Punk took shape amid unemployment and social crisis (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Walk down any high street today and you can buy a Che Guevara T-shirt from a global chain. Or punk-inspired garments mass-produced at breakneck speed. What once signalled rebellion now hangs neatly from the clothing rails.
The question is not whether fashion is political, but how capitalism has transformed fashion into something consumed rather than lived.
In Capital, Karl Marx described how commodities are produced not simply to meet human needs, but to generate profit. Clothes, which began as a basic necessity, become symbols of status and identity.
Frederick Engels observed workers in poverty feeling pressure to keep up with bourgeois standards of dress.
What we wear signals our belonging and respectability. Marx himself was unable to enter the British Library because he had pawned his overcoat while facing poverty.
This is a stark reminder that clothing can determine not just how we are seen, but where we deserve to be.
Historically, subcultural style has often emerged from below as a form of resistance.
In 1970s Britain, punk took shape amid unemployment and social crisis, with ripped clothing and DIY aesthetics signalling a rejection of middle class respectability.
Across the Atlantic, hip-hop culture in the Bronx of New York City transformed marginalisation into pride through its bold, expressive style.
Rave culture carved out temporary spaces of freedom from the discipline of work in the north of England.
The Black Panther Party used uniforms of leather jackets, berets and sunglasses to project strength and cohesion.
In each case, style was not about consumption but about collective expression rooted in the wearers’ material conditions.
Capitalism has a remarkable skill for absorbing that which threatens it.
The style of rebellion is quickly stripped of any real political meaning and sold to consumers as trends.
Punk’s original anti-consumerist ethos became a fashion statement. Hip-hop’s core of survival was repackaged in luxury branding. Rave’s underground energy now fuels huge festivals.
What started as resistance has morphed into an expression of financial status.
The result is a hollowed out echo of rebellion—an echo that looks the part, yet demands nothing. This process is alienation.
The global fashion industry relies on millions of workers—often women in the Global South—exploited for their labour to mass produce clothing.
They work up to 16 hour days, seven days a week in dangerous conditions for as low as 20p an hour.
All this is done to meet the demands of consumers who are encouraged to construct and reconstruct their identities through endless purchasing.
Companies profit from our dissatisfaction and social media intensifies this cycle by presenting self-expression as something that is bought then discarded.
We are drawn to fashion because we seek visibility, connection and control over how we are seen by others in a system that doesn’t see us as our individual selves.
The problem is not the desire to express ourselves, it’s the way we pursue it. As long as style is dictated by profit it remains a source of exploitation.
Fashion can still be a tool of resistance, but ethical shopping alone can’t dismantle the system. Reclaiming style would require a shift from passive consumption towards collective action.
We must support garment workers’ struggles and create community-based alternatives such as clothing swaps and DIY spaces, to recognise culture as a sight of political struggle as opposed to a distraction from it.
Capitalism is adept at selling rebellion.
Our challenge is to move beyond buying the image of resistance and inject it with substance.
After all, self-expression cannot be purchased—it has to be created collectively.
