Keywords

1 Introduction

The many compartments of contemporary communication are increasingly resorting to the typical strategies of the advertising world; such trend can be noticed in fashion communication, also in fast fashion, a recent phenomenon that has played on that desire for change that is inherent in all humans, by launching new pieces all the time, far beyond the traditional turnover of styles, colours and shapes that goes hand in hand with the seasons. Such phenomenon is a response to a social welfare society that is built an on uncontrollable rise in the consumption not only of commodities, but also of identities, values, wishes and needs. It is a form of consumerism that affects many dimensions of people’s lives and therefore their choices – sometimes very quick and shallow – about which pieces to buy, imagine, experience, wear and ‘consume’.

Therefore, this essay will first address the relationship between fashion and advertising, and the contemporary advertising strategies that boost consumerism in fashion. Then, the second part will concern the concept of consumerism [Baudrillard 1974; Bauman 2007; Veblen 1899; Trentmann 2016], “the tangible form of imagination, what makes our self-representation tangible” [Andò 2020: 49] and its relationship with some characteristics of modern people, more liquid and ostentatious. Not only does the incentive to consume respond to market laws, it also responds to the vulnerability of people, who, with the help of the Internet and especially the social media, need to feel constantly satisfied with their appearance, with their outfits, by buying things that try to soothe their artificial needs and create a sort of dépense, à la Baudrillard, people spending themselves on commodities.

Reviewed in the third part of the paper, fast fashion perfectly responds to this new relationship with fashion, especially fashion promoted for wellbeing and self-care activities. The particular case of (fast) fashion advertising that we might associate with ‘sports’ seems to be emblematic of such trend, for two reasons: first, because ethical values such as wellbeing, strength, determination, care for personal and collective health take centre stage, providing grounds for buying in the name of responsible shopping; secondly, because it concerns the aestheticizing of contemporary life that is typical of narcissistic people and pervades the body and the clothes people like to wear to be more attractive [Lipovetsky 2002], beyond gender stereotypes or “aspirational models”Footnote 1. Both reasons nod to the relationship between vulnerability and consumption that is dealt with in the fourth part of this paper. The pandemic has recently triggered feelings of uncertainty and danger that have led to a consumption of fashion based on the central role of the person and the responsibility one takes by making specific choices. For such purpose, another form of consumption makes its appearance, the one that Franchi defines as the form “of fear”, which gives pride of place to consumption for health and physical wellbeing, as well as for sports [Franchi 2019].

I will eventually try to think of some ways to curb the consumeristic drifts that seem to pervade people’s identities [Paccagnella and Vellar 2016: 11 ss] and a lifestyle that seems to be ethically unsustainable. Every day, the stability of one’s identity feels threatened by advertisements that engaging and promise to renew it through new styles and pieces, sometimes suggesting it to take its distance, with that “magical thinking” that governs consumption, from its own authenticity [Baudrillard 2011: 31; Taylor 1992] and a modus vivendi that is sensitive to the environment we live in [Jonas 1979]. As, after all, Barthes writes, “through fashion, society shows off and communicates what it thinks of the world”, that is, itself as a community but also as the sum total of its individuals [Barthes 2006, Id. 1998: 118].

2 Fashion Advertising Strategies and Induced Consumption

Historically, fashion has always relied on advertising media to promote itself, from the so-called “fashion dolls” of the 17th century to the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence of our days [Codeluppi 2016: 14–15, Monneyron 2008]. Advertising is a form of communication that fashion did and does cherish, to such an extent that more and more often it shapes new languages, which are then borrowed by other fields and industries, from political to public communication, from media to biomedical communication, etc. In Baudrillard’s footsteps, advertising, “the patterns of which permeate any other media” [Baudrillard 2011: 101], “has become in the eyes of the citizens of today’s Western societies a sort of model – or benchmark – for any other activity. Since […] an increasingly wide area of social life is incorporated into the “consumer model”, it’s not entirely surprising then that the “Metaphysics” of consumerism has turned, along the way, into a sort of implicit philosophy of all modern life” [Campbell 2004: 41–42]. While over time fashion advertising has often strayed into stereotyped and self-referential patterns as it tried not to emotionally engage its audience, nowadays, with the help of the Internet, of social media and the new frontiers in AI, it is taking new forms, especially from an experiential perspective. Promotional storytelling, emotional narratives, the development of creative skills, the “algorithmic turn” [Uricchio 2011], the building of experiences through fashion are the frontiers in online advertising, by interacting with their own audiences, who are certainly more aware of promotional dynamics and ethical fashion.

Fashion advertising, especially now with Instagram, TikTok and the AI, is built not only more on “the representation of dress” in advertising [Barthes 2006], the real dress, that is, the one you actually buy and wear, a fashion experience and more generally a brand experience, that affects us through the media “drillability” mechanism first described by Jenkins [2014].

It is a representation that builds a reality through – extremely arbitrary – signs that may be worn, “mythologised” and “demythologised”, along a timeline that does not wait for the item to wear out but for it to be replaced, regardless of its value-in-use [Svendsen 2006: 73–75]. But it is also an interactive, dynamic experience of direct and/or indirect observation and consumption (just think of touchpoints) with the brand and mass-media environments. In its multiple forms, advertising makes such process possible. While then the relationship between fashion and advertising looks inextricable and essential, it is imperative that it be fast, as the mirror of an ever-changing and therefore consumeristic society, to keep abreast of the latest trends.

Here, then, in addition to the typical seasonal turnover of fashion advertisements, such a process is sparked off by a consumeristic trend that is inherent in the contemporary Western world. As Baudrillard writes, advertising is the mass medium par excellence, and the “technological process of mass communication conveys a certain type of a very imperative message: a message of consumption of the message, of subdivision and showmanship, disregard for the world and exploitation of information as a commodity, and glorification of the content as a sign” [Baudrillard 2011: 101].

This happens through a form of fashion advertising that is certainly different from what Baudrillard observed. A form of advertising that has evolved into the digital era. The new goal of advertising with a new prosumer consists of creating new communication in which the advertisement does not persuade the prosumer [Toffler 1980] but engages him or her through a participatory experience, which is as emotional as it is cognitive, full of different stimuli. Fashion advertising does not consist merely in original, creative, convincing displays that cannot be judged as fake, but that actually add truthfulness to what they communicate, as a a sort of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ [Ivi: 108–109], but in making people believe in the goodness and beauty of the product for sale through transmedia storytelling and spreadability strategies [Jenkins 2014, Andò 2020: 86, 88], in which the new consumer, no longer passive, is engaged, even by the advertising. And social media, most recently with the arrival of the Metaverse, are increasingly a privileged tool in this sense as they make the world represented more real than reality. Possession becomes the benchmark for regarding others as “a requisite to the complacency that we call self-respect” [Veblen 1899: 31]. A similar version based on fashion consumption as the acknowledgement of a status symbol and of an (assumed) self-worth, along the lines of Baudrillard [Baudrillard 2011] and Veblen, is criticised by Lipovestsky, who pointed out that needs stem from a tendency to de-socialise consumption and “having pushed back the immemorial primacy of the status-related worth of objects to the benefit of the now prevailing value, use for personal pleasure” [Lipovetsky 2002], to pursue an eminently personal fulfilment. The added value that one thinks of gaining by buying a new fashion piece is accompanied by pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

Fast fashion, based on low price, placement and being up-to-date, has given free access to the discourse on appearance, thus fulfilling (though fleetingly) that almost troubled longing that feeds consumption to be more and more up-to-date [Campbell 1987]. Unintentionally, such model has evolved, on one hand, into a better-performing but more polluting supply chain, and, on the other hand, into consumers not being always so perfectly aware of the environmental and ethical harm that can be done when they buy large amounts of goods and throw them away soon afterwards.

3 Consumerism, Fast Fashion and Athleisure

As so, consumerism in and of fashion brings to mind an ethical reflection about making informed choices when we buy and then use something. But what does consumerism mean? It can be briefly defined as an economic, social and ethical phenomenon that is typical of wealthy industrialised countries and is based on boosting people’s consumption to meet needs that are more artificial than real and that are induced by advertising and social imitation behaviours. From the Latin consumere, it seems it first appeared in French in the 12th century to mean the physical exhaustion of the matter. Between the 17th and the 20th centuries, the word consumption took connotations that went beyond material decay. Buying fulfils people’s desires and makes society richer by expanding the market. In the 20th century, in the interwar period, when mass production took off, companies and advertising agents joined forces to boost the consumption of the goods they placed on the market; in the meantime, the concept of consumerism dramatically changed and prompted a rethinking of some moral values and principles. People turned into consumers of goods, services as well as consumers of emotions and experiencesFootnote 2. So, consumption shapes and makes sense of social life, and it makes sense of identity. Such approach is widely criticised by the Frankfurt School, especially by Marcuse (1964), claims that man is reduced to the mere consumerist dimension. In consumerism, he sees a new form of totalitarianism based on moral degradation in which artificial desires have replaced the real ones [Trentmann 2016, Adorno and Horkeimer 1947].

Anyway, the wish for consumption thus criticised had already been analysed a few decades earlier by Veblen who worked out the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’, by which he claims that people have a tendency to buy things that are not really appreciated for their intrinsic value but for the social status they confer. It’s no coincidence, then, that in “The Theory of the Leisure Class” Veblen [1899, 168] states that “the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods finds expression in dress. Other methods of putting one’s pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually, but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance”. Hirsch defined the goods that confer prestigious social status as ‘positional’ goods as they affect people’s position in society [Hirsch 1977: 41 ss].

So, consumption is boosted by exogenous causes, the market, as well as by endogenous causes, the desire to identify with a given social milieu. One is induced to consume, and fashion, in Barthes’s footsteps, “every year […] destroys what it had adored and adores what it will destroy”. Today’s society encourages us not to turn into “damaged consumers” à la Bauman, that is, outcasts of society as non-consumers. People are constantly pressured into being someone else, stoking their fragilities and their dissatisfaction with their identities, in a sort of tyrannical obsolescence. The tyranny of the carpe diem replaces the tyranny of the eternity of the memento mori: “Commodification invades and reshapes dimensions of social life that so far had been spared its arguments, to such an extent that subjectivity itself becomes a commodity to be displayed and sold on the market in the form of beauty. Of cleanliness, sincerity, independence”.Footnote 3 Therefore, the consumer society works by triggering a constant feeling of dissatisfaction, by inspiring a feeling of missing out that turns desires into needs. It is up to people to decide whether to obey such commercial diktat or use their freedom of choice and take responsibility for themselves; in other words, whether to choose an ethical gesture even if they could then be socially isolated because they do not consume. Thus, society seems to be intolerant of poor people, whom it regards as inadequate, flawed consumers who cannot recover their “reputation” unless they partake of consumption. Bauman’s homo consumens is not free to choose and is haunted by a fear of boredom. He fears he will have no desire for anything anymore, and that’s why he pursues new needs and chooses new fashion items, because newness reassures him, even if in fact such endless turnover prevents him from building a stable identity for himself. Actually, Bauman speaks of ‘liquid identity’ to mean the ongoing motion, the fast changeability that comes from the fact that man runs after trends not to feel left out of a social group. The aim is to drive people to maximise their pleasure, which will be felt afresh at every new purchase. Consumption becomes a relational phenomenon as well as a personal preference (no matter how rational) within a system of social standing.

In the world of fashion, the approach of contemporary consumerism has certainly encouraged a kind of “throwaway fashion”, the so-called “fast fashion”, that meets the need to consume over and over again. Coined in the Nineties, fast fashion is the strategy which the big high-street fashion companies are built upon. The operative words are a short production lead time, ongoing inventory turnover, low retail prices, and innovative, trendy designs.

While such phenomenon certainly produces cheap clothes, it has an impact on the environment, with greater gas emissions and waste [Bédat 2022; Muthu 2018; Brooks 2015]. It is a system that has led to buying more short-lived clothes. The new waste is made up of clothes that are no longer trendy, so they are useless. It is no longer the ‘conspicuous’ consumption of a “positional good”, but a fast consumption to always look like someone else. The ultimate goal of fast fashion then is to produce the trendiest clothes and make them available to consumers as quickly as possible, keeping the cost down to a minimum. Such phenomenon distorts the traditional manufacturing system, which is based on accurate planning. Every day, it reassesses and improves its offering, in the attempt to meet the customers’ tastes and changes as fast as it can. Conversely, the planned one has a value proposition that follows, step by step, the customers’ response to the collection, so tapping into and keeping up with the new tastes can become quite complicated. The fast fashion revolution has overturned the consumer’s traditional buying process, leading to a new way of interacting with the stores: today, you will find a piece in a store that will not be there next week. You will buy it even if you are not sure you are going to use it. Such a process has exponentially increased the fast fashion companies’ brand awareness. It is a sort of “democratisation of fashion”, whereby, because the goods are so cheap, many more people, regardless of their status or disposable income, can express themselves and communicate through what they wear, as they can afford to change their wardrobe more often, obeying the diktat of narcissistically investing in their own body as a fetish [Cietta 2009, Thomas 2020]. After all, Simmel already claimed that fashion “possesses the peculiar attraction of limitation, the attraction of a simultaneous beginning and end at the same time, the charm of newness and simultaneously of transitoriness” [Simmel 1957: 549]; and then, as if predicting what has now so rapidly flourished with extreme consequences, he adds that “the more an article becomes subject to rapid changes of fashion, the greater the demand for cheap products of its kind, and the cheaper the products become the more they invite consumers and constrain producers to a quick change of fashion” [Simmel 1957: 58].

4 Fashion and Vulnerable Consumers

The promotion of consumption conveyed by fashion advertising, and mainly by fast fashion, apparently gives consumers more freedom of choice, because of the wider availability of fashion items, but buyers are in fact more deeply concerned with other people’s approval and judgement, partly because of the Internet-based promotional tools encouraging them to take care of their appearance, forcing them to put themselves on display in real time, bolstered by a form of communication that is based on seeing and being seen. Such issue goes hand in hand with another kind of personal vulnerability, which has come to the fore in the last few years, which have been so riddled with the pandemic and the conflict, and have made people more fragile when faced with uncontrollable external factors that can undermine their health and even their lives. Fashion advertising – through influencers, famous testimonials and ad hoc websites – suggests therefore that one should take good care of oneself, of one’s body and one’s health, to fulfil one’s aspirations and wishes, thus encouraging an individualistic and narcissistic approach to action. It is a very specific form of advertising, built not so much on traditional commercials as – just think of the Spanish Zara – on word of mouth, on countercultural practices based on the the same rational as citizen journalism – on people and celebrities wearing some given pieces and posting their outfits on their social media, thus making them seen and known everywhereFootnote 4.

While such trend has made people, in some respects, more aware of themselves and of the worth of their authenticity, in other respects it has made them more fragile and sensitive to other people’s judgement. Fashion advertising, mainly through visual communication tools, pursues the goal of enhancing and propagating self-perception. But, on the other hand, (quite paradoxically) it also hints at new forms of vulnerability in people, who are more exposed than a few decades ago when the Internet as a mass medium was still in its infancy [Briggs and Burke 2010]. Fashion advertising comes up with goods that make people feel comfortable and cope with their new insecurities. Especially now that it promises beauty and wellbeing, with the help of all the social-media marketing hype that propagates a hyper-reality that is more real than real, increasingly targeted to a sustainable lifestyle, centred on the health of individuals and of an increasingly global community [Fletcher 2016; Griffin 1986].

After all, vulnerability hints at the possibility of being hurt and therefore at the fragility of individuals. Metaphorically, clothes “protect” from wounds, from other people’s looks (and approval), but they also protect from one’s own look. Nevertheless, many brands use many different “aspirational models”; the language of seduction now also relies on dels showing off their being different sizes, for example, like Victoria’s Secret. The adjective vulnerable [from the Latin vulnerabĭlis, a derivative of vulnerare, «to woundmo»] actually encompasses the idea of vulnus; one is vulnerable when one is exposed to a wound, to a damage, to failure. Vulnerability does not have to have a negative connotation, it can become an asset for the homo oeconomicusFootnote 5. Fragile, instead, from the Latin “frangere”, means snapping and breaking. Fragility is a condition that affects all living things. But a distinction needs to be made between existential fragility, a human fragility that is ingrained in the precariousness of life, and a more psychophysical fragility, sometimes even in a pejorative sense, which is not so much a susceptibility to disease but rather a proneness to moral weakness and fear.

Fashion easily taps into such personal vulnerability, coming up with collections that increasingly respond to a need to feel protected, to feel stronger in the face of global change. Wellness-related fashion is a call to fight precisely that (multidimensional) contemporary vulnerability.

And so, fashion is promoted against vulnerability, not to efface it but to remind one that it should be protected, because it somehow defends us. The so-called athleisure is brought into play as the point where haute couture meets sportswear, making the two worlds blur into each other and offering items that can be worn on the catwalk as well as at a yoga class. The big luxury brands have begun to launch their own sportwear collections, while comfortable pieces made for the gym have sprung up in the shop-windows of fast fashion: from tracksuits to tops for Pilates, from leggings in engineered materials to actual gym equipment, such as weights and mats. Clothes starring in Instagram stories, online ads, suggesting different lifestyles according to Jenkins’ transmedia rationale, built on spreadability, on wordlbuilding, immersion and extractability, experiencing fashion as an environment to be lived in and built up by immersing oneself in experiences that are not necessarily aimed at buying. Jenkins aptly defines such concept as “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” [Jenkins 2012]. So, athleisure becomes a trend to wear sporty, casual clothes even on formal occasions. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, athleisure is defined as “casual clothing designed to be worn both for exercising and for general use” and appeared for the first time in 1976 in a footwear advertising in the El Paso Herald Post.

Actually, on the online fashion websites or blog of microcelebrities dedicated to lifestyle, there are more and more advertisement sections for athleisure in precious materials that resonate with the new contemporary identity conveyed by fashion, because it is associated with a healthy, dynamic lifestyle, where comfort and function say that health and wellbeing now come first. After all, wellbeing can also be holistically regarded à la Taylor, not just as an “integral human development” (art. 3 Cost it.) in a personal sense, but even in a social sense, going beyond the mere fulfilment of one’s wishes, along a utilitarian model, and living solely according to one’s authenticity and uniqueness [Taylor 1985, Ferrara 2019: 32–45].

5 Conclusions

The brief discussion above clearly shows that fashion cannot help responding to the consumeristic laws of the market or to the contemporary man’s desire for multiple identities. On one hand, it fills people’s increasing vulnerabilities occasioned by the recent global transformations – from technological developments to the pandemic, and all the way up to the war – and, on the other hand, it exacerbates them by arousing wishes that are never perfectly fulfilled, and thus whet new appetites. With the global crisis of the last few years, fashion has tried to do its part to soothe the weaknesses of people and society in terms of health and to encourage activities that help them achieve a psychophysical balance by wearing comfortable but glamorous clothes. At the same time, it also tried to give people a chance to experiment with and reshape their bodies at a bargain price.

Based on this, people’s ability to choose is clothed with a higher level of complexity, considering the algorithmic machines that gently prod us to action, the so-called nudgesFootnote 6. Faced with an increased number of buying opportunities, we risk slipping into a sort of consumeristic bulimia, caring little for the purchases and much more for the power of owning them.

Informed choices seem to opt for pieces that are suitable for a lifestyle that promotes environmental sustainability and the protection of personal and global health, such as, for instance, using the goods for longer, manufacturing processes that are respectful of human dignity, recycled materials, etc. Just like the slow food movement that was born in Italy in the 1990s, now’s the time to reflect on the possibility of a slow fashion [Clark 2019: 309–327; Id. 2008: 427–446], so our fashion items will have back their multiple lives, and will be selected as carefully as we would select a pair of prescription glasses, which must correct our vision so we can responsibly be in the world, while retaining a crystal-clear ‘view’ of it.

However, such perspective should also reflect the contemporary desire, boosted by the digital technologies of visibility, to appear, and to appear in the multiple identities that can ever be invented. A need that can be assuaged by the pursuit of wellbeing leads people to take more and more care of themselves and of the community. A wellbeing that brings to mind an ethical fashion, not just in the sense of atlheisure, but in the sense of making informed choices for clothes that will stay for their value-in-use, that are our signature looks and that reflect our authenticity, which cannot be so multifarious as fast fashion would have us believe. In this way, people’s fragility turns into a strength too. It prods people to reflect on the right measure of and care for themselves.

All things considered, this means choosing to consume a fashion that will not consume our bodies or our identities, but will strengthen them, one that we should not be afraid of. The pressure to be always someone else stokes people’s fragility and dissatisfaction with their current identities. So, fashion, fast fashion and fast fashion for wellbeing should not, as Stasiuk feared [Bauman 2007: 26], provide a pseudo- “possibility of changing the shape of our body and reshape it according to different patterns […] When you flip through the glossy magazines, you have the feeling that most of the time they all tell the same old story, over and over again: about how to make a new personality for yourself starting with your diet, your house, the places you go to, and even build a different physical structure from the one you had before, though often with the mantra “be yourself””. But it is a fashion that gives us strength in our bodies and direction in our moral sphere. However, such approach is challenged by a flippant, creative fashion, a hotbed of contaminations and transfigurations of luxury brands imitated by fast fashion, such as Gucci by Alessandro Michele or Balenciaga by Demna Gvasalia, for example, in the Gucci Aria 2021 fashion campaign, which seems to bring in many different aspirational models of being.

However, today, such approach must confront “choice architecture”; when consumers take their decisions, they rely on the information they find or is provided by machine learning (ML) models, public profiling and filtering systems. In particular, ML models use algorithms to process the users’ data through their pathways, thus enabling computers to learn, apprehend and evolve through automatic input/output analyses (sound, visual, verbal, etc.), simulating man’s cognitive faculties and therefore making data-based predictions [Pitruzzella et al. 2017: 92–93].

As well as encouraging fashion brands to create more sustainable styles and lifestyles, a toolbox should be provided too so one could learn how to choose, getting out of the quagmire of the algorithms and the material and standardising culture they promote as we search our buys online. We need to keep in mind that “in practice Artificial Intelligence does not behave ethically. It does not behave unethically either. It has simply no idea what ethics is. But as we observe its predictions we can judge if its results match or go against our ethical principles” [Quintarelli 2020: 74].

We can then get out of such vicious circle through our freedom of choice, an ethical deed that makes man unique and where freedom is the source of the responsibility that man is called to take if he wants to remain human. Even if, as Bernays claims, “we are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never seen or heard of” [Bernays 2020: 23], and, now one could add, by unknown machines, the final choice must be made by the people, who can refuse to be persuaded by critically using the information they get from the advertising campaigns and from the devices to which they (in)voluntarily delegate some of their decision-making power. As Floridi points out, the ethical questions are and will always remain a human question [Floridi 2022: 23].

So, the choice architecture needs to be improved through clear advertising messages, expert groups’ comments, and ethically-directed nudges. Faced with a fashion advertisement, one should not abdicate responsibility, and the decisive factor will consist in encouraging public debates and policies about such phenomenon to build a long-term bond with things, caring less for material wealth and more for emotional and empathic wealth, that reflect ourselves and our care not just for ourselves but also for the ‘other’ and the world we live in. Though still aware of the danger lurking everywhere that “the real stimulating and hot attraction of fashion lies in the contrast between its wide, all-encompassing presence and its fast, fundamental transitoriness, in the right to be unfaithful to it” [Simmel 1957: 558] and hence the endless longing that may never be completely met.