The Brooklyn Rail

More than six hundred years ago, Fashion emerged from Europe to rule over more and more of the world’s clothing. As a global industry, it continues to grow at a terrifying pace, yet the conditions of its demise are now in place.

For three crucial centuries, from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century, it emanated from Paris. The great “haute couture” houses from Worth through Poiret to Balenciaga dictated hemlines, skirt, sleeve, collar, and bodice shapes, waist location, even colors and fabrics. These pronouncements were amplified by a dedicated press and a vast commercial network. The accelerating speed at which successive pronouncements contradicted each other instilled habits of colossal waste. Just as fundamentally, the attribution of Fashion to femininity polarized gender.

But you have seen homeless people on the street with more style than a supermodel. The impulse to order our bodies can lead to style anywhere and everywhere. When tyrannized by Fashion, style sometimes thrives but usually appears in illusions which dissolve after a mere season. Every day offers an opportunity to compose a textural layer over our lumpy, hairy, oozing anatomies. Though some activities may seem to require functional gear, this is rarely, if ever, all that we intend. Do we seek to provoke astonishment, inspire emulation, attract desire, or hide? Regardless of purpose, often, we choose a variety of items at once to accomplish a socially dynamic task. From head to toe, hat to shoes, inside out from underwear to overcoat, we all get dressed.

Consciously or unconsciously, we try to style ourselves: we pick proportions, colors, textures, volume, drape, mixing and matching these formal, material qualities. With zest for order, or in despair of order, we go about creating our outward appearance. Dissatisfaction with the constraints of our peculiar human bodies invites us to believe that we can transcend them aesthetically. When we succeed, it feels glorious within, even as it delights others. Which is why getting dressed might be the most ubiquitous, democratic, and challenging of all the arts.

Getting dressed, then, is as much social performance as it is aesthetic practice. We send each other signals about our gender, wealth, age, nationality, and ethnicity, just to name the most common supposed aspects of identity. All human societies demand apparel deemed correct by its governors. Some of us resist, divert, or parody these social rules.

In 2025, at least in some parts of the world, gender has become less binary, and sustainable industry a goal. Moreover, social media offers styles from all societies and Fashion moments. What are we to make of this information deluge within the context of piles upon piles of barely worn clothing? Style can now be devised from the present and the past, from what we imagine and what we inherit, from technical innovation as well as from among the one hundred billion or so garments a year we seem to produce every year. Which is to say we can compose or jumble our attire with items from various eras and invented categories flaunting “masculinity” and “femininity,” and representing spiritual as well as financial wealth.

The magnitude of our existing clothing stockpile allows for infinitely revolving trends as well as uniformity. Yes, there are those who wear the same wardrobe for most of their adult-size lives—very few. Yet we have never had so much ready-made stuff with which to create multiplicitous selves.

Does this prospect seem implausible or idealistic? Consider blue jeans. At the same time as Fashion extended its empire, the United States invented a clothing item that resisted change and waste even as it evolved. Since Levi Strauss brought forth jeans in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, we have adored a type of clothing that we believe gets better with wear, that all genders, classes, and ages adopt, that can be as practical as it is sexy. We have it in us already to burst gorgeously into a sartorial future.

Without the crutch of fashion, without the facsimile of security that comes from obedience to the tyranny of the category, we will, I admit, have to face the sheer riskiness of style. Clothing freedom, here we come.