the tradition of pleasing, long controlled by the male gaze in fashion design. Karjalainen wishes to refrain from accentuating the parts of the female body most stereotypically symbolic of sexual appeal, such as breasts and hips. Instead, she uses her voice quietly and thoughtfully, by revealing the back, selecting materials that are sustainable and by choosing colors that take a stand on stereotypical notions of femininity. Karjalainen wishes to challenge the normative understanding of femininity in a non-offensive manner. As a designer, I don’t feel like I’m trend driven. I don’t design clothes “for the sake of fashion,” because I perceive it as too abstract and generic. Fashion appears to me as a state of interaction that makes it possible to achieve an encounter with both oneself and the rest of the world. In addition to the future of more sustainable fashion, I hope that the fashion industry will be looked at in more depth; the “superficial” image attached to it would be broken and its multifaceted meaning and power would be understood. I think the most important task of fashion is to follow, interpret and create a spirit of the times. Through the tradition of dress, clothing is an important part of everyone’s identity and its expression. – Heidi Karjalainen, personal communication, 31 March 2021

Figure 9.2 The designer Heidi Karjalainen states: “In fashion, politicization is not seen if it is not shouted and if it is shouted then it is perceived as a provocation, a ‘selling point’ or a way to seek column space. This is an unfortunate continuum of fashion stuck on the idea of attention-seeking.” Photo by: Diana Luganski. Courtesy of the designer. 190

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Ervin Latimer, Finland Ervin Latimer is a self-identified Brown Finnish-American fashion designer, writer and queer artist, an Aalto University graduate, and a Young Designer of the Year 2020. At the beginning of 2022 he launched his own brand Latimmier at the Pitti Uomo men’s fashion week in Milan (Tebay 2022).1 Key themes in Ervin Latimer’s work include challenging norms of whiteness, gender, and sexual orientation, through which he expands ideas of what fashion can be and the kind of bodies it is made for. Latimer’s pieces are inspired by DIY drag queen culture of gay men, drag balls of the 1980s and 1990s New York as well as the history of cross-dressing. Drag culture typically parodies stereotypical gender roles using clothes, makeup, and gestures. Another inherent feature is the drag artist’s freedom to decide the interpretation of gender created with the clothes. The history of cross-dressing is apparent in the way in which the pieces feature stereotypical elements of men’s and women’s clothing: pinstripe suits alongside floral patterns and dresses. Latimer likes to challenge conventional ideas of the types of clothes suitable for men, women, and other genders. The collection also comments on body standards, as the clothes are fastened with strings and adjust to the shape of the person wearing them. As a designer I am first and foremost a storyteller—the meaning behind a piece of clothing is equally important to me as the actual design. As a designer my ultimate goal is to push the discussion of the multitudes of masculinities in the context of fashion. All this is referenced from the framework of queerness and Brownness. – Ervin Latimer, personal communication, September 30, 2021

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Jahnkoy, USA JAHNKOY (a.k.a. Marusya Vadimovna Kazakova) is a multidisciplinary artist and fashion designer, a graduate from the Parsons School of Design, New York. Jahnkov was born in Siberia, Russia, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. JAHNKOY’s practice is rooted in Craftivism, and they aim to restore artisanal craftsmanship and revive the global cultural heritage in contemporary culture. JAHNKOY aims to redefine and rebuild creative expression in adorning oneself and to restore ancient skills and techniques of garment creation. For its debut collection with Puma, JAHNKOY brought its signature aesthetic to streetwear silhouettes, reimagining them with artisanal detailing and vibrant patterns. Inspired by traditional Russian ornaments and folk references, the PUMA x JAHNKOY collection (2020) reflects the brand’s artistic vision and celebrates cultural heritage, craftsmanship and sustainability. In this spirit, the collection’s footwear is made using responsibly sourced and recycled materials to reduce waste. Organic cotton is used for the apparel.

Figure 9.3 Ervin Latimer’s designs celebrate POC queerness and investigate the influence of modern LGBTQI+ culture on fashion. This collection won the Young Designer of the year 2020 award and investigates hybrid clothing that allows the user to wear the pieces in several ways. Photo by: Hayley Lê. Courtesy of the designer. 194

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Figure 9.4 Jahnkoy debuted with a collaboration with the sportswear brand “ME$$ENJAH: Workin-Progress.” This included an installation and a performance event at Bergdorf Goodman men’s department store, as well as a crafting workshop to revive old clothes-making techniques. Photo by: Oluwaseye Olusa. Courtesy of the designer. 196

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Claudia Lepik, Estonia Claudia Lepik is an Estonian jewelry designer, a graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jewelry is one of the oldest and most visible ways of constructing, experiencing, and understanding gender, status, and social relations. The Estonian artist Claudia Lepik challenges these preconceived ideas and creates gender neutral jewels that can be used by anyone. Claudia Lepik uses jewelry to investigate culture. Her designs depicted here draw from Seto culture, an indigenous ethnic and linguistic minority in south-eastern Estonia and north-western Russia. Setos boast their own unique lifestyle including their own language and clothing customs such as flamboyant jewelry. Lepik combines elements from Seto culture with contemporary aesthetics and uses her work to mediate knowledge about it. Jewelry has always been a tool of expression for me. Limitless material and size choices. After this particular collection, I have learned where I want to situate myself in the jewelry and fashion world—how I can approach certain topics without creating any harm to people and how to make jewelry gender neutral without preconceived ideas. It is always important to think through what you are planning to create and if there is a chance that this has been already done historically or in the current space of time. – Claudia Lepik, personal communication, September 20, 2021

Figure 9.5 Claudia Lepik’s gender neutral jewelry draws from Estonia’s indigenous Seto culture. Photo by: Claudia Lepik. Courtesy of the designer.

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Muslin Brothers, Belgium Established in 2011 in Tel Aviv, and located in Brussels, Belgium, Muslin Brothers by Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi is named after muslin fabric that is widely used to make veils, men’s shirts, and clothes prototypes prior to production. The studio acts as both a fashion brand and research studio to speculate about the way personal and social systems are shaped through clothes. The duo’s work exists in the fertile ground between design and art, as a poetic investigation into the experiential biography of non-designers’ clothing, collecting statements from makers, wearers, and protocols. Using technologies of clothes-wearing and clothes production lines, systems of commerce and fashion documentation, their work overlaps between wearables, spatial art, performance, image-making, and the exchange of information. The collection / installation I’m Feeling Lucky is an investigation of generic pieces of clothing through time and society, such as uniforms which are not designed by any individual. The work consists of eighty unique and numbered variations of the American M65 military field coat. The installation was exhibited in a former post office transformed into an abstract desert, lit by gradient yellow fluorescent lights, and covered with sand during Jerusalem Design week in 2017. Through direct and non-direct attributes, Muslin Brothers investigate the evolution of classical uniforms such as the military coat from its original use in the Vietnam war, to its use by the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1970s, and how it later emerged as a subcultural uniform, and became an iconic garment in popular culture and war films, as well as a collectible item.

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Figure 9.6 The installation I’m Feeling Lucky by the Muslin Brothers investigates generic clothing and how its meanings change over time. The work was displayed in the Fashion Pavilion at Jerusalem Design week in 2017. Photo by: Elad Sarig. Courtesy of Muslin Brothers.

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Kristian David, Sweden Kristian David’s work, To Construct a Bridge (2020), is prompted by the designer’s multicultural background as a Swedish-born Assyrian with Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi roots. David, a graduate of the Swedish School of Textiles, uses his hybrid collection as a vessel to communicate cultural complexities, fusing inspiration from Pierre Cardin’s Pagoda shoulders with the keffiyeh, the checkered scarf and quintessential symbol of the Palestinian fight, power suiting and long-sleeved ankle-length thobes, which are traditionally worn in the Middle East and in the Arab countries. Uniting the western category of power dressing with dress practices of the Middle East, David’s collection acts as a catalyst to connect disconnected worlds. When it comes to dress, Orientalist notions of clothing traditions of the Middle East proliferate. The complex history of the Middle East and its conflicts have played their part in developing a cultural disconnection between the East and the West. Through my designs I explore the recontextualization of original and cultural elements, in this collection from the Levant and Arabian Peninsula through men’s suits, thobes and accompanying traditional attire. I aim to challenge the Western world’s dominant influence on fashion, where it becomes crucial to assert cultural aspects linked to facts and aesthetic value. My designs are a convergence between expressions that are culturally polarizing, which can reinvent the narrative of Western dress and symbols that are both ubiquitous and preserved in the transcultural region. – Kristian David, 2020

Note 1

See https://bit.ly/3rJ0PBu.

Figure 9.7 The white keffiyeh suit from the collection To Construct a Bridge. The collection is an investigation of Western and Eastern clothing traditions. Photo by: Kacper Kasprzyk. Courtesy of Kristian David. 203

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. Aalto University, 176–7 Act Up, 32 Adidas, 63, 164, 167 Adorno, Theodor, 110 advertising, 37, 38, 39, 170–1 controversial, 2–3 as political forum, 29 and social norms, 43 aesthetics, 130 affective economy, 157 affective fashion, 54 Africa, maternity clothes for 12-year-old girls scandal, 100–8 agency, 12 Ahmed, Sara, 171–2, 174 All Points North, 101–2, 105 Alt-right anger, useful, 58 anorexia nervosa, 148 Anthropologie, 131 apologies, 2, 65, 91–2, 141, 144, 147 appearance, and identity, 117 Attili, Giovanni, 145–6 audience, 62 audience perception, 114, 115, 120 authenticity, 63 authorship, 124 Baartmann, Sarah, 104 Balenciaga, 1, 11 Barry, Ben, 176 Bartky, Sandra, 148, 149 Basotho blankets, 124, 125–6, 125, 128–9, 131 Bauman, Zygmunt, 32, 153 Beck, Ulrich, 34 228

Beinopen, 177 #BeMoreHuman scandal, 82–9, 168 benchmarking, 179–80 Benetton, 29, 38, 39, 55 Bennett, Lance W., 35, 102 Bentham, Jeremy, 149 Berlant, Lauren, 45 bigotry, 138 biopolitics, 146 Black feminism, 58 Black Venus, the, 142, 143 blackface, 140–4 #BlackLivesMatter, 56, 68, 167 Blackness, 142 bloggers, 25–6 body image, 148–51, 192 Body Positivity Movement, 151 body-positive brands, 151 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 96 border thinking, 9 Bordo, Susan, 148, 149 Bouvier, Gwen, 57 boyd, dana, 23 Braidotti, Rosi, 10 brand activism, 161, 163–4, 165, 166–8, 166, 170 brand avoidance, 62–3 brand communication, 21, 27, 28, 37 brand identity, 30, 38, 42, 53, 162–3 brand image, 3 branding strategy, 28 brands and branding, 27–36 cultural approach, 27–30 emotional branding, 53, 53–5 and identity politics, 27, 30, 31, 32–6

INDEX

media literacy, 29–30 as political actors, 163–4, 165, 166–8, 166 power, 28 reactions, 64–5, 68–9 as sites of (ideological) struggle, 42 British Fashion Council, Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee, 169 Brother Vellies, 164, 165, 166, 167 Bryanboy, 25, 91 bulimia nervosa, 148 Burberry, 169 suicide scandal, 145–6, 147 Burr, Vivian, 12, 13 business goals, 75 Business of Fashion, 59, 62, 116–7, 152, 168 Butler, Judith, 5, 12, 13, 33, 48, 80, 81, 172 Calvin Klein, 30, 31, 40, 55 Campbell, Colin, 54 Campbell, Naomi, 90–1 canceling and cancel culture, 56–8, 64–5 case studies, background, 68–9 Castells, Manuel, 24–5 celebrity ambassadors, 134 celebrity humanitarianism, 103 cerebral pluralism, 156 Césaire, Aimé, 144 Chanel, 125, 169 change, 181 Chernin, Kim, 148 child labor, 178 child pregnancies, 100–8 China, 65 #DGLovesChina scandal, 133–9 Chromat, 51 citizen journalism, 19, 62, 115 Civil Rights Movement, 32, 56 civilizational discourse, 95 civilizational fashion, 7 civilizing process, 8 Clark, Hazel, 187 Clark, Meredith D., 56–7, 57–8, 80 co-creators, 26 codes of conduct, 38 colonial discourse, 11, 107, 128–9 colonial hierarchies, 129–30 colonial matrix of power, 9

229

colonialism, 6, 7, 15 coloniality, 6, 15 colonization, 181, 187 color-blind racism, 95–7 communicative capitalism, 45 community building, 33, 187 Condé Nast, 169 conspiracy theories, 110 constructionism, 13 consumer advocacy, 62 consumer behavior, 62–4 consumer governance, 168 consumer outrage, 56, 133–9 consumerism, 54 continued colonialism, 128–9, 134–6 controversy advertising, 38, 39 corporate communication, 162 corporate social responsibility, 161–2, 170, 179 corrective action, 38 Council of Fashion Designers of America, 143 counter narratives, 185–8, 186 Claudia Lepik, 198, 199 Ervin Latimer, 192, 194–5 Heidi Karjalainen, 189, 190–1 JAHNKOY, 193, 196–7 Kristian David, 202, 203 Muslin Brothers, 200, 201 Levi, Yaen, 200 Levit, Tamar, 200 counter-archives, 15 Covid-19 pandemic, 164 Craftivism, 193 creative labor, 151–2 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 48 crisis communication theory, 3–6 crisis management, 114–5 crisis response strategies, 4 crowdculture, 82, 89 cultural appropriation, 1–2, 3, 33, 43, 68, 124–32, 125 and colonial hierarchies, 129–30 contextualization, 124–6 as continued colonialism, 128–9 Dior, 124, 129–30, 129 Gucci, 124, 130, 132 Louis Vuitton, 124, 125–6, 129, 131

230

problem, 126–7 resolving, 130–2 cultural backlash, 43 cultural branding, 28 cultural context, 44, 77 cultural diversity, 68, 69 cultural identity, 32, 35 cultural intermediaries, 58–9, 60, 61–2 cultural relativism, 95 cultural sensitivity, 132 cultural sustainability, 162, 175, 180–1 damage diminishing, 97 Dapper Dan, 144 Dean, Jodi, 34, 35, 45 decoding, 77 decoloniality, 6–8 decolonization, 6–8 defamation, 65 denial strategy, 65, 115 Derrida, Jacques, 20 design heritage, 132 #DGLovesChina scandal, 65, 133–9 Diet Prada, 59, 61, 61–2, 62, 65, 134, 135 difference, celebrating, 26 digital media, 22 digital turn, 21 digitalization, 3, 19, 21 Dior, 1, 2–3, 30, 40 cultural appropriation, 124, 129–30, 129 Dior saddle bag, 40, 41 disciplinary society, 149 discrimination, 2 diversity, 36, 64, 169, 170–1, 181, 186 glossification of, 171–5 diversity officers, 168–70, 173, 174–5, 178, 181 diversity washing, 170–1, 172 Dolce, Domenico, 74 Dolce & Gabbana, 61 #DGLovesChina scandal, 65, 133–9 “Love is love” scandal, 72–81 double consciousness, 185 drag culture, 192 dream consumers, 73–5 Du Bois, W. E. B., 185, 186 Duggan, Lisa, 75 Duma, Miroslava, 90–7

INDEX

eating disorders, 148–51 echo chambers, 35 effeminacy, 79–80 Elle, 76 Ellis, Havelock, 117 emotional branding, 53, 53–5 emotional capitalism, 145, 153–4, 161 emotional reactions, 55–6 emotions, 53 encoding, 77 Enlightenment, the, 107 environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings, 180 environmental issues, 162 environmental values, 163 environmentally sustainable fashion, 180 epistemic positionings, 12–3 equity, 171–2 Eurocentrism, 7, 10, 23, 46–8, 69, 93, 106, 126, 176, 181, 187, 188 everyman style, 117, 118 exclusion, politics of, 42 extremist ideology, 116, 118, 119–21 assimilation, 117, 119–21 mainstreaming, 115–7, 119 Eyers, Jack, 50, 52 Ezie, Chinyere, 141 Facebook, 23, 24, 26, 45, 69, 133 fake news, 110 Fanon, Franz, 104 far right fascism, flirting with, 109–17, 116, 118, 119–21 fashion as academic discipline, 10 centers of, 10 decolonization, 6–8 definition, 128, 131 digitalization, 19, 21 instagramification, 25–6 mediatization, 19, 22–3, 64 and mental health, 147–8, 153–4 platformization, 23–5, 26 politicization of, 3–6 visualization of, 19, 19–21 fashion curriculum, reimagining, 175–7 fashion education, 175–7 fashion profiling, 116–7

INDEX

Fashion Transparency Index, 180 female sexuality, 82–9 femininity, 40, 79, 82–9, 189 feminism, 8, 48, 58, 81, 82–9, 189 femvertising, 83 Finland, 9, 10, 11, 69 Makia scandal, 116, 118, 119–21, 168 maternity clothes for 12-year-old African girls scandal, 100–8 Nyberg, Totti, 109 firestorms, online, 56, 65 Flügel, John Carl, 128 folk-devils, 57 forced labor, 179 Foucault, Michel, 5, 107, 146, 149 Frankfurt School, 20 Fraser, Nancy, 35, 65 Friedman, Vanessa, 90, 146 Fukuyama, Francis, 30, 32, 68 Gabbana, Stefano, 74, 134, 137 Galliano, John, 40 Garment Worker Protection Act, 178 Gaugele, Elke, 15, 117, 119, 121, 185 Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, 32 gay market, the, 73–5 gay propaganda, 72–81 gayspeak, 78 gaze, 149 oppositional, 187 politics of, 12–3 white, 15, 103, 104, 135, 185 gender identification, 80 gender ideology, 86 gender pluralism. see “Love is love” scandal Gerrie, Vanessa, 61 Gevinson, Tavi, 25 Gill, Rosalind, 82–9 global culture, 30 global fashion culture, 44 Global Slavery Index, 180 globalization, 30, 69 glocal fashion cultures, 44 glocalization, 83–4 glossification, of diversity, 171–5 Gobé, Marc, 54

231

Goehring, Marc, 91 Goodman, Nelson, 20 Green, Denise N., 33 Green, Nicholas, 73 green marketing, 162 Gucci, 2–3, 61, 169 blackface scandal, 140, 141, 144 cultural appropriation, 124, 130, 132 mental health scandal, 145–6, 147–8 Gvasalia, Demna, 11 H&M, 65 Code of Ethics, 173 diversity officer, 168–9, 173 racism scandal, 1, 63, 101 Hall, Stuart, 4, 8, 12, 30, 33, 42, 72, 77, 106, 107, 126, 137 hate crimes, 76 Heatherton, Erin, 150 hegemonic ideologies, 5 Helsingin Sanomat, 111 Hennessy, Rosemary, 75 heteronormalisation, 79 hierarchies challenging, 37 subversion, 59 Hill, Tim, 162, 170 Holliday, Tess, 51, 52 Holt, Douglas, 28, 55, 89 homeless chic, 1 homosexual iconography, 79–80 hooks, bel, 187 Hoskins, Tansy, 143 Hottentot Venus, the, 104 Huber, Sasha, 102 Hugo Boss, 179 human rights, 94–5, 115, 177–9 humanitarian campaigns, 102 identity and identity politics, 27, 30, 31, 32–6, 42, 43, 44, 48, 69, 157 and appearance, 117 double consciousness, 185 and social media, 34–5, 44–6 and traditional values, 94–5 identity claims, 33–4, 124 identity recognition, 90–7 Illouz, Eva, 153–4, 161 inauthenticity, 63

232

inclusion, 36, 169, 174, 177, 186 influencers, 26, 29 information brokers, 65 injustice, 35 Instagram, 19, 23, 25–6, 45, 57, 69, 77–8 intentional fashion scandal, the, 37–8, 39, 40, 42, 43, 43–4 International Advertising Association, 38 International Labour Organization, 178 internet, freedom, 34 intersectionality, 48, 49–51, 52, 81 intimacy, infrastructures of, IvanaHelsinki 45–6 Suhonen, Paola, 15, 100, 104 James, Aurora, 164, 165, 166 Jansen, M. Angela, 46, 128 Jones, Ayesha Tan, 145, 146, 147–8 Kaiser, Susan B., 33, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 130 Kardashian, Kim, 134 Kärkkäinen, LTD and discount chain store 109, 110, 111, 113 Magneettimedia, 110 Kärkkäinen, Juha, 110, 111, 112 Kennedy, Liz, 147 Kering, 173, 179 Kloss, Karlie, 124–5 Knight, Nick, 40 KnowTheChain, 179–80 Knox, Kelly, 49, 52 Kotler, Philip, 163 Koutaniemi, Meeri, 100, 103, 104 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 117 Kuhar, Roman, 86 Lazar, Michelle, 82 lesbians, 78–9 LGBTQI+ movement, 32, 68 cultural invisibility, 74 “Love is love” scandal, 72–81 linguistic turn, 20 Liu, Tony, 59, 60 local culture, 44 Lorde, Audre, 58 Louis Vuitton, cultural appropriation, 124, 125–6, 129, 131

INDEX

“Love is love” scandal, 72–81 LVMH, 173 Marimekko McCartney, Stella, 124, 130, 131 McGuire, Jennifer Smith, 61 McIntosh, Peggy, 47, 138–9 McLuhan, Marshall, 21 McQueen, Alexander, 152 McRobbie, Angela, 151 Makia scandal, 116, 118, 119–21, 168 Malmi, Joni, 109 Manna & Co, 113 Marimekko market communication, 2 marketing, 3, 15, 109–10 marketing and consumer culture theory, 4 Markhetha-Kwinana, Thabo, 126, 131 Marshenkulova, Zalina, 84–5, 87, 88, 89 Marx, Karl, 153 masculinity, 79–80 mass media, 22 maternity clothes for 12-year-old African girls scandal aim, 101 contextualization, 106–8 reading, 102–4 shock, 101–2, 105–6 visual language, 104–5 media, 19, 22–3 media events, scandals as, 2 media literacy, 29–30 mediatization, 22–3, 64 megaphone effect, 3, 36, 55–6 Menkes, Suzy, 152 mental disorders, glamorizing, 145–6, 146 mental health, 145–54 and body image, 151–2 and creative labor, 151–2 fashion and, 147–8, 153–4 glamorizing disorders, 145–6, 146 suicide, 147, 152 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20 #MeToo movement, 32, 68 Michele, Alessandro, 141, 145–6 Mignolo, Walter, 9, 130 Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, 119 Mitchell, W J T, 20 Mkwesha, Faith, 101, 102

INDEX

mob mentality, 57 Modern Slavery Act, 178 modernity, 7–8, 8 moral panic, 57 Morozov, Evgeny, 34–5 Mort, Frank, 73 Moss, Kate, 31 Moss, Kevin, 86, 95 multiculturalism, 93 Muravyeva, Marianna, 86 Muslin Brothers, 200, 201 Neo Nazis, 118 network connectivity, 45 network effects, 24 neurodiversity, 33, 154, 155, 156–7 Neurodiversity Movement, 154, 156 New Balance, 63, 64 New York City Commission on Human Rights, 144 Nieborg, David B., 24 Niessen, Sandra, 128, 179 Nike, 29, 63–4 brand activism, 164, 166–7, 166 emotional branding strategies, 55 Nölke, Ana-Isabel, 72, 74, 78 Nordic Resistance Movement, 110 norm entrepreneurs, 61–2 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 164, 165, 166 oppositional gaze, 187 oppositional reading, 77 Orientalism, 93, 107, 136–7 Othering and Otherness, 46–8, 49–51, 52, 135, 136–7, 142 Paasonen, Susanna, 45 Panopticon, the, 149 Patagonia, 163–4, 167 patriarchy, 84, 149 Paulicelli, Eugenia, 144 Peirce, Charles, 20 Pejic, Andreja, 91 performance culture, 172 performativity, 172 Perminova, Elena, 90 Pfeffer, Jürgen, 56, 65, 89 phenomenology, 20 pictorial turn, 20

233

pink economy, the, 74 plagiarism, 124, 131 Plan International Finland, 100, 101–2, 105, 105–6 platformization, 23–5, 26 platforms, 23–4 Plein, Philipp, 61 Poell, Thomas, 24 politicization, of fashion, 3–6 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 104, 142–3 postcolonialism, 6–8 postfeminism, 82–3 postfeminist sensibility, 82-3 power dressing, 203 power relations, 32–3, 127, 187 Prada, 65, 169, 179 blackface scandal, 140, 140–1, 142, 143–4 Proud Boys, 116, 116 McInnes, Gavin, 116 Puma, 193 purposeful polysemy, 78 Pussy Riot, 89 Queer Nation, queer 32 racism, 1–2, 3, 15, 46, 56, 63, 104–5 casual, 133–9 color-blind, 95–7 #DGLovesChina scandal, 65, 133–9 Duma and Sergeenko post scandal, 90–7 ending, 137–9 maternity clothes for 12-year-old African girls scandal, 105–6 in Russia, 92–3, 93–4 sensitivity training, 143–4 structural, 140–4 rainbow-branded capitalism, 75 Rana Plaza catastrophe, 178 Raun, Tobias, 157 recognition, 136 Reebok, #BeMoreHuman scandal, 82–9, 168 representation, 4, 12, 48, 49–51, 52 reputational damage, 69 resistance, 187 right-wing brands, 117 Rissanen, Timo, 175

234

Rocamora, Agnès, 22 Rodman, Gilbert B., 137, 138 Roman, Meredith L., 94 Rotkirch, Anna, 85 Rubchinskyi, Gosha, 11 Russia, 5, 9, 10, 11, 32, 69 #BeMoreHuman scandal, 82–9, 168 Duma and Sergeenko post scandal, 90–7 female sexuality in, 82–9 identity politics in, 94–5 LGBTQI+ community, 75 “Love is love” scandal, 72–81 racism in, 92–3, 93–4 traditional values Sabah, Sheikha Majda Al, 146 sacrifice zones, 179 SahWira Africa International, 101, 102 Said, Edward, 127, 136–7 same-sex relationships “Love is love” scandal, 72–81 Sarkar, Christian, 163 Savage x Fenty, 151 scandal, definition, 37 scandalizing tactics, 2 Schroeder, Jonathan E., 19–20 Schudson, Michael, 42 Schuyler, Lindsey, 59, 60 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 74 semiotics, 20 sensitive issues, spectacle of, 15 sensitivity training, 143–4 Sergeenko, Ulyana, 90–7 Seto culture, 199 Sex and the City, 40 sexism, 87, 88 sexuality. see “Love is love” scandal; #BeMoreHuman scandal shock, 3, 37–8, 39, 40, 42, 53, 101–2 contemporary, 43–4 effects, 40 maternity clothes for 12-year-old African girls scandal, 105–6 shock advertising, 40 shockvertising, 40 Silberman, Steve, 156 Simmel, Georg, 107–8, 117, 128 Singer, Judy, 154

INDEX

skin color, 46–8, 138 Slade, Toby, 46 slave labor, 178, 180 social awareness washing, 168 social media, 2, 19, 20, 23–5, 29, 34, 69 and identity politics, 34–5, 44–6 as infrastructure of intimacy, 45–6 megaphone effect, 36, 55–6 mob mentality, 57 rise of, 3, 32, 115 word-of-mouth tactics, 64 social media activism, 35 social media firestorms, 56 social movements, 68 social network sites, 23 social networking, 24 social norms, 43 social sustainability, 180–1 soft power, 90 stereotypes, 78–80, 84, 87, 100–8, 133–9 structural racism, 140–4 Stuart, Madeline, 155, 156–7 Style Rookie, 25 subpolitics, 34 suicide, 147, 152 supply chains, 177–9, 179 sustainability, 162–3, 175, 180, 180–1 sustainable fashion, 11, 15 Swan, Elaine, 171–2 systemic inequalities, 11 Tapestry, 173, 179 Teatum Jones, 49, 50 techno-social systems, 22 Temkina, Anna, 85 The Fashion Law, 59 therapeutic narrative, 145, 153–4 thingification, 143–4 third-wave feminism, 8 Thor Steinar, 117 Thunberg, Greta, 61 Titton, Monica, 15, 185 Tlostanova, Madina, 93–4 Toscani, Oliviero, 38, 55 traditional values, 89, 94–5, 96 transgender, 80 transparency, 64 True Finns Party, 120

INDEX

Trump, Donald, 63, 64, 116 truth and truth claims, 12, 13 Twitter, 23, 24, 26, 35, 45, 57, 69, 109, 112, 133 unintentional fashion scandal, the, 37, 38, 43–4, 46–7 user-generated content, 23 values, 82, 113, 115 van Dijck, J., 23 Vazquez, Rolando, 130 Veblen, Thorstein, 117 Vetements, 11 Victoria’s Secret cultural appropriation, 124–5 eating disorders scandal, 149–51 virtue signaling, 168 visibility, 69, 145, 157 visual cultures, hierarchies of, 20 visual language, 104–5 visual noise, 37 visual turn, 20 visualization, of fashion, 19 Vogue UA, 5 Volkova, Lotta, 11 Volonte, Paolo, 151 Wahlberg, Mark, 31

235

Walters, Suzanna Danuta, 74 Warner, Michael, 75 Web 2.0, 24 Weeknd, The, 1 Weibo, 35, 133 Western civilization, 106 white gaze, 15, 103, 104, 135, 185 white masculine domination, 7 white power, 117 white privilege, 46–8, 137–9, 143, 176 white savior mentality, 101, 102–3, 105 white supremacy, 116, 118, 119 Wilcox, Claire, 124 Wilkinson, Cai, 94, 95 Wilson, Ara, 45 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 20 woke washing, 168 Women’s Liberation Movement, 32 Women’s Wear Daily, 40 word-of-mouth tactics, 64 Wu, Annie, 168–9, 173, 174 Wylie, Christopher, 116–7 Yeung, Amy, 131 YouTube, 23, 57, 100 Zdravomyslova, Elena, 85 Zero Waste, 189

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