Fashion loves to tell dreams. It sells more than fabric - it sells glamour, coolness, belonging, and the promise of transformation. A dress is never just a dress; it is an invitation to a lifestyle, a signal of taste, a shortcut to identity. From couture runways to fast-fashion feeds; the industry thrives on the seduction of image, packaging aspiration as if it were a tangible product. But fashion is not simply an aesthetic industry; it is one of the largest global employers and one of the most resource-intensive supply chains in existence. Yet its pricing mechanisms remain structurally disconnected from the realities of production. A T-shirt retailing for less than five dollars or a dress sold for under thirty cannot possibly reflect the true costs of labor, energy, and material embedded within it. What appears ad affordability is, in fact, a system of cost displacement - where the burdens are externalised onto underpaid workers, degraded ecosystems, and unacknowledged cultural contributors.

The issue is a structural one. Pricing in fashion has historically been designed to obscure rather than reveal value. By separating price from real costs, the industry sustains its cycle of overproduction, discounting, and disposability. Many sustainability initiatives in fashion address visible practices - such as material substitution or capsule collections - while leaving intact the broader economic structures of pricing, production speed, and volume. Price becomes a narrative device, signaling accessibility or exclusivity, while concealing how the economic and cultural rewards concentrate at the top while the human and ecological costs are pushed downward.

The consequence is that fashion’s pricing logic systematically underwrites exploitation. Workers - mostly women - in garment factories are paid poverty wages while shareholders reap profit; cotton fields in the Global South consumes vast amounts of water, yet this ecological cost is absent from the price of the garment. While at the retail level, consumers see only affordability - sometimes even framed as conscious or sustainable - while the true value of the resource remains hidden. What appears as affordability is in fact a misallocation of value - where human and ecological costs are suppressed, while financial gains concentrate at the top. In a fair system, a price should reflect the real costs of making something: wages, materials, energy, land, water, time, design. It should also communicate something about value: durability, skill, creativity. But what fashion pricing actually do is hiding real value, both fast fashion and luxury fashion, one by making things too cheap, the other by charging far beyond the true cost while failing to redirect profit fairly.

To move beyond this extractive logic requires rethinking value at its core. A value-driven fashion economy would account for human dignity, ecological limits, and cultural authorship as integral to price, not as externalities. The question is not simply whether garments should cost more, but whether their price can tell the truth about what sustains them, aligning what we pay with the real human, ecological, and cultural inputs. Without this redefinition, even the most ambitious sustainability initiatives risk remaining surface-level - gestures. They touch the surface, but they don’t address the deeper structural distortions - like underpaid labor, externalised ecological costs, or exploitative margins.

In Rome the toga might cost months of a soldier’s pay (© Edie Lou)

The Historical Construction of Price in Fashion

But someone always paid - and it was never the Global North consumer. This is for sure. The history of fashion pricing is inseparable from power, structured by the centrality of the Global North and its ability to dictate value while externalising cost. From its emergence at the royal courts of Europe to its industrial globalisation, fashion has never been priced according to labor or material inputs alone. Instead, price has been a mechanism of distinction, signalling access to cultural capital at one end of the spectrum and concealing exploitation at the other.

To understand today´s fashion economy, we need to step back in time and see how garments were valued in earlier centuries. Let`s go back in time, to trace how the price of clothing was calculated long before the fashion system we know today. In antiquity, as we can guess, garments also carried weighty costs, through measured through different systems of value. In Egypt, linen was both everyday cloth and symbolic markers of wealth and purity. Priests wore specific linen as part of ritual cleanliness laws, and the whiteness of linen carried religious weight. Gifts of clothing were used by pharaohs as a way to reward loyalty. Tomb inscriptions record “bestowals of fine linen” to officials, which functioned as political rewards, not just material goods. Clothing was distributed through central systems: workers were paid in grain, beer, or oil. People were paid in food staples, and clothing was often allocated through redistribution systems.

Only later, in Greek and Roman periods, do we see clothing more commonly appear in markets as a priced commodity. In the Greek and Roman periods, clothing production became more diversified and integrated into market exchange. In Greece, enslaved people and free artisans worked in workshops (ergasteria), producing wool garments and dyed textiles that could be sold in the agora, the central marketplace and civic space in Ancient Greek cities. So garments moved beyond redistribution and into open-market exchange, where they were explicitly priced and sold as commodities. Prices for goods, including clothing and fabrics, were denominated in drachmai and obols in Greek and denarius, sesterce, aureus in Rome. In both systems, ordinary wool or linen consumed days or moths of wages. In ancient Athens, a wool chiton could equal several days’ wages, while in Rome the toga might cost months of a soldier’s pay; luxury fabrics such as Tyrian purple were reserved for elites by law. Production itself often relied on enslaved or underpaid labor, embedding inequality directly into garments. The same dynamic remains embedded in fashion’s economy today.

Louis XIV (reigned 1643 - 1715) (© of the original picture belongs to the rightful owner)

In the medieval and Renaissance periods, clothing was produced within guild systems that tied cost to materials and hours of skilled labour, often regulated by civic statutes. They professionalised production, controlling access to skills and regulating prices. Scarcity of fabrics such as silk, velvet, and fur anchored price in availability and craft rather than in symbolic authorship. At the same time, sumptuary laws reinforced hierarchy by legally restricting certain textiles and colours to elites, making garments markers of social order as much as of personal wealth. Weavers, dyers, and tailors operated within strict hierarchies: masters and merchants controlled pricing, while apprentices, women, and day laborers earned little and often remained outside guild protections. Inequality was institutionalized, embedding fashion’s value system in structures that privileged order and prestige over fairness. So, while fashion’s hierarchies were not invented in the Renaissance, but the period marked a decisive consolidation of how value was structured. What had long been a diffuse hierarchy hardened into a system - a framework that Versailles would later exaggerate and that continues to echo in fashion’s pricing logics today.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European courts - and above all the French court - established fashion as an instrument of power. Under Louis XIV (reigned 1643 - 1715), the court at Versailles became the centre of a regulated spectacle. Dress was strictly codified through sumptuary practice, and luxury consumption was cultivated as a deliberate state strategy: Colbert, the King’s finance minister, fostered the silk industry in Lyon and the Gobelins manufactory to ensure that France would dominate textile production. The “Livre Rouge”, the royal ledger, reveals the staggering sums spent on clothing and ornament, where value was defined not by materials or labor but by symbolic participation in the spectacle of absolutism. Marie Antoinette, a century later, amplified this dynamic. Through her dressmaker, Rose Bertin, she commissioned gowns that could cost as much as 10,000 livres each, with annual clothing expenses reaching 120,000 livres Pricing here was inseparable from status and ritual: the gown as a currency of power, access, and proximity to the monarch. Exclusivity, as we know it today was definitively born.

In the centuries that followed, this disconnection between price and real cost not only persisted but was expanded through colonial and industrial systems that allowed the Global North to outsource extraction. Raw materials from enslaved and colonised labor supplied European courts and later industrial mills, while value and prestige consolidated in Paris and London. The nineteenth century replaced court ritual with bourgeois aspiration: Charles Frederick Worth and the rise of haute couture redefined fashion as authored luxury, priced for exclusivity rather than labor. industrialisation and department stores created the opposite pole, where mechanisation and global sourcing drove costs down, establishing the illusion of affordability. By the late twentieth century, fast fashion globalised this model, making a T-shirt cheaper than a sandwich, while luxury houses inflated prices to perform scarcity.

Today, the Global North occupies the role once played by royalty, kings, and queens. Its consumers live within a system that offers both cheap glamour and inflated luxury, while the true costs are displaced elsewhere: in the garment districts of Dhaka, the drained cotton fields in Uzbekistan, and the landfills of Accra. Price in fashion has rarely been a neutral reflection of cost; it has always served a political or cultural purpose. At Versailles, pricing was exaggerated to signal status and reinforce absolutist order. In luxury, pricing is inflated to perform scarcity and mark social distinction, and in fast fashion, pricing is artificially cheapened to fuel overconsumption, with hidden costs shifted onto workers and ecosystems.

From Performance to Value

As we can see, price in fashion has rarely reflected the actual costs of production; instead, it has functioned as a signal of status, scarcity, or belonging. Thorsten Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), described how the value of luxury goods is not tied to their utility but to their ability to signal distinction. What mattered was not the garment’s material or the hours of labor embedded in it, but its capacity to demonstrate distance from necessity. This logic is visible from the French court to contemporary luxury boutiques: garments become markers of status precisely because they are unnecessary, scarce, or costly beyond reason. Veblen named this dynamic “conspicuous consumption”, and it remains one of the most durable principles of fashion’s pricing.

The durability of Veblen’s insight lies in how fashion manufactures scarcity. History throughout the years and especially Versailles had already made this logic visible: garments there were not simply worn but staged as tools of hierarchy, garments operated as a staged performance through ritualised access and the careful staging of who could be seen and adorned at court. In today’s luxury market, it is reinforced through limited editions, waiting lists, or price hikes unrelated to costs of production. A handbag that requires a few hundred euros in materials and labor can retail for tens of thousands because the price itself is the signal of belonging. Here, price is not a measure of embedded value but a symbolic marker of distance. This logic persists across centuries because it transforms economic exchange into cultural distinction, making pricing inseparable from power.

Yet Veblen’s framework alone cannot explain the other side of fashion’s spectrum: disposability. While luxury inflates price to signify status, fast fashion deflates it to create the illusion of accessibility. The $5 T-shirt does not reflect efficiency but the externalisation of costs - onto underpaid garment workers, depleted soils, and polluted rivers. In both extremes, price is disconnected from the material and human inputs of production. The luxury buyer pays for scarcity, but the premium rarely circulates back to the garment workers or artisans; it accumulates instead in the margins of conglomerates and the symbolic capital of brands. At the other end, the fast-fashion buyer pays for speed, enabled by poverty wages and ecological depletion. In neither case does the price reflect the true value embedded in the garment - the labor, the resources, or the cultural contributions that sustain fashion.

To redefine value is, in this sense, to re-anchor fashion’s economy in reality (© Edie Lou)

Why Value Must Be Redefined

The necessity of redefining value in fashion arises from a structural misalignment: what sustains the industry and what it rewards are not the same. Prices reward symbolic scarcity at the luxury end and accelerated turnover at the mass-market end, but they fail to register the real costs embedded in production - human labor, ecological resources, and cultural creativity. Economically, this is a problem of externalisation: wages suppressed below subsistence, water and soil treated as expendable, and aesthetic innovations from marginalised communities absorbed without recognition. Culturally, it is a problem of distortion: consumers are taught to read price as a marker of prestige or accessibility, not as a reflection of the garment’s actual embedded worth.

This misevaluation has consequences far beyond fashion, obviously. It sustains exploitative labor regimes in the Global South, contributes to the depletion of planetary systems, and erodes the possibility of fair cultural exchange. As ecological economists such as Kate Raworth and Tim Jackson argue, economies that externalise their true costs inevitably overshoot social and planetary limits. In fashion the gap between what a garment costs and what I is priced at does not merely reflect market dynamics; it encodes centuries of erasure and disbalance in value. From colonial cotton plantations to outsourced garment factories, the ability of the Global North consumer to pay less has always depended on others absorbing the difference.

Redefining value, therefore, is not an abstract moral gesture but a material necessity. Unless pricing mechanisms account for labor dignity, ecological thresholds, and cultural authorship, fashion cannot move beyond the cycle of erasure. The system’s legitimacy depends on whether prices can tell the truth - not only about design or branding, but about the lives, resources, and histories embedded in every garment. Without this shift, sustainability strategies risk remaining performative, while the structural inequities that underpin fashion’s economy persist unchanged. To redefine value is, in this sense, to re-anchor fashion’s economy in reality. It means treating garments not as pure symbols of aspiration but as material outcomes of human and ecological interdependence.

Fashion cannot keep pretending price is neutral when it has always built on erasure - first of labor, then of resources now of entire ecosystems. Value must be redefined so that it includes the real costs of what makes a garment possible: wages that sustain life, ecological resources that are finite, and infrastructures that have long been invisible. Without this redefinition, fashion will continue to operate on illusion - cheapness at the bottom, exclusivity at the top - while everything in between, the actual labour, the material resources, and the dignity that makes this argument distinct from typical sustainability commentary is its depth: it does not simply call for incremental reform but identifies a structural flaw.

Fashion’s conception of value has been wrong for centuries, from Versailles to Shein, because price has functioned as a mechanism of power, illusion, and erasure rather than a reflection of labor or ecology. To confront this, pricing must be reconfigured as recognition - a recognition of work - valuing the human labor that actually produces fashion, from farm workers and garment workers to designers, instead of letting wages be suppressed while margins flow upward -, of limit - acknowledging ecological boundaries: water, soil, energy, biodiversity -, interdependence - recognizing that fashion is not a self-contained luxury sphere; it depends on global networks of people, resources, and ecosystems, all of which must be considered in pricing and value-.

As a designer, I confront this contradiction every day (© Edie Lou)

From Heritage to Future

Across centuries, fashion’s pricing has never been a neutral reflection of cost but a staging of ideology. At Versailles, garments were priced to uphold hierarchy - their value lay less in fabric or labor than in their role as instruments of spectacle and political control. In the 19th century, Worth transformed exclusivity into authored luxury, while industrialisation manufactured the illusion of affordability. Today, fast fashion reduces clothing to near-disposability and luxury houses inflate prices into symbols of scarcity. Different contexts, same logic: price conceals the real labor, materials, and ecological strain that sustain fashion. What was once orchestrated by kings and queens now plays out through conglomerates and global supply chains.

Thorsten Veblen argued that elites engaged in conspicuous consumption, where high prices served not to measure real value, cost, or utility, but to display wealth by signalling that the buyer was wealthy enough not to care about necessity. Yet the other pole is just as revealing: the engineered cheapness of mass production. A $5 T-shirt and a $5,000 handbag are opposite expressions of the same distortion - neither really reflects the work, resources, or ecological limits embedded in the garment. In both cases, price becomes a mechanism of misevaluation, sustaining systems of inequality. Here Mariana Mazzucato’s argument becomes critical. In the Value of Everything, she shows how contemporary economies confuse price with value, rewarding those who extract rent, manipulate scarcity, or control branding, while undervaluing the labor, materials, and ecosystems that actually create wealth. Fashion exemplifies this pattern: profit accrues to shareholders and prestige to creative directors, while garment workers, cotton farmers, and ecosystems carry the hidden costs. The industry has inherited centuries of what could be called “bad manners” - a heritage of spectacle that mistakes performance for value.

As a designer, I confront this contradiction every day. If I choose excellent materials, work with skilled producers, and pay fair wages, the cost of a coat cannot be $50-100. It is not possible unless I cut corners where it matters most: in the dignity of labor or in the integrity of resources. So, brand owners today face a structural paradox: they are expected to integrate fair wages, sustainable sourcing, and high-quality materials - and this is essential - while also meeting consumer expectations of affordability. This tension exposes hot the current pricing system externalises true costs, creating a gap between ethical production and market demand.

Centuries of treating price as a performance have conditioned us to believe that value can be read directly from cost. In fast fashion, cheapness disguises exploitation, persuading consumers that garments can be bought next to nothing. In luxury high prices create the opposite illusion: that costliness guarantees fairness. Well, no. Here too, the money rarely honours the true cost, human labor and resources.

To produce responsibly entails costs that reflect reality rather than illusion. It requires wages that respect the value of human labor. sourcing that acknowledges the limits of soils and water, and craftsmanship oriented toward durability rather than disposability. For fashion to shift, there must be a collective understanding that garments carry real costs and that these cannot be wished away. Paying a higher price is not a premium or exclusivity but a reflection of what is required to produce responsibility. Education around why a coat, like a car or furniture, demands investment and long-term use is essential if the system is to move beyond disposability and erasure. For fashion to move forward, we must dismantle this illusion. Value cannot be confused with margin or image; it must be recognised in the real systems that sustain a garment’s existence. As long as consumers and corporations alike demand fairness without paying for it, designers will be forced into an impossible bind. But if we begin to align price with truth - with labor, ecology, and dignity - fashion could finally escape its long history of exploitation.

A value-driven fashion economy would mean that price reflects the realities that sustain a garment. Labor must be dignified, with wages and conditions that are fair rather than squeezed for margins. Ecological costs - biodiversity, energy, soils, water - can no longer be treated as invisible. Garments should be designed and price for longevity, not disposability, much like furniture or technology built to last. And cultural value - the creativity and heritage embedded in fashion - must be recognised rather than appropriated. When price accounts for these dimensions, it ceases to be theatre and becomes truth: not a signal of scarcity or speed, but a record of the work, resources, and meanings that make fashion possible.

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