Me, internally:
everyone has forgotten, but I haven't. I haven't forgotten uptown funk. I can't hear those words without getting an unexplainable urge to say 'hot damn.' Maybe nobody forgot. Maybe we all think this. I feel like we need to talk about the influence this song had on all of us.
There’s more to the discussion, obviously. But the core of the article remains useful.
What fast-fashion critics miss is that all apparel companies are enmeshed in a system of global capitalism, and all are subject to its profit-driven logic. Worker exploitation and health and safety violations plague the entire industry.
Invectives against the amorality or stupidity of fast-fashion consumers (predominantly but not exclusively working-class and poor people) misses this entirely, while giving a pass to elite consumers whose clothes are just as likely to be produced in deplorable conditions. Anti–fast fashion messages end up blaming poor people — the victims of global capitalism — for the ills of global capitalism.
Urging working-class and poor people to shop at Barney’s instead of Forever 21 suggests that the least powerful consumers are responsible for fixing the depredations of capitalism. But buying more expensive clothes based on some misguided code of ethics does nothing to reduce global capitalism’s racially gendered divisions of labor, opportunities, and rewards. Fashion cycles — crucial for turning the wheels of capitalism — will roll on even if poor people go into (more) financial debt.
