Fashion is commonly framed as a matter of personal taste, aesthetic preference, or a superficial style. Yet clothing operates within a far more complex social field, where garments function as visible mediators of belonging, distinction, and legitimacy. What individuals wear participates in symbolic systems that shape how bodies are perceived, interpreted, and positioned. Dress is rarely neutral. It reflects internalized norms, status sensitivities, and deeply embedded mechanisms through which recognition and social intelligibility are negotiated.

To understand fashion it this way is to recognise its entanglement with biology, psychology, power, and social structure. The desire to appear appropriately, credible, or aligned is neither trivial nor irrational; it emerges from the relational conditions of human existence. We do not dress outside the system, but within it. Awareness, however, can alter how these dynamics are inhabited -clarifying what garments and symbols can meaningfully communicate, and what they cannot resolve.

Appearance is never neutral. Long before clothing became a matter of style, it functioned as a way of making “the look” readable in social space. This article examines how appearance became socially coded and why that code continues to operate. Rather than tracing garments or styles, it follows the development of a system through which visible difference became legible, repeatable, and actionable. From early decoration to dress and later fashion systems, appearance functioned as a material interface between bodies and social order. What changed over time were the forms and meanings attached to clothing; what remained constant was the role of appearance in enabling rapid social orientation. Dress did not acquire significance through aesthetics alone, but because it allowed individuals to be positioned, recognized, and evaluated within shared social space.

The persistence of this clothing system cannot be explained by culture alone. Social perception operates automatically and prior to reflection, extracting information from visible cues in order to guide interaction. Higher cognition may reinterpret or critique these judgements, but it does not prevent them from forming. As a result, appearance continues to influence trust, credibility, inclusion, and exclusion, even in societies that value rationality and self-awareness. Fashion accelerates and reorganizes the surface the code, but it does not suspend the act of reading. To appear remains to be processed, and participation in the system is unavoidable.

Fashion is not disappearing. What is coming to an end is the economic logic that allowed it to expand without limit while externalizing its social and ecological costs. Across luxury and mass-market segments alike, the industry has been organized around accelerating volume, compressed labor, and chronic overproduction, even as consumer demand has saturated and planetary boundaries have tightened. The result is a system that now produces more than ecosystems can sustain. Overproduction, discounting, destruction, and secondary markets are structural mechanisms for managing surplus in an industry that has outgrown both its customers and its material base.

What follows is not the disappearance of fashion, which history shows to be persistent, but a reorganization of its conditions of existence. Regulations, traceability, and rising resource constraints are forcing the industry to bear costs that were previously shifted onto workers, ecosystems, and the public, while saturated consumer markets make unsold inventory increasingly expensive to absorb. The current conditions make clear that structural change is necessary, and that the strongest prospects lie with brands whose scale and output are aligned with real use rather than speculative growth, particularly smaller, made-to-order, and tightly bounded models that build value through long-lasting relationships between suppliers, producers, manufacturers, and costumers. A possibility is opening toward a fashion industry that operates with greater responsibility and transparency regarding its social and environmental impacts - in other words, one that begins to behave like a grown-up system.

2025: A PULP Retrospective looks back on a year spent examining fashion as a whole system - not only clothing or style but the people, economics, materials, and cultural meanings that shape how garments are made. Across the year, the writing moved between reflection and analysis, tracing how semiotic meaning, business realities, and ecological limits intersect in everyday garments. The point of PULP wasn’t just to observe fashion. It was to think inside the system - so we could understand what is actually workable, sustainable, and ethically defensible for our brand, ELS. So, the year was shaped by exploration - thinking about value, culture, labor, and materiality - and sharing what we discovered along the way. The work continues: we move into the year ahead with curiosity, steadiness and care. Happy New Year!

This article explains how fashion startups should choose a business model before beginning product development, and why this decision is more important for long-term success than creative positioning alone. It outlines the main fashion business models - volume-scale, wholesale, and precision-based - and explains how each one operates in terms of cash flow, capital requirements, risk exposure, and growth pace. The issue shows that business models are not interchangeable strategies, but distinct systems that determine how money moves, how much uncertainty a brand can absorb, and how quickly it can and want realistically grow.

It also argues that choosing a business model is both an economic and a values-based decision. Each model supports a different type of brand, from high-growth mass-market businesses to slower, sustainability-oriented companies. Because early choices create long-term dependencies in production, supply chains, pricing, and customer expectations, they are difficult to reverse later. The purpose of the article is to give founders a clear, practical framework to align financial structure, growth ambition, and brand values from the start, reducing the risk of strategic contradictions and early failure.

While contemporary clothing production is largely structured around short product cycles, rapid turnover, and short production cycles, the skin remains largely peripheral in material decision-making. Through the work of institutions such as Hochenstein, OEKO-TEX©, and North Carolina State University, the article shows how textiles are tested for basic skin safety - by screening for harmful chemical residue, irritation potential, and physical stress during weather, and by defining minimum threshold for what is considered acceptable in contact with the body.

The article also addressed Empa’s research, which extends beyond basis textile safety toward materials designed to interact functionally with skin physiology. this includes work on skin-mimicking membranes and therapeutic textile systems used in clinical contexts, where materials are developed to influence moisture regulation, healing environments, and controlled substance delivery. These developments suggest a future in which textiles may be understood as materials that actively shape the skin’s microclimate and long-term condition. At the same time, these developments are not yet part of everyday clothing entirely, but they point toward a different way of understanding textiles and their role.

This article provides a structural overview of how fashion collections are developed across the industry’s main formats: commercial ready-to-wear, conceptual runway collections, and haute couture. It outlines the internal processes that connect early conceptual research to material sourcing, sampling, fittings, and final presentation, while highlighting how each category operates under different creative, technical, and economic conditions. From the corporate architectures of luxury houses to the integrated, hands-on methods of independent designers, the piece maps the systems through which garments move from idea to form - and the institutional frameworks that shape those movements.

Rather than attempting exhaustive coverage, the analysis focuses on the core mechanisms that define collection development today. It clarifies how creative decision-making intersects with supply-chain realities, why runway shows and couture presentations remain symbolic rather than industrial outputs. Even as large luxury houses increasingly blend commercial pieces into their runway narratives, the runway itself continues to serve as space for image-making and conceptual identity, whereas independent and locally rooted brands navigate the same structures at a different scale. often merging creative exploration with direct-to-market production. Together, these perspectives offer a clear structural overview of how contemporary fashion collections are conceived, developed, and shown.

This article offers a structural overview of the contemporary fashion system, tracing how garments move from initial design through sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. It examines the chain of decisions made along the way - how materials are selected, how production is managed, how logistics shape margins, and how retail environments convert presence into demand. The goal is to clarify how each stage contributes to economic performance and material outcomes, and how inefficiencies or misalignments accumulate into financial loss and waste.

Alongside the dominant model - built around long lead times, seasonal calendars, and volume-based production - the piece also maps emerging alternatives: direct-to-customer strategies, made-to-order systems, and surplus-based sourcing. These models operate on different assumptions and timeframes, offering varied approaches to aligning production with demand, material limits, and cultural shifts. This structural overview aims to make visible the operational choices available to both established players and independent designers, and to map out how the system works. The older model - based on seasonal planning, long lead times, and large production volumes - is clearly unsustainable - ecologically, socially, and economically. It has led to chronic overproduction, markdown cycles, and enormous waste. Yet it persists because it is deeply embedded in supply chains, business structures, and retail expectations. At the same time, emerging alternatives are proving viable, especially for smaller, more agile brands. These models - DTC and MTO or local production - offer clearer alignment between demand and production, between values and operations.

This week on PULP focuses on the written layer of Stardust Dignity, the upcoming collection by Edie Lou Studio. While the previous collection, the (Birth) Right Cut, translated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into printed form, this one turns inward - the words are personal. They feature raw, unfiltered texts written over the past nine years - during my time living in California, Paris, Florence, and Zurich.

These short poems, fragments of thoughts, are time documents, and will appear printed on the garments - just as the UDHR appeared on the previous collection. If that collection was the law - the written foundation - then Stardust Dignity explores how that foundation lives in us. Its emotional foundation lies in inner freedom. Dignity becomes a way of being that grows through awareness and presence. And it carries a sense of love in its broadest form.

This week’s article examines the intertwined histories of Marlow Moss and Piet Mondrian, tracing the origin of the “double line” and how questions of authorship, visibility, and power shaped its legacy. Positioned between Constructivism and De Stijl, Moss developed a visual language of precision and relation that influenced the grammar of modern abstraction - yet their contribution was later absorbed into the dominant narrative of male modernism.

Through Moss’s story, the article addresses a broader systemic issue: how women and queer artists have historically been written out of the narratives they participated in building. Across art, design, and politics, their ideas were often absorbed into the work of more dominant male contemporaries - a process reinforced by institutions. In this sense, authorship became less a record of creation than a filter of legitimacy - determining whose work could be recognised, and whose would be forgotten. Moss’s marginalisation is not merely a historical oversight but a part of a longer continuum - one that extends into today’s creative industries.

For decades, fashion’s idea of progress has shifted from the industrial mass production and synthetic material innovation to the digital, each wave promising growth and profit - progress measured in scale and accumulation. Today, as the industry faces its ecological limits, a new paradigm is taking shape - one not rooted in algorithmic optimization or industrial automation, but emerging from the convergence of biotechnology, circular design, and ecological system thinking. Fungi, algae, and bacteria are emerging as models for a circular economy that operates within regenerative systems. Mycelium leathers, enzymatic recycling, and bio-based dyes mark the beginning of a material evolution - where fashion - finally - learns to collaborate with life and work with living systems as agents of production.

With this shift toward biological innovation and regenerative design the industry is slowly entering a new phase. This turn extends beyond laboratories and supply chains; it is a cultural reorientation. It invites industries and individuals alike to rethink progress through the lens of interdependence. The Pilzfestspiele in Vienna gives this idea form - uniting scientist, photographer, artists, designers, and entrepreneurs around the shared potential of fungi. Across photographs, installations, lectures, and collaborations, it demonstrates how mycelial thinking can translate ecological awareness into systemic change. Within this context, the Pilzfestspiele offered us the opportunity to share our collaboration with soil ecologist Franz Bender, The Underpants Dress - linking soil health, fungi, and the need for truly regenerative materials in fashion and circular economy in fashion, across industries, and in life itself. It stands as a reminder that innovation begins in the living systems beneath us - without fungi, microbes, and soil, there is no renewal and no future.

The Digital Product Passport signals the end of opacity as fashion’s default mode. At least in the European Union. As outlined by the European Parliament in its 2024 study, textiles sold in Europe will begin carrying digital passports in 2027, with simplified data sets at first and expanded versions by 2030, reaching full implementation by 2033. Each garment will be linked to verifiable information on fibre origin, water and carbon impact, chemical use, labor conditions and options for repair or recycling. This shift responds to structural failures in the industry: the EU Environment Agency estimates that textiles are the fourth largest source of environmental pressure in Europe, generating around 270 kg of CO2 per person annually, while the Ellen MacArthur Foundation reports that less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new fibres. What was once shielded by marketing language will now be confronted through standardised data, moving sustainability from slogans to facts.

This transformation challenges both the industry and its audience. Luxury houses that built their prestige on symbolic narratives - “Made in Italy”, heritage craft - will be forced to align these stories with verifiable supply chain data. Fast fashion, meanwhile, will struggle as the Digital Product Passport exposes the hidden costs behind ultra-cheap garments: water use, carbon emissions, and exploitative labor. For consumers, this means that style and price will no longer stand alone; every purchase will be directly linked to measurable histories of production and impact.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things resists every attempt at containment. More than a surreal fable, it stages identity as an unfinished experiment, dramatized through Bella Baxter’s refusal of the roles offered to her—wife, mistress, dependent. Her erratic movements, grotesque costumes, and distorted environments do not merely signal eccentricity but reveal a deeper truth: autonomy emerges only when inherited scripts collapse. In a time when identity is increasingly packaged, marketed, and performed, this rawness unsettles. The film restores to the avant-garde its indispensable function—not provocation as spectacle, but existential rupture, reminding us that freedom means refusing to let identity harden into conformity.

This is why Poor Things still matters today. Bella’s journey is less a coming-of-age tale than a constructivist allegory of selfhood, mirroring the pressures of the present. Each encounter is a test of possibility, a place where roles are absorbed and discarded in equal measure. The grotesque silhouettes that exaggerate her proportions, the warped cities that resist realism, the nonlinear arc of development—all underscore that identity is not natural or inevitable but continuously negotiated. In a culture defined by surveillance, performance, and compliance, Bella’s refusal to collapse into stability is urgent. To preserve the curiosity of a child while insisting on adult autonomy is to remain radically alive—a task no less political now than in the Victorian frame she subverts.

Avant-garde in fashion cannot survive as a decorative gesture; if avant-garde is reduced to just an aesthetic - ripped fabrics, extreme silhouettes, or theatrical styling - without carrying deeper meaning (political, cultural, human), it loses its force. It becomes “decoration”, something visually striking but easily absorbed into mainstream fashion as just another style. In affluent societies, where comfort and conformity mute resistance, rebellion is absorbed almost instantly into trend cycles. What once unsettled now becomes a marketing strategy, emptied of urgency. Yet precisely in this climate the avant-garde is most necessary - not for shock, obviously, but for clarity. Its role is to resist assimilation, to give forms to voices and values that the system would prefer to silence.

Authenticity becomes the ground for this resistance. When design is aligned with human dignity and ecological awareness, the results cannot be mistaken for compliance. Silhouettes, fabrics, and gestures carry codes; they either repeat order or disrupt it. A garment worn with conviction - because it mirrors identity rather than spectacle - holds the possibility of genuine avant-garde. It does not need to shout, because its refusal to bend already unsettles. In this refusal lies the future of fashion: radically human, politically clear, and holding open the space of memory, critique, and resistance when society would rather erase it.

Fashion’s price tags rarely tell the truth. From Versailles to fast fashion, garments have been priced as theatre - signalling exclusivity at the top and accessibility at the bottom - while the real costs of labor, ecology, and culture remain concealed. A coat may retail for a fraction of its true cost because wages are suppressed, its ecological resources are depleted, and creative heritage is appropriated without recognition. Conversely, luxury prices soar not because they reflect embedded value, but because they signal scarcity, leaving most of the margin in the hands of conglomerates rather than the workers who sustain production.

Across centuries, the logic remains the same: garments are priced to sustain hierarchy, not to reflect the labor, resources, or cultural value embedded in them. To move forward, fashion must redefine what price represents. True value cannot be measured in speed or prestige, but in the dignity of labor, the integrity of ecosystems, the durability of design, and the cultural contributions that shape creativity. A value-driven economy would make price a record of interdependence rather than illusion - aligning fashion’s future not with exploitation, but with recognition, responsibility, and longevity.

The fashion industry presents material innovation as its most compelling answer to the ecological crisis. Mycelium leather, spider-silk proteins, algae-based yarns, and other lab-grown fibres are promoted as breakthroughs that could reconcile consumer desire with planetary limits. These technologies are impressive, but their promise risks being overstated. At small scales they appear sustainable, yet scaling them often requires high energy inputs and new infrastructures, while leaving untouched the structural drivers of fashion’s crisis: overproduction, acceleration, and disposability. Innovation alone cannot resolve a system that exceeds ecological limits by design.

To confront this, fashion must redefine value itself. The question is not only what fibres are used, but how much is produced, at what speed, and under what social and ecological conditions. Without slowing production, embedding transparency, and enforcing regulation, new fibres risk becoming symbolic gestures rather than systemic solutions. A future of ecological dignity in fashion will require more than technical breakthroughs: it demands cultural and political transformation, in which garments are valued not only for their design but for the human labor, ecosystems, and non-human lives that sustain them.

Fashion has never been a trivial pursuit. Its foundations lie in the labor of those denied recognition: women in workshops, enslaved and colonised workers in global cotton and silk economies, migrant labourers int today’s supply chains, and queer and subcultural innovators who redefined style under conditions of exclusion. These groups built both the material and symbolic foundations of fashion, yet their contributions were repeatedly devalued, dismissed as frivolity, or appropriated without credit.

Fashion legitimacy has been filtered through a narrow gaze. From the invention of the couturier in 19th-century Paris, which elevated Charles Frederick Worth as a white male “genius” to the appropriation of Black, queer, and subcultural aesthetics reframed as innovation only when detached from their originators, the industry has been built on structural erasure. Enslaved labor in the cotton fields, women’s invisibilised work in garment factories, and queer codes of style developed under persecution all shaped fashion’s global power - yet authority and profit consolidated elsewhere.

This asymmetry is not only historical; it persists in today’s luxury conglomerates, fast fashion complexes, and global supply chains. Millions of workers sustain production while cultural prestige accrues to a small circle of creative directors and CEOs. To move forward, fashion must dismantle the dominance of the white male gaze as the sole arbiter of legitimacy. Cultural authority cannot continue to be filtered through whiteness, masculinity, and European prestige while the foundations of the industry remain erased. Reconfiguring legitimacy means recognising multiple genealogies of creativity, embedding transparency into business models, and redistributing value across the system. But it also requires individual work: confronting the ways we internalise and reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, and class in our own consumption and judgments. If law, capital, culture, and self-practice begin to align, fashion could transform its legacy of exploitation into a model of interconnected economies - a system built on accountability, redistribution, and dignity. The future of glamour, in this sense, will depend on whether the industry can align its cultural prestige with genuine justice.

Fashion’s reputation as a frivolous industry is rooted in a long historical axis of devaluation. From antiquity through the industrial age, textile and garment production was indispensable to economic and cultural life, yet consistently dismissed because it was associated with women’s work. Spinning, weaving, and sewing were coded as unskilled or secondary, reducing essential labour to the level of vanity or excess. This dismissal became structurally entrenched, linking fashion’s material centrality with its cultural marginalisation.

That same logic persists today, but in globalised form. As production was displaced to the Global South, what remained visible in the North was not industry or craft, but consumption: shopping, advertising, and spectacle. The labour that sustains fashion has been obscured behind geographic distance and cultural hierarchies, just as women’s labour was once obscured behind gendered assumptions. Fashion is not trivial by nature; it has been made trivial by the systematic devaluation of the people and places upon which it depends.

Fashion is not a surface layer of culture; it is one of the most complex and far-reaching systems on the planet. Every garment begins in the soil - in the cotton fields, flax pastures, or sheep-grazed lands, and fossil-fuel extraction sites that anchor a global supply chain. From there, fibres move through water-intensive processing, chemical treatment, and multinational manufacturing before returning, often as waste, to the same ecosystems that produced them. To dismiss fashion as frivolous is to ignore its role in agriculture, climate resilience, water security, labour rights, and cultural identity. Its impacts rival those of the food system, yet it continues to escape the scrutiny, regulation, and urgency such scale demands.

This misperception is no accident. Historically trivialised through gendered and cultural biases, sustained by subconscious self-protection, and reinforced by an industry that benefits from its own underestimation, fashion remains misunderstood by strategic image management. But the stakes -ecological collapse, human exploitation, and the erosion of cultural diversity - are too high for indifference. If cultural narratives are redefined, education made systemic and interdisciplinary, and legislation made binding, fashion can shift from a driver of depletion to a force for regeneration. To understand fashion is to recognise that no one is outside it - and that to claim otherwise is to abdicate responsibility for one of the planet’s most powerful and consequential systems.

What we often mistake for moral awakening is, in truth, a short cycle of performance - a flare of outrage, a gesture of care, a slogan in place of thought. Empathy, once a condition for civic life’s reduced to spectacle: emotionally charged, highly visible, but ultimately transient. True empathy - embedded, sustained, and ethically grounded - demands something more difficult: a coherent identity, capable of engaging with others without collapsing into fear or mimicry. It is embedded empathy. It is not just about feeling for others. It is about having enough internal solidarity - a well-formed moral core - to stay open without losing yourself. That requires reflection, emotional regulation, and ethical maturity. Without this kind of empathy, the self becomes reactive, brittle, and easily manipulated. This is not simply a psychological issue - it is a political emergency.

To rebuild identity on firmer ground, we must turn inward and outward at once: toward emotional literacy, moral development, and human dignity. The work begins where performance ends - in silence, in presence, in the slow cultivation of ethical autonomy. In a time of performative politics and algorithmic selfhood, the project of becoming truly human must reclaim its foundation: not identity as branding, but identity as responsibility. Not empathy as a trend, but as the ground of justice.