Entangled Fashion: A Psychosocial Contribution to Fashion Ethics in Times of Crisis

This critical meditation proposes a dialogue between the fields of fashion studies and of psychosocial studies as a fruitful and generative alliance in relation to the ethics of fashion. I develop the idea of a “crisis of entanglement” as a means of analyzing the structural foundations of fashion’s onto-epistemic situatedness. Addressing both the current COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing crises of sustainability, I work with the proposal of “entanglement” as seen in the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva. A crisis of entanglement, as I propose, runs entirely through the global fashion system, and if we are to re-orient the field to a decolonial perspective, reconfiguring and reconstructing it, we — practitioners, theorists, and consumers — need to rethink our positionality in light of both structural visible and invisible ethical troubles perpetuated by the industry. Fashion, as this piece proposes, is witness to a very complex and particular type of alienation, that of fashioning the self. The proposal of entanglement or nonlocality as paradigms for a new imaginary, as defended by Ferreira da Silva (2016, 2019), are helpful in the exercise of moving fashion from crisis to commons, via creativity, as I argue in what follows. Differences, in this model, are multiple, plural, and yet allow for interconnectedness. After elaborating an eco-feminist critique of fashion, I conclude by asking how we could wear fashion differently, where difference comes without separability (Ferreira da Silva, 2007, 2016, 2019).