Fashion’s Relation to the "Geo": from Global Impacts to Earthly Practices

This paper stages a radical rethinking of the relation between fashion and the ‘geo’. Fashion studies, within and beyond geography, have largely articulated this relation through ‘global’ modes of thought, which also deploy problematic concepts of capitalist ‘progress’, placing fashion within a linear and Eurocentric geohistory of modernization, industry and ‘Anthropocene’. What’s more, such approaches often maintain clear boundaries between humans and other earthly forces. We argue these tendencies must be undone if we are to comprehend that fashion operates beyond globalized industry and is a result of the earth’s lively and agentic matter(s) and forces, not just a producer of its waste and environmental impact. To achieve this, we rethink fashion in geohistorical and geophilosophical terms. By doing so, we show how to comprehend the complexity and contingency of divergent fashion geohistories beyond "the Anthropocene" and practice fashion "after progress", where fashioning becomes capable of recognising and expressing the contingency and precarity of earthly beings and things. Taken overall, this paper appeals to geographers and fashion scholars to take both fashion and earth seriously as implicated matters of history, thought and practice.