a FRIVOLOUS industry: Gender, labor, and fashion’s historical axis of devaluation

Aug 21

Fashion is often dismissed as surface - a carousel of trends, catwalks, and seasonal excess. Nothing more than shallow spectacle. Having traced fashion’s entanglement with soil, water, and agriculture last week, we now turn to its social fabric: the cultural and historical backgrounds that made one of the world’s largest industries appear superficial, frivolous, and kept it stubbornly underestimated. Given the fashion system’s complexity, this dimensions merit dedicated attention in their own right. So this week, we’re unpicking the cultural seams that keep fashion in the shadows of its own spotlight.

No reminder is too frequent: fashion remains one of the most powerful, largest, and among the most consequential global industries. Valued at over $2.5 trillion annually, it accounts for about 2% of global GDP and provides direct employment for more than 60 million people worldwide. In countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam, garments form the backbone of the economy, representing up to 80% of exports. In purely economic terms, fashion is infrastructure - as central to growth and stability as energy or agriculture.

Beyond its size, fashion is a political force. It is one of the most globalized industries, spanning cotton fields, garment factories, shipping routes, luxury flagships, and digital marketplaces. Its supply chains reveal the stark geography of inequality: profits concentrated in the Global North, while environmental costs and labor exploitation are outsourced to the Global South. The dependency runs so deep that fluctuations in consumer demand can destabilize entire economies. Fashion is therefore not just a consumer sector, but a global system shaping trade, labor, and geopolitical relations.

Last week, we explored fashion’s material foundations and the ecological stakes that place it as planetary infrastructure alongside the food and energy sectors. But the industry’s underestimation is not only ecological; it is also cultural, shaped by its troubled history build on exclusion and inequality. Fashion has long been trivialized, not because it lacks impact, obviously, but because of the way its labor and creativity have been coded - feminized, racialized, and queered, and therefore strategically dismissed. For centuries, fashion’s foundations were built by those pushed to the margins and whose contributions were systematically devalued.

We can all agree that that the fashion industry cannot continue to operate as it does today. But for it to become fairer and truly sustainable, we must first understand its heritage and the socio-political reasons why it has been trivialized for so long. Once fashion is taken seriously as the global force it is, it gains the political weight, lobbying power, and institutional recognition needed to drive real reform - from labor rights to environmental regulation.

Barber notes that the spindle was humanity’s first machine (©Edie Lou)

Fashion as “Women’s Work”: Devaluation Through Gender

From its earliest forms, textile labor was gendered. As Elizabeth Barber demonstrates in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, spinning and weaving were among humanity’s first technologies - predating metallurgy and rivalling agriculture in economic importance. Textiles enabled survival through clothing, shelter, and trade; in many early societies, cloth even functioned as a form of currency. Barber notes that the spindle was humanity’s first machine, invented at least 7,000 - 8,000 BCE in regions like Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Anatolia, a tool that transformed raw fiber into usable thread - a technological leap on par with the plough. Both inventions were vital for human civilization. While the plough made it possible to farm, the spindle made it possible to produce thread and textiles on a larger scale.

The ability to produce durable cloth meant the difference between life and death: without warm, layered textiles, communities that were exposed to lethal winters depended on the unpredictable availability of hides and furs. And animal hides, though protective, were heavy, scarce, and inflexible; woven fabric could be layered for warmth, cut and resewn, and produced in greater quantities from renewable fibers like flax and wool. This made it far more adaptable to human needs, allowing clothing to be lighter, more portable, and better suited to varied climates.

Yet because spinning, weaving, and sewing were carried out largely by women, these tasks were coded as domestic duty rather than recognized as technological innovation. This cultural framing stripped textile work of prestige and erased the women who carried it out from economic and historical narratives. From the Upper Paleolithic onward (ca. 25,000 - 20,000 BCE), textile work like spinning and weaving shows strong evidence of being primarily female labor. Barber’s core thesis is that in almost every society where we have records, textile production was carried out overwhelmingly by women. Of course, there were some male weavers, but these tended to be rare, and often institutionalized (e.g., in monasteries, in certain guilds, or in specialist roles). In Classical Greece, for example, weaving was quintessentially women’s work - Penelope’s loom in The Odyssey is symbolic of women’s domestic role. In medieval Europe male weavers existed, especially in large urban commercial workshops (guild structures mostly excluded women from “professional” weaving), but the raw fiber processing, spinning, the actual production, and much of the domestic and household scale remained feminized.

From the Middle Ages onward, men increasingly took over the organizational and public-facing aspects of textiles. Guilds in Europe often barred women from becoming masters. So while women still did the bulk of spinning and sewing, men dominated higher-prestige trades like tailoring or dyeing, which were counted as “skilled”. So, textile innovation and labor were overwhelmingly female domains for millennia. Spinning and weaving were some of the most universal markers of women’s work across ancient and early societies at certain historical moments, men entered - often at points where the labor could be monetized, institutionalized, or associated with cultural capital (guilds, tailoring, couture). That’s when the prestige shifted away from women, even through they still did most of the base labor.

The implications of this framing were profound. While metallurgy, architecture, and other “male” fields were canonized as markers of civilization, textiles were relegated to the private sphere. Barber shows how this devaluation persisted across centuries: the monumental value of textiles in trade routes such as the Silk Road, or in European court economies, was undeniable, yet the labor behind them was obscured. Women produced the fabric that clothed armies, furnished palaces, and powered markets, but their contributions were written out of history. The very act of coding textile work as “women’s work” allowed societies to extract immense value from it while denying women cultural authority or recognition.

This paradox - vial economic work rendered invisible by its association with femininity - continues to shape how fashion is perceived today. What Barber documents since prehistory echoes through the contemporary industry: women’s labor remains concentrated at the bottom of the value chain, from garment workers in Bangladesh to seamstresses in luxury ateliers. The cultural coding of textiles as feminine has historically justified both their economic exploitation and their symbolic trivialization. By tracing fashion’s roots back to this devaluation, Barber’s work helps explain why, even as a multi-trillion-dollar industry, fashion is still dismissed as superficial.

The Cultural Script

There had been rare figures such as Rose Bertin in the Rococo period, whose proximity to Marie Antoinette briefly gave a woman dressmaker public visibility. Nicknamed as ministre de la mode to Marie Antoinette, she wielded extraordinary influence, dictating court styles across Europe. Yet, her authority was never institutionalized. Because she was a woman, her authorship was interpreted through the lens of frivolity and excess. Fashion in her hands was framed as an extension of feminine vanity and royal decadence. By the time figures like Rose Bertin emerged, the cultural script was already written.

The framing of women’s fashion as vanity and frivolity has deep roots in Western thought. Since antiquity, philosophy and theology had linked women with the body, appearance, and desire while reserving reason, permanence, and authority for men. Plato and Aristotle cast women as unstable and sensual. Women were framed as incomplete men - biologically colder, less rational, and more bound to the body. Plato reinforced the hierarchy of logos (reason, masculine) over soma (body, feminine). This philosophical dualism (reason vs. body) positioned women as unstable and morally weaker. A view reinforced by Christian theology, which warned against ornament as a temptation to sin. From the Church Fathers (4th-5th centuries) writers like Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine argued that women’s use of jewellery, cosmetics, and fine clothing was morally dangerous. It was seen as an expression of pride (superbia), vanity (vanities), or sexual temptation. In Tertullian’s text On the Apparel of Women, he warns that makeup and ornate dress corrupt both women’s modesty and men’s virtue, because they inflame desire.

During the medieval Christianity this suspicion deepened. Ornament was often linked with the sin of luxury (lust/excess), one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example, clerical sermons and monastic rules instructed women to avoid “worldly finery” and to dress modestly, since rich clothing was thought to distract from spiritual life and lead others into temptation. Reformers like Calvin and the Puritans in the 16th century took this further, stressing plain dress and condemning ornament as vanity, corruption, and idolatry. Since women were tasked with embodying beauty and appearance, this suspicion landed most heavily on them.

Put together, this systems created a long cultural inheritance: women were framed as unstable, ornamental, and morally suspect, while men were framed as rational, serious, and suited to public life. When women excelled in areas like textiles, it was diminished as vanity or frivolity, even when it sustained economies and political orders.

Economic Control and the Devaluation of Women’s Labor

Women’s labor has always been essential to survival. Obviously! Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, textile production, and household management were the foundation of premodern economies. Without this continuous, unpaid labor, neither agricultural surplus nor the social foundations of industrialization could have existed. Women’s work created the baseline of stability that freed men to engage in farming, trade, politics, and later mechanized industry. Yet this labor was rarely counted as “work” - ring any bells today? - it was framed as a “natural duty”, an extension of women’s bodies rather than a contribution to the economy. This framing stripped it of value and reduced it to a form of servitude: women’s time, dexterity, and knowledge were treated as obligations rather than as work that produced wealth. In effect, what sustained entire economies was made invisible by being coded as gender performativity and social construction, turning labor into a silent kind of…slavery.

Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, argues that this devaluation was not just a random evolvement but highly structural. During the transition to capitalism in early modern Europe, women were pushed out of public roles in markets, guilds, and communal landholding. At the same time, their reproductive and domestic labor was locked into the private household, where it became invisible and unpaid. This shift guaranteed that capital could expand with a steady supply of cheap labor: women maintained and reproduced the workforce - feeding, raising, and caring for men - without being paid themselves. And the reason it was possible on such vast scale is that women had been conditioned for centuries to accept work as their duty, as “natural”, and therefore not something that could be refused or bargained over. In that sense, they were positioned as dependent and subordinate, their labor devalued because it was framed as part of their “place” rather than as economic contribution. In Frederici’s analysis, controlling women’s bodies and work was a precondition for capitalist growth.

This logic carried into textiles and fashion. Spinning, weaving, and sewing were indispensable survival technologies, but because they were performed largely within households, they were not recognized as industry. By casting women’s labor as “natural” and “unskilled”, men secured monopolies over land, wages, and political authority. The result was a structural asymmetry: women sustained the economy but were denied economic recognition and political power. Fashion’s later trivialization as vanity or frivolity can only be understood against this background of systemic devaluation.

Devaluation was not just a random evolvement but highly structural (© Edie Lou)

The Global South Today

Frederici’s analysis helps explain fashion’s structural paradox. Fashion is an industry today that runs on women’s labor - seamstress garment workers, textile producers - but because this work is culturally coded as feminine, it has historically been dismissed as trivial, unskilled, or “natural”, and its economic significance erased. It suggests that women do not learn or develop expertise in these tasks, but that such work flowed “instinctively” from their identities. This ideological framing makes it easy for societies till today to demand the work while refusing to compensate or respect it.

The exploitation of women’s labor has not disappeared. Today, the fashion industry relies on a vast, predominantly female workforce in the Global South, where garment workers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, or Ethiopia sew clothing under conditions strikingly reminiscent of earlier centuries in the global North. Their work is indispensable to the global economy, yet it is routinely classified as “unskilled” and renumerated at poverty wages. The justification is almost identical to the historical logic: sewing is presented as a feminine aptitude, requiring little training, and therefore easy to digest for the less cognitive capable ones. It is not deserving of recognition or fair compensation.

A central reason the devaluation of women’s labor persists is the absence of protections and rights that define work in the formal economy - the systematic absence of political recognition and collective representation through unions, associations, or political movements. Unlike sectors dominated by men, women’s work historically developed without strong guilds, unions, or lobbies capable of defending wages and rights. In textile and garment production, this remains the case. Most garment workers today are women, often migrants or from rural areas, employed in informal or weakly regulated sectors. They are structurally positioned outside of legal protections, making it extraordinarily difficult to organize collectively or demand enforcement of labor standards.

This lack of lobby is systemic. Laws and institutions have long prioritized male-coded industries - steel, finance, construction - which were framed as “productive” and tied to national interest. By contrast, the feminized textile and fashion sectors were dismissed as peripheral or trivial. Even when legislation exists, enforcement is weak; governments in the Global South often resist stronger protections to remain competitive in global markets. In practice, this means that millions of women produce value for the global fashion economy while remaining socially and politically voiceless.

The result is a cycle of silence. Women’s labor in textiles and fashion has long been coded as unskilled, a designation that stripped it of institutional recognition and excluded it from collective representation. This erasure meant there was no lobby to defend its value. At the same time, wages were deliberately held at subsistence levels - pennies rather than living incomes - producing material dependency. Refusal was not an option, since refusal meant hunger. In this way, ideology, economics, and political coercion reinforced each other: devaluation justified exploitation, poverty wages made resistance impossible, and the absence of advocacy ensured that power remained concentrated elsewhere.

The lack of protection was and is systemic, a form of structural violence that persists into the present. And who is benefiting? We all know the story by now: The Global North. While labor and environmental costs remain in the South, financial profits flow back to shareholders, investors, and executives - mostly white male people - in the North. The Global North is structurally dependent on keeping the Global South in a position of cheap production to make even more profit. Even though most garment factories - sweatshops - are now in the Global South, the command centres of the industry - headquarters of luxury brands, fast fashion chains, and retail giants - are almost all in the Global North. And although this imbalance is no secret, the system adapts just enough to keep itself intact.

But just a side-note: even in the North - in Prato, London, Los Angeles - sweatshops do exist and rely on undocumented and migrant workers whose silence is coerced by precarity; they remain exposed to the same system, with no real choice but compliance, their labor is absorbed into the polished image of “Made in Italy” luxury, glossy marketing campaigns, and the legal frameworks of the North that tolerate “informal” work. The reality of exploitation is disguised by the aura of prestige and the veneer of legality.

…just ends up reinforcing the supremacy of the male-coded ideal (© Edie Lou)

Beyond Legitimacy

And the lesson, once more? That indifference to fashion is not sophistication but neglect - it is time to reconsider its weight. It is no longer possible to say, “I am not interested in fashion”. People’s lives depend on it. Behind every garment lies a history of labor, coercion, and survival, and to dismiss fashion as frivolous is to dismiss the lives of those who sustain it.

Fashion’s persistent trivialization cannot be explained by its products or its scale, but by the structures of power that shaped it. The clothes we wear, the style, the superficial act is not the reason fashion is trivialized; the status of the people who made them is. From antiquity to the industrial era, women’s labor in spinning, weaving, and sewing was essential to economic survival and cultural life, yet systematically devalued by being coded as unskilled or secondary. This history established the paradox that still shadows the industry: indispensable in material terms, yet dismissed in cultural and intellectual registers. Fashion has always been economically and practically essential. Clothes are survival technologies (protection from climate), but also key drivers of trade, industrialization, and global capitalism (cotton, silk trade, department stores etc.). Entire economies and empires depended on textile labor. Despite that material importance, fashion was rarely granted “serious” recognition.

And if anything, fashion’s reputation feels even worse today. For decades we have been talking about injustice, Rana Plaza and several other incidents happened, and still nothing really has changed - if anything, the sense of triviality has only deepened. Why? Well…Because it is not the North’s business. The reputation of fashion worsened mainly because of geographic displacement. When textiles and garment production were still visible in the North people could at least see fashion as an industry, craft, or labor. Once production was outsourced to the Global South, what remained visible in the North was only consumption: shopping, advertising, red carpets, influencers. And some of the rare Paris’s couture ateliers but they are treated as rarefied heritage under legally protected standards (the Chamber Syndicate’s definition of couture), detached from the wider industry, while the bulk of production, also for the luxury market, has moved elsewhere. The hard, technical, life-sustaining work was made invisible, tucked away in “elsewhere” that northern societies routinely devalue. And since the South itself is coded as peripheral or disposable in global hierarchies, its labor carries no cultural weight in the North’s imagination.

The result is a double erasure: not just the workers in the South are unseen, consumers in the North only encounter fashion as image or spectacle. The pattern is strikingly familiar. For centuries, women’s textile labor in the North was treated in precisely the same way: invisible and worthless when performed in households and workshops, and dismissed as vain, seductive, and frivolous when it appeared in public. And what was once the gendered logic of devaluation has now been globalized - entire regions coded as unseen, devalued - just like women’s work was trivialized, now, at the level of geography southern labor is trivialized, affecting mostly women. Again.

And you know how it goes - especially in the North, women are told to not get too dressed up. Not too much make-up, not too feminine. Seriousness and authority are still modelled on the white male body and its uniform - the dark suit, minimal adornment, restrained appearance. Anything that departs from this template, especially when performed by women, is judged as “too much”, “not professional”, “unsophisticated”, or simply “frivolous. Femininity itself is treated as a liability, so women who aspire to or achieve authority often feel compelled to distance themselves from it - and in doing so, they reproduce the very hierarchy that once excluded them. So when femininity is stripped away and judged as “unprofessional” this is not liberation! It is assimilation. The irony is sharp here: what is often celebrated as feminism - breaking into male spaces - just ends up reinforcing the supremacy of the male-coded ideal.

So now, we are coming to the end. This article has traced the historical and structural devaluation of women’s labor in fashion, but the story does not really end here. The roles of slavery, colonial exploitation, and queer communities are equally central. They will be addressed in the next piece, since they deserve a full account of their own.

For now, it is time to shift how we see one another - not as work-force objects, competitors, not as surface to be judged, and especially not through the narrow lens of hierarchical systems defined by masculine norms. To move forward, we must affirm that every person, every worker, every maker, every participant in fashion and beyond is entitled to dignity and basic human rights. It is time to stop reducing people to objects and devaluating them, and to start recognizing one another as human beings with skills, talents, and feelings. By protecting rather than erasing, by supporting rather than diminishing, we create the possibility of a different - most likely better - future. And for those in stronger positions, the task is not to push others aside but to lift them up - to share, to help, to open space - so that together, we might build a culture where no contribution is dismissed, and everyone is given the chance to be valued with the respect they deserve.

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