In the News, Issue 10, September 16, 2021

Twice a month, we bring you a curated news report that addresses some of the most critical and timely headlines as it relates to fashion and race.

Sep 17, 2021

NOTE: This is an abridged version of our full “In the News” issue. To read the full stories and view all of the images, continue on at our website.

Indigenous model & activist Quannah Chasinghorse in a custom #DUNDASXREVOLVE gold lamé gown at the 2021 Met Gala. She completed her look with traditional Navajo jewelry (turquoise & silver earrings and necklaces) gifted to her by her aunt. — Quannah Chasinghorse in a custom #DUNDASXREVOLVE look at the 2021 Met Gala. She completed her look with traditional Navajo jewelry gifted to her by her aunt.

This week, we review the Met Gala’s most significant statement looks, delve into why Balanciaga is being accused of cultural appropriation, and examine how fast fashion is intertwined with a major human rights crisis.

– Anu Lingala, Contributor, “In the News”

Design & Imagemaking

This past Monday marked fashion’s most extravagant event – the annual Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit Gala. Centered around this year’s exhibition, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” many people, like longtime New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman, predicted the Met Gala red carpet to feature a stream of exciting emerging American fashion designers. But alas, many of the most-photographed celebrities wore the designs of European luxury houses. This is likely a consequence of the way invitations to the Gala are dispersed.

Typically, brands or designers sponsor the $275,000 tables or $35,000 tickets and then invite celebrities as their guests to model their designs. Thus, the red carpet ends up being a repetitive parade of the same well-financed names – Balenciaga, Dior, Saint Laurent, Versace, etc. The nature of the fundraising scheme inevitably means that smaller emerging designers are generally excluded from one of fashion’s most significant showcases. This problematically perpetuates issues of systemic inequity and racism in the industry. Young Black and POC designers are often underfunded compared to their white counterparts, and they are less likely to have the networking connections that might help them enter cultural spaces like the Met Gala.

Dress Politics

Balenciaga’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection, recently released in stores, has drawn criticism for being culturally appropriative. The brand’s $1190 ‘Trompe-L’Oeil Sweatpants’ are designed with the faux appearance of exposed boxer shorts above the waistband of the pants. This creates the illusion of ‘sagging’ pants – at a very high price. Marquita Gammage, an associate professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge, expressed to CNN Style that she was “disturbed” by the brand’s “exploitation of Black culture…delegitimizing Blacks experiences of injustices for capital gain.” Likewise, many commentators on social media have accused the brand of ‘gentrifying sagging,’ noting that Black men, in contrast, have been systematically targeted for donning this style of dress over the years: some cities and institutions have even passed legislation to criminalize ‘sagging.’ Gammage emphasizes how the style of sagging pants, which has roots in hip hop culture and Black communities, has “been used to criminalize Blacks, especially Black males as thugs and a threat to American society.”

Yahoo News reports that in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Black men “comprised 96% of the arrests from 2017 to June 2019 for wearing sagging pants.” This same ‘saggy pants ban,” which was passed in 2007, led to police chasing down and killing 31-year-old Anthony Childs in February 2019 while attempting to detain him for wearing his pants too low. It was only after the outrage following Childs’ tragic death that the “unconstitutional and discriminatory ordinance” was finally repealed. A similar law in Florida – also passed in 2007 – was only repealed in September 2020. Yet even in locations where ‘sagging’ may not be legally prohibited, Dr. Jonathan M. Square points out, “men who choose to wear sagging pants are policed socially and stereotyped as vagrants and criminals.”⁣ Considering how this “aesthetic has been weaponized against men of color” within the sociocultural context of systemic racism in America, it is quite clear to see why many people are offended by a European luxury fashion house’s blithe replication of the highly politicized style.

Labor Issues

In prior issues, we have discussed the ongoing controversy over alleged forced labor within the cotton production industry in Xinjiang, China. A recent feature by Sofi Thanhauser in Vox delves even deeper into the history of cotton production in the Xinjiang region and emphasizes the connections between fast fashion consumption in the U.S. and the human rights crisis faced by Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Thanhauser points out that “the US has gobbled up far more Chinese garments and textiles than any other nation every year since 2006. Between 2002 and 2020, China was by far the largest source of garment imports into the US.” Our compulsive shopping habits have fueled the fast fashion industry, and the fast fashion industry relies almost entirely upon low cost clothing production based in China.

China is the world’s largest producer of cotton, and Xinjiang is the biggest cotton-producing region within China. Prior to 2020, an estimated 1.5 billion garments made with Xinjiang cotton entered the US market annually. But over the past year, both the U.S. government and human rights organizations around the world have maintained that cotton fields and manufacturing facilities in Xinjiang are staffed via an internment camp system built by the Chinese government and targeting the Uyghur ethnic minority group. The system is believed to involve sterilization and forced labor to an extent that the U.S. State department has classified these actions as genocide and yet, Thanhauser writes, “they are actions that have also been a boon to industry.” Repressive policies against the Uyghur people began being implemented by the Chinese government as early as 2016 and evidence of the internment system began being exposed between 2018-2020. This timeline “dovetailed with a desire to keep garment production in China after labor costs there grew uncompetitive with those in places like Vietnam or Bangladesh.” And as American consumers continued to demand large quantities of cheap, fast fashion, “garments stitched by imprisoned Uyghurs were quietly entering the American wardrobe through myriad avenues — much of it, it would soon be revealed, made from cotton harvested by enslaved people.” Brands whose products have been traced back to suspicions of forced labor in Xinjiang include Gap, Nike, Adidas, Skechers, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Zara, Muji, and Uniqlo, among others. Yet even once these suspicions were confirmed with increasing evidence of human rights violations, and international outcry grew, “it was clear that the effort to remove cotton harvested by forced labor from the market was squarely at odds with the imperative to produce ever-cheaper clothing.”

The Fashion and Race Database Newsletter

In the News, Issue 10, September 16, 2021

Twice a month, we bring you a curated news report that addresses some of the most critical and timely headlines as it relates to fashion and race.

Design & Imagemaking

Further Reading:

Dress Politics

Further Reading:

Labor Issues

Further Reading:

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