Last week, we traced how women’s labor - from spinning and weaving to the seamstresses of industrial Paris - was systematically devalued, its economic centrality obscured by gendered narratives that coded it as unskilled or secondary. This week, we turn to a related but distinct question: how the very concept of authorship in fashion was constructed through the white male gaze?

Fashion has always been more than clothing. It is a system of visibility and invisibility, one that determines whose labor is valued, whose creativity is remembered, and whose cultural authority is legitimized. Yet the narrative of fashion as an “art” form - worthy of prestige, elevated into the cultural mainstream, and institutional recognition - has been written overwhelmingly through the white male gaze. Within this framework, contributions by women, Black communities, and queer innovators have been dismissed as marginal, excessive, or unserious, even when they laid the foundations of the industry. The line between craft and culture shifted not with the work itself, but with the figure performing it - when attributed to white men, similar practices were recoded as authorship and elevated into art and granted a prestige that had been denied to others.

This asymmetry is not a matter of personal taste but a structural lens that has shaped both the historiography and the economy of fashion. From the invention of the “couturier” in 19th-century Paris to the recycling of a small circle of white male creative directors today, authority in fashion has been repeatedly consolidated around a figure who embodies neutrality, seriousness, and universality. These qualities are not inherent but socially contructed; they depend on a gaze that codes male authorship as innovation, while framing women’s handwork, Black style, or queer aesthetics as derivative or excessive. This gaze determines which practices are remembered as milestones and which are relegated to footnotes.

Understanding the persistence of this lens is crucial, because it explains more than symbolic imbalance. It reveals why cultural prestige and financial profit have long flowed to the same narrow demographic, while the majority of workers - women in ateliers, garment workers in the Global South, queer and Black subcultures driving trends - remain unrecognized or precarious. To interrogate the white male gaze is not simply to critique representation, but to confront the mechanisms through which power and capital circulate in fashion. Without such recognitions, the cycle of devaluation will continue: a global industry employing millions, shaping aesthetics worldwide, yet persistently trivialized in the very societies it sustains.

Worth was not only producing garments; he was producing a brand (© of the original picture belongs to the rightful owner)

Charles Fredrick Worth - And the Turn of Fashion

Let’s dive into the world of Charles Frederick Worth - the man who turned dressmaking into an empire and himself into fashion’s first celebrity. Charles Frederick Worth may not have invented fashion, but he reinvented what it meant to be seen as its author. Worth (1825-1895) was an Englishman who rose to prominence in Paris and is widely regarded as the first modern “couturier”. Trained as a draper in London before moving to Paris, he built his reputation not in the artisanal tradition of anonymous dressmaking but by repositioning himself as a creator whose name was inseparable from his garments. In 1858 he opened the House of Worth, which quickly became the center of Parisian fashion, dressing Empress Eugénie and an international clientele of aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois women.

What made Worth distinctive - and different from the generations of seamstresses, mantua-makers, and even male tailors before him - was a cluster of very specific innovations that crystallized around him in mid-19th century Paris. First of all, he claimed authorship. Earlier dressmakers produced garments to the specifications of their clients. Worth reversed this relationship: he designed collections in advance, and clients chose from his vision. This shift turned the maker from servant into “creator”. He also branded fashion. Worth was among the first to sign his garments with labels, asserting authorship in the same way artists signed paintings. This was radical in fashion, where clothing had traditionally been anonymous handwork.

Furthermore, Worth staged fashion as spectacle. He presented his creations on live models (then called mannequins) in salon-like shows - a precursor to the contemporary fashion show. Fashion was no longer just commerce; it was performance. And he also industrialized couture. Worth leveraged industrially produced fabrics (silk from Lyon, cottons imported via colonial trade) and Paris’s booming bourgeois clientele to scale his operations beyond court patronage. His house employed hundreds of petites mains, making couture a visible institution rather than a hidden workshop. And nevertheless he aligned with cultural hierarchies. By styling empresses, Worth inserted himself into statecraft and politics. He cast himself not as a servant but as a partner in power, an “artist” shaping public image.

So, what happened was not a revolution in cutting or sewing, but in framing: Worth shifted fashion from service to authorship, from anonymous labor to signed genius, from workshop to cultural institution. And crucially, this framing worked because he embodied the figure that 19th-century institutions recognized as legitimate - a white European man in the age of industrial capitalism and the cult of the “great creator”.

But the real shift wasn’t just that “a man entered the room”. Several things converged around the mid-19th century. Industrial capitalism was rising. Fabrics and trims were being industrially produced, which meant clothes could circulate faster and in higher volumes. This scale allowed fashion to be framed as part of modern commerce, not just private handwork. The industrial base gave rise to couture as an organized business, supported by a system of suppliers, factories, and new forms of distribution.

The other factor was urban bourgeois culture. Under Baron Haussmann, Paris was rebuilt into a city of boulevards, department stores, like Le Bon Marché, cafés, and theatres, all designed to display modernity. A new class of wealthy bourgeois women sought fashion as a marker of status and distinction. And Worth tapped into this expanding bourgeois market. And not to forget, media and global circulation reinforced this change. Illustrated magazines, like La Mode Illustrée (1860), Le Follet (1829), La Gazette Rose (1864), and lithographs, and the beginnings of international journalism spread names and images of fashion across Europe and beyond. Worth was not only producing garments; he was producing a brand, attaching his identity to his work in a way that made him both visible and legible to institutions. This was amplified by media, which circulated his image and solidified his position in the cultural hierarchy.

La Mode Illustrée, 1882 (© of the original picture belongs to the rightful owner)

The Romantic Ideal of the Genius Artist

The shift wasn’t simply about gender. It was about timing - industrial modernity, urban spectacle, and the 19th-century cult of authorship converging in Paris. Worth did not create this transformation on his own; he became its figurehead. By the mid-19th century, fashion was already moving out of private workshops and into public view. Branding and authorship were becoming central to modern commerce, and institutions were beginning to treat fashion as part of culture. Worth embodied these shifts, turning the anonymous dressmaker into the visible couturier and crystallizing a system that was already in motion.

Yet the gendered divide was never dissolved by these changes; it was hardened. The very same industrial and media structures that amplified Worth’s name also obscured the seamstresses who stitched his gowns, relegating their mastery to the background. But because the invention of the couturier concentrated legitimacy and prestige in one figure - a branded, recognisable, “author” - the division became sharper than before. Before Worth and the couture model fashion was fragmented.

Charles Frederick Worth redefined the system of fashion by importing the Romantic ideal of the “genius” artist into dressmaking. Where garments had once been the outcome of collective labor - Worth positioned fashion as the authored expression of a single creator. In this shift, the designer was elevated from craftsperson to creator, and the thousands of invisible hands behind each garment disappeared from the narrative. Fashion, for the first time, became a story of singular authorship rather than shared production. This new framework was anything but open or neutral. It rested on cultural codes that privileged whiteness, masculinity, and European authority as the social markers. Worth could be celebrated as an artist because his identity aligned with these hierarchies, while those who did not were pushed further into invisibility.

Worth’s model of fashion as authored “genius” didn’t reduce the need for labor, it multiplied it. His gowns required more seamstresses, embroiderers, textile workers, and global suppliers than ever before. But under his system, those hands became even less visible. The more the couturier was elevated as the singular creator, the more everyone else’s contributions were erased. So his model depended on expanding invisiblity: a growing army of women in ateliers, colonial labor in cotton and silk, and artisans across global networks, all recast as background to the story of one man’s “vision”. That is why Worth is so symbolic - his success institutionalized a structure where prestige and visibility concentrate at the top, while the actual work disperses downward into silence.

Cotton in particular tied to fashion directly to slavery (© Edie Lou)

Cotton, Colonialism, and Racial Capitalism

If Worth embodied the figure of the couturier in Paris, his gowns were materially dependent on a vast, racialized economy. Behind every bolt of cotton or silk in Worth’s ateliers lay the machinery of empire - slavery, dispossession, and colonial control. As historian Sven Beckert argues in Empire of Cotton, cotton was the first truly global commodity of industrial capitalism - a fiber that connected enslaved workers in the American South, indentured laborers in India and Egypt, European industrial mills, and consumers in imperial capitals. Fashion’s rise as an authored and prestigious system cannot be separated from this infrastructure of racial capitalism. The very possibility of haute couture depended on fibers extracted through violence and dispossession.

Cotton in particular tied to fashion directly to slavery: the vast plantations of the American South supplied the raw fiber that fed Europe’s textile mills. Enslaved men, women, and children cultivated and harvested this cotton under conditions of extreme coercion, their labor converted into the cheap material base that made European fashion possible. The end of formal slavery in the United States did not dismantle this economy but restructured it through systems of sharecropping and dept bondage, ensuring that cheap cotton remained abundant. Cotton remained the backbone of the Southern economy, and global demand for cheap fiber (especially from Britain and France) was still enormous. Plantation owners and elites therefore needed a new system to secure a disciplined, low-cost workforce. Freed Black families were allowed to farm small plots of land, but only in exchange for giving a large portion of their harvest to the landowner. They had no capital to buy tools or seed, so they borrowed at high interest - usually from the same landowner. This meant they could never get out of dept.

And if harvest failed, or if cotton prices dropped, families went into debt that carried over year after year. Legally free, they were in practice tied to the land and the landowner, unable to leave without facing violence or imprisonment. And most importantly, after 1865, many Southern states passed Black Codes and later Jim Crow laws, which criminalized everyday behaviors primarily for newly freed Black people. Vagrancy laws made it a crime to be unemployed, homeless, or simply “without lawful purpose”. If a Black person was not under labor contract, they could be arrested for vagrancy. After formal emancipation in 1865, white landowners in the South largely refused to employ Black workers as free, fairly paid labor.

They wanted to maintain the system without the legal name of slavery. So the laws were written in a way that guaranteed guilt: if Black people could not secure exploitative labor contracts with white planters - often because wages were impossible to live on or contracts locked them into debt - they were driven into illegality. So it was a closed loop. No fair jobs available and forced into contracts that resembled slavery. Refusal or inability to sign those contracts meant immediately facing arrest for vagrancy. Once arrested, these “offenses” carried fines that most could not pay. If someone couldn’t pay, they were leased out to private employers under the system of convict leasing. So those laws created a pipeline from freedom, criminalization to forced labor. They ensured that Black labor remained cheap and coerced, even after the abolition of slavery. Here the focus is on the United States, but similar systems of coerced and underpaid labor structured fashion’s foundations across other cultures and colonial economies.

So, let’s be honest: capitalism would never have taken off without cheap labor. The brutal exploitation of enslaved people and women’s unpaid work weren’t side notes - they were the engine. Just like women’s labor, discussed in our article last week, the labor of enslaved people was positioned as the invisible foundation of capitalism. Both were treated as self-evident, unpaid, and outside of economic value. Expected rather than acknowledged, indispensable yet denied recognition as skilled or valuable. Women maintained households, reproduced and cared for the workforce, and produced textiles within the domestic sphere; enslaved people cultivated cotton, harvested indigo, and sustained the raw material economy that fed Europe’s factories. In each case, survival of the system depended on keeping this labor cheap, disciplined, and uncredited. The exploitation was not incidental but structural: capitalism could only expand by coding entire groups - women through gender, enslaved people through race - as bodies of labor rather than as agents of culture or history.

So, as we see, Worth’s elevation as the father of couture was inseparable from the global economy that slavery and women labor had built. The splendor of his gowns rested on cotton harvested through coerced Black labor and on dyes and silks extracted from colonial trade routes. In this sense, his “genius” was never autonomous, obviously, it was staged on the backs of systems that dehumanized others, even as his own authorship was glorified. To understand the whole picture of the couturier, we must also confront the afterlives of slavery, women labor exploitation, and empires that sustained it.

Queer Innovation and Cultural Appropriation

If slavery, women’s labor exploitation, and colonialism supplied fashion with its raw materials and garment construction, queer communities supplied it with many of its most radical aesthetics. From underground cabarets to ballroom culture, from drag houses to street style, queer innovators redefined what beauty, glamor, and defiance could look like. Yet their contributions were rarely recognized within fashion’s official histories. Styles born in queer subculture - sequins, gender fluidity, camp aesthetics - were dismissed as excessive or theatrical, and cheap until they were appropriated by mainstream designer, most often white men, at which point the very same practices were reframed as bold innovation.

This dynamic reveals another axis of fashion’s white male gaze: cultural appropriation. As bell hooks argued, dominant groups have historically mined the creativity of marginalized communities while denying them cultural authority. In fashion, this meant, for example, that queer aesthetics circulated widely - in magazines, couture collections, pop culture - but without acknowledging the contexts of survival, resistance, and performance in which they were forged. José Esteban Munoz describes this as disidentification: queer communities built new identities through style, but these were continually stripped of their political charge when absorbed by institutions that celebrated only the surface. Disidentification is a strategy used my marginalized groups to navigate dominant culture. It is neither full assimilation nor total rejection. Instead, it is a tactical reworking of dominant symbols and practices: taking what exists, twisting it, parodying it, exaggerating it, or subtly altering it so it becomes legible to those “in the know”. But once absorbed into the dominant gaze, the signs lost their double-coded visibility. They became profitable aesthetics without their politics, emptied of the risk and resilience that had originally defined them.

To understand this logic, however we must trace its longer history. These strategies did not suddenly appear in 20th century drag balls; their roots stretch back to figures like Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, whose sartorial codes marked early instances of queerness expressed through dress, even under the threat of ridicule, criminalization, or exile. Although no single person “invented” queer codes of dress - Brummell and Wilde were figures who crystallized and popularized them at specific moments. Queer codes were collective inventions, but Brummell and Wilde are often remembered as some of the first to explicitly use fashion symbols for queer recognition.

The Origin of Queer as a Subculture

Examples of gender nonconforming dress reach back to antiquity - from Roman emperors to cross-dressing in festivals, androgynous saints in medieval Christianity etc. - but these were not systematic codes that allowed queer people to recognize each other. They were either temporary performances or elite fashion gestures that sometimes carried rumors of deviance. But while these instances show that queer aesthetics long predate the word queer, it was in the 19th century that such styles began to form recognizable subcultural codes.

And, of course, clothing had always carried codes, long before the emergence of contemporary queer subcultures. In antiquity and the medieval world, monarchs, clergy, and aristocracies signalled their authority through prescribed garments: purple reserved for emperors, ermine for royalty, elaborate wigs and silks for European courts. These codes were collective and hierarchical, tied to birth, office, or class rather than to individual choice. This changed with Beau Brummell (1778-1840). Brummell’s restrained tailoring and obsession with detail introduced a new kind of performance: dress as a subtle language of individuality, mastery, and distinction. Dress became a deliberate performance of identity with layered meanings. He stripped away the lace and color of aristocratic fashion and instead elevated understatement into a new form of status. Beau Brummell is often credited with turning men’s dress into an art form. What made it “art” was not lavish materials but precision, proportion, and execution. That shift - from clothes as spectacle to clothes as a discipline of detail - elevated dressing into an aesthetic practice in itself, much like painting or poetry. In fact, later cultural critics (like Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in Du Dandysme et de George Brummell, 1845) explicitly wrote of Brummell as an “artist of the self”.

This hyper-stylization blurred gender boundaries (© Edie Lou)

Most importantly, he demonstrated that fashion could be more than decoration; it could be a language of coded distinction, legible only to those who understood the details. Brummell and the dandies refined men’s dress to such an extent that it unsettled conventional masculinity, which prized practicality and restraint. This hyper-stylization blurred gender boundaries. They weren’t dressing in women’s clothes, but they adopted behaviors (care for appearance, aesthetic sensitivity) that society had coded as feminine. This reorientation opened the space for fashion to become a field of coded expression, one later seized by queer communities who reworked style into a language of recognition and survival within hostile environments.

By the late 19th century, figures such as Oscar Wilde and his circle adopted visible symbols like the green carnation - a flower pinned discreetly to the lapel - as a sign of recognition among men who desired men. The gesture was subtle enough to escape immediate persecution, yet clear enough to be legible within the subculture. It exemplified the double edge of queer fashion in hostile environments: a means of belonging and visibility, but always shadowed by the risk of exposure, ridicule, or criminal punishment. When Oscar Wilde was prosecuted and imprisoned for “gross indecency” in Victorian England it showed how quickly coded fashion could shift from subtle survival to dangerous exposure.

Through the twentieth century, queer communities expanded these strategies into aesthetics that would shape global culture. From Berlin’s cabarets to Harlem’s drag balls, coded performance evolved into vibrant forms of self-definition, even as they remained outside mainstream legitimacy. What tied these moments together was the same double edge: fashion as a language of recognition and resistance, but also as a marker of exclusion, criminalization, or ridicule.

Queer style generated aesthetic vocabularies that reshaped contemporary fashion. Yet when these styles remained in queer spaces, they were trivialized. Only once adopted by mainstream cultural institutions - luxury brands, fashion magazines, museums, critics, global runways - did they acquire legitimacy. The same aesthetics were suddenly reframed as serious innovation. Drag-inspired silhouettes were “avant-garde” when shown by John Galliano, camp was “artistic” when staged at the Met Gala and ballroom aesthetics became “influential” only when filtered through white male designers. So, these aesthetics only became visible, celebrated, and profitable once they were detached from their queer origins and reintroduced through the institutions of high fashion - institutions that historically privilege white, male authorship. The irony is sharp here: what once exposed people to ridicule, danger, or even criminal punishment became a profitable runway spectacle once reframed through the lens of the white male designer.

Worth’s Legacy

This repetition follows the same structural logic established with Charles Frederick Worth. Worth collapsed collective labor into the figure of the couturier, making visibility and prestige hinge on authorship coded as white, male, and European. A century later, queer aesthetics faced the same filter: survival strategies forged in hostile environments were only reframed as “fashion history” when attached to men who fit the established markers of legitimacy. In bots cases, the communities that originated the work remained invisible, their authorship erased even as their creativity was essential.

The persistence of this logic explains why the upper echelons of fashion continue to rotate among a narrow circle of white male designers. The system itself was built to read their authorship as “serious” and embodied cultural legitimacy, while other contributions remain coded as niche, subcultural, secondary, and invisible. Women dominate fashion schools; queer and Black communities and many other subcultures shape global style; and women, particularly in the Global South, sustain the garment-building sectors that make the industry function - from pattern cutters and seamstresses to entire factory floors. In other words, the creative and material foundations of fashion are overwhelmingly feminized and marginalized. This is not new. The wealth of the contemporary fashion system was built on slavery, colonial extraction, and cheap women labor.

Yet the level of cultural authority and economic decision-making, power consolidated elsewhere. The majority of CEO’s, investors, and creative directors of major luxury houses remain white men. Conglomerates like LVMH and Kering embody this imbalance: they concentrate profit, prestige, and authorship in a narrow circle of male-led leadership, while the millions who generate the industry’s value remain structurally invisible. This dynamic reproduces the very logic inaugurated in the 19th century with Worth: those who generate fashion’s creative and material foundations remain systematically undervalued or even devalued and dehumanized At the same time, cultural legitimacy and financial authority concentrate in a narrow demographic.

The heritage of fashion is not glamorous ateliers and Parisian runways; it is a dirty heritage built on stolen labor, systemic exploitation, concealment, and the laundering of violence into prestige and one of the world’s most profitable industries. And constantly hiding. Well, sorry fashion industry, for all your size, money, and influence…you are so obvious! You behave like a three years old hiding behind curtains. And you are too weak to admit what you are built on. Stealing, exploiting, lying, and refusing accountability are clear signs of immaturity. Power without courage is weakness. Unfortunately, too many lives depend on this system so we cannot ridicule or ignore it. It needed to be said: an industry that feeds millions cannot keep hiding behind its own weakness.

The Future of Fashion: Self-Work and Structural Change

So, we can all agree that it cannot continue like this, obviously. To confront this, fashion must acknowledge not only appropriation but the conditions that make appropriation legible. The issue is not whether queer, Black, or women’s labor, aesthetics, and cultural codes belong in fashion - they always have. The issue is that legitimacy has been filtered through the white male gaze, a lens that elevates some while marginalizing others.

This is not unique to fashion, though, it mirrors the broader logic of society, where access to cultural authority and economic power has historically been reserved for those admitted to the “white male club”. Those outside it - have been systematically repressed, their contributions trivialized even as entire industries and cultures were built on their labor and creativity. Too often, the proposed solution has been assimilation: women, people of color adopting the same codes of dress, speech, and authority in order to be recognized. But assimilation does not dismantle the gaze; it amplifies it, reproducing the supremacy of a single model while erasing alternative ways of being, seeing, and creating. If fashion is to move beyond this contradiction, it cannot simply diversify who sits at the table while leaving the table unchanged. What is required is an opening of perspective itself: dismantling the monopoly of the white male gaze and legitimizing multiple gazes, multiple perspectives, and multiple genealogies of creativity. Only then can the industry acknowledge its true foundation to those who have always sustained it. The result: a less monopolised industry, but also a more resilient one.

The fashion industry as it stands is built on three interlocking pillars: cheap and invisible labor and creativity source, centralized authorship, and concentrated capital. Economically, power is concentrated in conglomerates such as LVMH, Kering, and Inditex, where cultural prestige and financial profit converge. This is the very mechanism by which the industry secures its margins.

For change to be possible, these foundations must be restructured through regulatory, financial, and cultural levels. Binding regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive or New York’s Fashion Act point toward a future where disclosure and accountability are no longer optional but mandated. Investors, too, will need to recalibrate: once hidden labor is recognized as a liability - legally, reputationally, and operationally - there will be pressure to finance models that prioritize wage security and credit distribution. Precedents already exist: Patagonia’s B Corporation framework and co-operative models in smaller fashion houses show that alternative governance and profit-sharing structures are not utopian but functional.

At the cultural level, the consolidation of authorship around a single white male gaze must be deliberately decentered. Just like we said above. Fashion schools, platforms, and brands will need to amplify multiple creators simultaneously, treating authorship as collaborative rather than singular. For conglomerates, this could mean royalties for cultural originators, co-directorships, or more transparent profit allocating along the supply chain. Decentering the white-male gaze is not a vibes project; it is a capital-allocation and contracting project. When credit, cash, and control follow the people who already create the value - garment workers, ateliers, queer and Black innovators - the industry’s “seriousness” stops being a claim and becomes a blanace-sheet fact.

And, never the less, consumption today often functions less as necessity than as compensation - a way to fill the voids created by a culture of disposability, speed, and alienation. Fashion thrives on this cycle: emotional trigger, desire, purchase, disappointment, repetition. To move beyond it requires not only structural reform but individual self-work. Shoppers are not passive; they are participants. Unless people begin to examine why they consume, and address that need through self-work rather than products, the cycle of overproduction will persist, even under a sustainable label.

And remember: as long as we internalize and reproduce racism, misogyny - even in their softest forms, dismantled into acts of “charity” or token inclusion -, and hierarchies of value in our own choices, the system has no incentive to transform. Reframing purchasing as an ethical act shifts fashion from indulgence to responsibility. To purchase a garment, in this sense, is to invest in the labor, resources, and histories that made it possible. Value no longer lies only in design, branding, or the price we pay, but recognizing the dignity and work embedded in every piece. If such cultural shifts align with changes in law, capital, cultural awareness, and deeper self-reflection, fashion could begin to model what a just global industry looks like: not a system built on erasure, but one grounded in recognition, accountability, and redistribution. What was once obscured - the workers, the resources, the inequalities - would become integral to how garments are valued, circulated, and celebrated.

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