A conversation with Sandra Niessen

In an interview for GQ  about her publication Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan, Kate Fletcher said, "fashion is a verb—not a noun… it's not a garment, it's a process." It can be a verb — to fashion something — but it is its noun definition — to wear the latest fashion — that comes to mind when most people think about fashion. The past year, however, as the coronavirus took away almost all opportunities to perform through clothing and Black Lives Matter protests called for an end to social injustice, people have started to question the meaning of "fashion." Coupled with the climate crisis, the idea of what is in and what is out seems increasingly unfashionable. 

In Georg Simmel's paper 'Fashion,' first published in 1904, he laid out his observations on the subject. Simmel wrote, "fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change." These two opposing forces; the want to ape other humans and the desire for expressions of individuality, are integral to fashion, but "As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom," Simmel said. Fashion was to be enjoyed by European elites, who set fashion trends. Once the rest of society began to wear them they were no longer in — "... fashion ... is a product of class distinction." He wrote: "Fashion does not exist in tribal and classless societies." These ideas that attempted to theorize and conceptualize fashion and separate it from clothing or dress, a material, and tangible object/artifact, have become the cornerstone in the definition of fashion and an integral theory to the way it is taught.

Le Salon de Mode, 1907, Costume Institute Fashion Plate Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Ar

This week I interviewed Sandra Niessen, an anthropologist who last August published 'Fashion, its Sacrifice Zones, and Sustainability' in Fashion Theory. In the essay, Niessen questions Simmel's view and wonders why very few others have. "Simmel saw fashion as a signal and expression of European superiority," she writes. "He contrasted fashion with all clothing that was not consistent with that conceit, pointing out that European fashion styles change quickly while all the other clothing expressions in the world, from tribal to peasant, are hampered by tradition and exemplify stasis and therefore constitute non-fashion." It is this thinking that has allowed sacrifice zones: "physical locations that are designated expendable for the sake of economic activity" to exist. "The zones entail both ecocide and racism because the landscapes and their associated populations are destroyed in the process," Niessen writes. To truly achieve sustainability, we must eliminate the sacrifice zone, and with them this outdated definition of fashion, she argues. 

Shonagh Marshall: How do you define the term 'fashion'?

Sandra Niessen: I think you'll discover with me that I'm not much for definitions. I'm much more interested in dynamics and change, interpretations and comparing — that kind of thing. So I'd like to skip the definitional part and look at the nature of the beast.

I think of fashion as a co-opted term. There is a universal human proclivity to decorate and dress the body. You have a particular Western variant of this universal, and this Western variant we call ‘fashion.’ We know the term fashion refers to something universal: fashioning, façonner, foggiare; it's a ‘way of doing’ — everybody has a way of doing, that is a human universal. Then came the Westerners and said, I think I'll co-opt this term; ‘We're the only ones who have fashion.’ The original definitions were about that co-optation, and, from this, a lot of myths came into being.  With the co-optation of the term came this notion that Western fashion was sui generis — that it wasn't a phenomenon created by the West, but that fashion exists a priori. That delusion was supported by economic dominance.

I've defined fashion in various ways in the past. I've said, Everybody has fashion, and the West should recognize that it has co-opted the term. Other times I've recognized the Western version of dress with the term ‘fashion.’ But the problem with that is that Western fashion is changing all the time; it's incredibly dynamic. There's trickle down; trickle-up; trickle across — there are so many different forms of so-called fashion that the term fails to denote anything specific. The only thing that it seems to denote is Western superiority. It's a way of saying, I'm not ‘them’ because I have fashion, and ‘they’ don't. That's what my writings have been about the last few years. The fashion category is constructed on othering. 

Shonagh: In your research, you have explored what Georg Simmel wrote about fashion. What did Simmel write, and how do you challenge this today?

Sandra: I think Simmel did a very good job of describing fashion in his day. He was a thoughtful, observant man, and he described fashion as he saw it operating in the world then. I don't have a problem with that. I think he developed really good insights. He's the one who initially pointed out the role of fashion leaders and how fashion trickles down, how fashion has to keep changing to remain something that exclusively the elites have and subalterns don't. The problem is not with Simmel; the problem is how Simmel has been received in the academic community that deals with fashion. Up until today, his definition of fashion is still used. That's when I come back to that perception of fashion as a priori, as though Simmel defined a phenomenon that was ‘out there’ and the failure to recognize that the superiority associated with the phenomenon was ascribed and reified over time.

He was right, in his time, when he wrote about European fashions changing faster than dress forms elsewhere. The Industrial Revolution was from 1760 to 1840, thereabouts, and as a result of those technological developments, Western dress could change rapidly. Simmel saw that this was indeed in contrast with what he saw in other cultures. The problem was, he didn't conduct cross-cultural research, to my knowledge. So he couldn't perceive the dynamics that did exist elsewhere, although he does mention slow change.

This notion that only the West has fast-changing fashion has been in textbooks for so long that it has become a central feature for distinguishing fashion from non-fashion systems. I find that very problematic and also extremely strange. We live in a very small world now, we can fly anywhere at the drop of a hat, and we can see how systems are changing everywhere. How on earth can we continue to hold on to that notion of ‘our’ fashion systems being so different from indigenous fashion systems when now we can so easily go out and observe? But we haven't done that, not sufficiently. Fashion textbooks are still very one-sided. So the problem is, his definition is historically bound, and the necessary comparative research was not conducted to test and verify it.  

Shonagh: Why do you think that is? Why haven't academics explored and challenged these concepts for themselves?

Sandra: Fashion theorists have tended to focus on the visual elements of fashion, design changes through time. Conducting cross-cultural research has not been a priority. Second,  I think there is also a certain amount of operating on bias. I don't think there has been a need to go out and test the idea; it's so much easier to remain comfortably in the assumption of superiority and leave it at that.

That's what I find embarrassing, and incredibly dangerous, that in academe — where you expect concepts to be questioned and tested, very different from, say, a fashion magazine — the very nature of the Western dress system has been unquestioned. Maybe it's because fashion teachers have also been preparing students for fashion careers in the fashion industry, so there's been a bit of a dogma being perpetuated. I'm really happy to see that now that is beginning to crumble. 

Shonagh: You have written that fashion carves out sacrifice zones. What are these sacrifice zones, and why do you think this happens? 

Sandra: I like that this question follows on the heels of your question about Simmel. When we have a Western definition of fashion and the claim that fashion occurs only in the West, we have a bifurcated world. That bifurcation is more or less consistent with the boundaries of the sacrifice zones that fashion creates. Fashion depends on the use of materials from nature, labor for production, and waste absorption. The impact of these things has been experienced most profoundly by people outside the West — people of lower conceptual status, economic status, people of other cultures and locales than Europe and North America. Fashion expansion depends on a burgeoning labor pool. The labourers in this pool leave their own traditions to produce in the globalized fashion chain. Thus indigenous cultures become part of the sacrifice zone of fashion. These zones are indispensable for the fashion system that we support by our purchases here in the West. And they are largely hidden from our view. We don't even see the sacrifice zones unless we hear about things like the collapse of Rana Plaza and so on. Then forgetting such disasters is facilitated again because fashion magazines, exhibitions, and so on emphasize beautiful designs, the latest designer, the identity you would like to display, having new things, the new season and so on.

We focus on everything except where the materials come from, who makes our clothing, and how they are faring. We are able to ignore the injustices that fashion perpetrates. One of the most important characteristics of sacrifice zones is that they are forgotten, erased, ignored. We don't connect the dots and it isn’t easy to connect the dots even if we want to. It is hard to obtain the information.

Animesh Biswas et. al. "Rescue and Emergency Management of a Man-Made Disaster: Lesson Learnt from a Collapse Factory Building, Bangladesh", The Scientific World Journal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Shonagh: You wrote a paper in Fashion Theory called 'Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability' where you interrogate the current approach to "sustainability" in fashion? What do you find to be flawed in work so far to address fashion's relationship to the environment and social equality? 

Sandra: I'd like to preface that by saying, I'm really in awe of what people have done with sustainability to date. I was blown away two years ago when State of Fashion put on its exhibition, showing the incredible steps taken to develop new fibers through recycling and the use of agricultural waste, and so on. Designers are doing amazing things to accommodate discarded materials, to recycle appropriately. I think that's great. I'm also pleased that governments and the United Nations are taking steps to deal with the low wages that producers are earning. 

However, I'm also very aware of things like what's happening in Myanmar, where, right now, you have an authoritarian regime that's pushing people off their lands. I'm from Canada, and we have somebody from Myanmar who stays with my family; he's a refugee. We often go with him into the forest, and he can see, even in Canada, how you can eat in the wilderness. He's a member of one of the groups that lives in the forest and used to eat  from the forest, not cultivated crops. He knows which barks, leaves and roots to eat. I know when his people get pushed off their land, they can't make their own clothes anymore; they become dependent on markets. His story is such a good example of how the sacrifice of an indigenous community can work to the advantage of the industrial fashion system, because the people have to start buying clothes and earning wages. So the industrial system expands and another cultural system bites the dust.

The fashion system that we know is dependent on sacrifice zones. It relies on exploitation. Fashion is a capitalist system, and it depends on growth and that means an erosion of diversity. If you want to look at sustainability, it doesn't matter how efficient you are; it doesn't matter how many new fibers you're discovering if you're still working in a system that is predicated on expansion and growth, that negates and erases any sense of harm that it's doing and focuses on the visuals to the exclusion of all else. You don't end up with  sustainability; you may achieve more efficiency in the use of materials. Perhaps those who create the clothes might get a little better income, but you have not achieved sustainability. The sacrifice zones still exist.

To achieve sustainability, we have to understand how the fashion system functions in the world and its detrimental effects: the erosion of cultural diversity as well as biodiversity, the decline of language systems, conceptual systems, meaning systems, and other clothing systems. All of that decline buttresses the fashion system and allows it to expand. But the fashion system requires diversity. By eroding cultural diversity, it is hurting itself in the end.  If we perceive how much inspiration the fashion system has derived from non-Western indigenous designs, we see that it is cannibalizing all the time. The quest for sustainability must take not just the exploitation of nature but also the exploitation and erosion of cultural systems into account. When you remove indigenous people from their land to exploit that land for mining, oil palm or other monocrops, you're losing the biological diversity you need for cultural diversity and sustainability.

Shonagh: You've done a lot of research into the Batak people of Sumatra. When did you find that they started to adopt Western fashion, and why did they do that?

Sandra: I wrote a book about that, published in ‘93. I was very curious — why did the Batak people of North Sumatra reject their indigenous clothing system and buy into the Western system? In this case, I went back to the 19th century. The Batak people weren't annexed until the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, at which point the clothing system changed rapidly, but it was all already changing long before then. 

I find your question an interesting challenge. It's hard to put my finger on the moment when these people started wearing Western dress. I wouldn't say that was the same moment that they began to adopt Western dress or fashion (here I am using the two words dress and fashion as equivalents). I started to ponder, why not? It's because, for me, the dress that is a signifier of Western fashion is only that — a signifier. Western fashion goes paired with a mentality, a system of thought, a conceptual system — clothing is only symptomatic. Yes, it's symptomatic of dynamics and trade, geopolitics, new epistemological systems, a changing sense of time, a sense of future, a sense of progress, and tradition. I remember the times when I did fieldwork — I'm an anthropologist — and I became aware that people started to describe themselves as having traditional times and modern times, I realized that those perceptions of self had been brought in through outside influence, during the colonial era.

When you start adopting another piece of clothing, you are seeing the world differently. You're assuming a different epistemological system; you're allowing it to be paired somehow with the epistemological system you've grown up with. I think of fashion not just in terms of garments, per se, but in terms of what they communicate. I would say that the Batak system of dress started to change at least 150 years ago. When the Batak people increasingly wore Malay-style garments from the East Coast of Sumatra, that was a colonial adaptation. They were adapting to a shift in power relations that the Dutch colonizers inspired in Sumatra. You dress to portray yourself as you would like to be seen. I perceive that they were saying; I would rather be seen as a person to be reckoned with than be dismissed as inconsequential. Even though they're not wearing Western dress, I would say that the adoption of Malay clothing was a colonial phenomenon. This colonial change was paving the way for the adoption of Western dress. There's no moment when you ring the bell and say, Oh, look, they just changed to Western clothing. It's an epistemological, slow change. It's a geopolitical change. I think the West only perceives it as having taken place at a certain point when the actual clothing is recognizable by the West. Whereas, the indigenous system of dress, and the history of the indigenous system of dress, has always been dynamic, has always been changing, has always been adapting to local influences, whatever they may have been.

I would see the change beginning as soon as the West's presence became apparent in the area. Now you have so-called fashion designers, locally, who model themselves after the Western designer, who exploit and objectify the women of their own culture, who romanticize and appropriate in the same way as the West does, to make garments that they think will be saleable on an international market. You find that happening internally within the Batak society; maybe that's the point where people can say, ‘Oh, they've got fashion now too.’ But, I see it as just the next step in a long, long process that has been taking place. The hierarchies implicit in the fashion system are then completely replicated in Batak society.

Batak women in Karo lands, circa 1890. Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and Leiden University Library/Wikimedia Commons

Shonagh: The Batak people act as a microcosm for these much larger issues that are happening all over the world. How did you find it impacted their culture? 

Sandra: That's such a huge question. I've just been on the phone for an hour and a half with my adopted Batak daughter, talking about her life issues that have come up. She's only one person in a large social system; I’ve watched her struggles, her ambivalence. I think about her mother, who is maybe a good person to talk about. She is an excellent weaver, she can make such exquisite things, but generally, she won't weave because the market doesn't support it. She can make a textile that can be used in ritual, a thousand times better than what you can find industrially made — she'll still buy the machine-made one on the market because it's considered modern and acceptable. It's what everybody else wears, and she'll forego her own weaving. She knows what a brilliant weaver she is. She knows how incredibly difficult it is to weave the textile that she weaves, so she has high regard for her work and her husband — he's recently deceased — had very high regard for it as well — he wanted her to teach her daughters so that the culture could be continued. He knew the market wasn't going to serve to perpetuate their culture.

There's reverence for their history, their traditions, but at the same time, there's an incredible embarrassment and sense of shame if they wear their traditional clothes in a modern setting, I see ambivalence, time and again, expressed in so many ways; it's painful. In farming families where daughters leave the villages to go to the cities, they know that they have to comport themselves differently. They wear different things; you'll even find videos on Facebook about good etiquette and how to be a modern being in the world — how not to embarrass yourself by looking like you come from the village. 

Shonagh: I think about the emphasis put on individualism in Western fashion and how it capitalizes on clothing as a means to express identity; hearing about the Batak people you see what a fallacy this is, as Western fashion is annihilating culture and expression. A debate arises when talking about fast fashion and the Western fashion industry that changing it will result in the loss of jobs for people in some of the world's lowest-income areas. What do you think about this conversation?  

Sandra: I'll start with what we're hearing these days. With COVID-19, suddenly nobody's buying new clothes, all the factories stop production, the laborers have to go back home, and they're suffering from lack of income. We hear people saying, ‘Well, you know, our fast fashion, at least it gives them a wage.’ People might think, ‘When I buy clothes, at least I'm supporting somebody somewhere else.’ That's true; the money that we put into the system when we buy an item, a percentage of it goes to labor. But that's such a very small window to look at the relationship between fashion and labor through. I think we need a much larger window to see fashion's complicity in the erosion of culture.

If I look at a village in Indonesia and why people are leaving a village, it's in part because of the modernity that I've already mentioned, that sense of embarrassment if you stay behind in the village. There's also a very, very powerful economic reason. Villages aren't being supported, so if you want to make something of your life as a young woman or as a young man, you almost have to leave the village and try to make your way in the outside world. 

I'm in touch with a woman right now in Indonesia whose father died just when she finished high school. And her mum couldn’t support her children alone. So the eldest daughter went to Java and got a job where she could, which was in a garment factory. When COVID came along, she lost her job. In the meantime, she had married, had kids of her own, and then her husband died, so her kids went off to stay with her mother because she couldn't look after them while working in a factory. So the mother now has her own children, plus her daughter's children. Her daughter was supporting everybody and then lost her job. She was just a veil of tears the whole time I talked with her. She has nowhere to turn.

Fashion is complicit in that it can make use of that excess labor that's flooding to the cities. The reason that people are flooding to the cities is so much more than just the fault of the fashion system. Still, the fashion system is part and parcel of that bigger whole, which absorbs people in the dominant global economic system. I think that's very important to see because when people say, ‘Well, at least we're giving them a job’, yeah, that's true,  but it fails to take into account so much more. We have to look at that when we look at sustainability in the world. It has to do with land relations — who owns the land — local economics, global economics, living wage. It's a huge, complex ball of wax. It's a huge, complex, systemic issue in which fashion is complicit. 

Shonagh: There is othering at play. It is incredibly problematic to assume that these awful jobs where you work long hours for almost nothing are enough.

Sandra: It's narrow because you can't live on bread alone. That's one of the things that I hate about even the term ‘garment workers’. With Fashion Revolution's slogan, ‘I made your clothes’ — the campaign that put a face to laboring people — yes, it gives them a face, but that person is still just an economic cog in the wheel — you don't know their culture, language, or clothing traditions, what they're losing in terms of skills by going to work in a factory. So, you've got a name — this fits into a kind of Western individualist perception of the world; the perception is of a garment worker who earns a wage. But there's so much more to them. There's a whole world that this person represents. When you look at it, I feel that the campaign is a failure because you precisely don't learn who made your clothes. That campaign isn't telling you who made your clothes in that much larger holistic system; it's narrowing the fashion garment worker down to a wage earner.

Buying clothing might give these people a wage, but vulnerability is more than just about income. It is about the loss of culture, loss of respect for your heritage — that can also generate insecurity and vulnerability, a sense of loss, a sense of aimlessness, a lack of identity. Fashion isn't a solution to that. Working in a factory is not a solution to that. The system we know erodes indigeneity, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier — it erodes local systems. We're learning increasingly from the people working with sustainability that we have to go towards local networks, local solutions to these larger issues. The fashion system, along with capitalism, is eroding the local solutions; we have to recognize that vulnerability has to do with more than just loss of income. 

Safomasi factory, India, Fashion Revolution 

Shonagh: It is interesting how the Western fashion system has aligned itself with art and culture instead of with the garment's production cycle. I have been thinking a lot about whether it is indeed linked to art and culture. Although I believe it takes cues from what is happening, these trends are all for capital gain. Would you agree? If so, how do we begin to educate people about fashion as not clothes but as an idea?

Sandra: I would still examine the need to look at fashion as art and culture. I don't have to tell you — you've probably done more fashion history studies than I have — there's a beautiful, extraordinary story to know about fashion and art, fashion and Western history, and so on. But what I like to look at is how we have prioritized the visual, above the processional, and any other meanings system that could exist. When people talk about fashion in ways that exclude all those other things involved in the fashion system, those are the blinkers that Simmel put on.

Prioritizing the visual allows us not to connect the dots. So how can we teach people the other facets of fashion? I would say, well, it means connecting the dots, it means taking a look at who made your clothes but then in a larger sense, not through an individualist lens, but a community lens or global dynamics lens. There are lots of dots being connected right now. How can we educate people to look at fashion differently? We're beginning to do that with the blue dot system, for example, where you're able to put the number on your clothing into your computer, and see the whole supply chain and whether or not it has been fair. So fairness is one of the issues that comes in to help us connect the dots. We find that too with sustainable agriculture. Now people are talking about which clothes are made within sustainable agricultural systems. What can sustainable agriculture offer to provide alternative clothing that's sustainable? So we're increasingly thinking about the implications of clothing production.

Thinking about clothing production brings us back to that whole sustainability argument. Culture has to come into that equation, too, not just the physical facets but also the cultural facets. Right now, it's in the ethics camp and the sustainability camp, but we need to interrogate all production systems. Shouldn't we know what's going on when we buy a lovely new pair of pants? What are we supporting in this world? Who is winning and who is losing? We have to connect the dots; transparency has to be something that we ask for and even achieve.

Shonagh: You also call for a broadening of the scope of fashion history and fashion studies. Can you explain what you envisage this to be?

Sandra: People who study cloth and clothing are always complaining that they're always being pushed aside because it's a ‘female’ topic and hasn't got the weightiness of ‘male’ topics, if I can put it that way. At universities, the first department that gets cutbacks, is the department that looks at arts and crafts. It's thought of as a "fluffy, pink feminine realm." I would say, in a sense, we call it upon ourselves if we deal only with the visual aspects of fashion, the selfie view of fashion, the look at me, and nothing else. I think that's one of fashion's most successful strategies to keep us from connecting the dots. The idea of looking at the beauty of an item instead of the hell that somebody went through to produce it. I would say, we have done fashion an incredible disservice, and ourselves thereby, by not seeing how it's been complicit in its global economic context with capitalism, economics, politics, sociology, gender studies, race relations, studies of class, coloniality, social history and on and on and on. I wonder, even if you take a look at the colonization of Africa if you subtract the clothing element, the disparity between Western garb and indigenous garb, what would colonialism look like without fashion? It's been such a huge player in shaping, highlighting, abetting, and leading in changing epistemologies and changing geopolitical systems. There is such scope in fashion that we haven't even begun to examine.

Shonagh: My final question is, what vision do you have for the future? What would Sandra's utopia look like?

Sandra: No sacrifice zones. When you think about that, that's huge — physical and social. It would mean that our world is sustainable. It would mean that that incredible ego that we have in the West, which allows immigrants from Africa to drown on their way to Italy, and they're not allowed to be picked up by boats, that would all have to change, the whole world order would have to change if we have no sacrifice zones. There would never have to be another Black Lives Matter uprising. It's hard even to conceptualize what the world would look like without sacrifice zones; we are totally constructed on sacrifice zones.

That's a nice one to play with. I think you could probably develop a whole course on what the world would look like with no sacrifice zones, and at the end of the year, you'd not be talked out. 

In my utopia I would also have acceptance of diversity and variety. I remember the first time I went to India, in 1985, walking down the street in Delhi. At a certain point I realized that the clothes I was seeing were one-offs, they were hand-dyed, they were handmade — they weren't mass-produced in a factory. I remember the feeling that it gave me; it was such an exquisite feeling of possibilities. It was almost like a relaxation, a sense of, ‘Ah, look at this, it can be like this.’

I would love to have the diversity and variety that was once in the world. I don't know how it would be possible entirely, but I think we're heading in that direction, to a certain extent. If we honor the local, get rid of sacrifice zones, and prioritize diversity and difference. If we advocate for things like basic income, repair economies, Black Lives Matter, restricting the power of the banks, building local systems, sustainable farming, caring for craft movements to support villages, the farmer rebellions in India, the struggle for democracy in Myanmar, and so on and so on. I mean, there is a whole segment of the world that's pushing for that diversity. That allowance for difference, my utopia would include that.