Fashion is not just a decorative surface or style. It is a system of language, ecology, power, resources, and labour - one that begins in the soil and eventually, returns to it. To ignore it is to ignore one of the most pervasive cultural forces shaping human life. (Edie Lou)

Fashion is one of the few global systems whose complexity is consistently mistaken for mere styling - a surface distraction, rather than a structure that touches nearly every human life, spans agriculture to design and technology, and drives a multi-trillion-dollar economy. The statement “I don’t care about fashion” is delivered with a certain moral ease and casual certainty - yet it betrays a profound ignorance, akin to claiming indifference to the planet’s health or to human life itself. It is a signal of detachment that implies immunity from its influence. Beneath this posture lies an enduring and shallow assumption: that clothing is an aesthetic entertainment - something served up in fashion shows, magazines, or social media feeds, a preoccupation of the wealthy, the vain, or the unserious, completely detached from its material and labour realities, from its fundamental necessity and a vast, interconnected industrial system that begins in the soil and ends in landfills.

In reality, fashion is not a decorative afterthought, obviously, but a core system of contemporary life. It is a basic necessity: everyone wears clothing every day, across all cultures and climates. It is embedded in essential industries, from agriculture - where cotton, flax, nettle, and hemp are cultivated and sheep are raised for wool etc. - to petrochemicals, which produce synthetic fibres, to the global manufacturing, trade, and waste systems that move and manage garments. Its impacts are measurable and significant: it affects the environment through soil management, water use, and carbon emissions; it shapes economies through jobs, production, and through export revenues; and it influences social life through identity, norms, status, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Participation in this system is unavoidable unless one lives naked and entirely outside human society.

The fashion and textile sector is a major contributor to national and global economies - not just luxury markets, but across mass production, raw material supply, logistics, and retail. In many countries, textiles and apparel are among the top export industries (e.g., Bangladesh, Vietnam, Italy). Globally, the fashion industry is valued at over $2.5 trillion, meaning the sales and services around fashion directly feed into GDP calculations. The sector generates tens of millions of jobs across agriculture, manufacturing, design, logistics, marketing, and retail. Fashion-related tourism (e.g., shopping districts, fashion weeks, design exhibitions) also adds to GDP through hospitality, travel, and event industries. And the list never ends.

The Roots of Fashion’s Trivialisation

And yet, despite its scale - a multi-trillion-dollar engine with ecological and social reach rivalling that of the food system - fashion remains underestimated. This is not the result of ignorance alone, but of cultural framing. The first reason is historical and cultural framing. As Pierre Bourdieu observed in Distinction, cultural fields are stratified by gender, class, and perceived seriousness. Fashion, historically associated with women, queer communities, and innovators from historically underrepresented and systemically marginalised groups, has been coded as emotional, decorative, and unserious.

This is not a neutral misreading; it is a form of symbolic power that diminishes the intellectual and economic value of fashion while relegating its practitioners to the realm of “domestic craft”. Even university-trained designers with advanced degrees are often reduced in the public imagination to seamstresses or hobbyists - asked to hem curtains or likened to apprentices - because the discipline’s research, conceptual frameworks, and systemic reach remain invisible to those not involved. Meanwhile, corporate and financial control of the industry remains concentrated in the hands of a global elite, predominantly male and Western, widening the gap between those who shape fashion’s aesthetics and those who profit from them. This gendered and cultural trivialisation has long obscured fashion’s reality: a resource-intensive, politically charged industry whose impacts are as material as they are symbolic.

The second reason is psychological self-protection. Apparent indifference to fashion is often less a matter of genuine disinterest than a defensive posture. As Byung-Chul Han notes in his work on self-presentation, identity is shaped as much by what one rejects as by what one embraces. For many, distancing from fashion shields them from the vulnerability of participating in a space they have been conditioned to view as exclusive - reserved for the stylish, the beautiful, and the glamorous. This conditioning often begins in childhood, through subtle cues that signal who belongs and who does not: the clothes one could afford, the approval or ridicule from peers, the cultural narratives about beauty and worth. Over time, these early exclusions can harden into a form of collective, internalised belief that fashion is “not for people like me”. The safest response, then, is to dismiss it as frivolous. In reality, this refusal does not exit the system - it simply becomes another performance within it, one that obscures the structural forces fashion exerts on daily life.

The third reason is strategic trivialisation by the industry itself. Fashion benefits from being seen as entertainment rather than infrastructure. As Edward Bernays observed in Propaganda, public opinion can be shaped by controlling the frame through which an industry is perceived. By foregrounding celebrity campaigns, seasonal trends, and the theatre of runway shows, fashion’s corporate actors keep attention fixed on the spectacle while diverting scrunity away from its supply chains, labour practices, and environmental toll. This framing allows it to avoid the levels of regulation and public accountability applied to other industries of comparable scale, such as agriculture, energy, or technology. The result is a paradox: one of the largest, most interconnected systems on the planet - linking fibre cultivation, manufacturing, logistics, marketing, and waste management - operates largely outside sustained policy debate. Its true operations begin with the cultivation of fibres in agricultural systems and end, often as waste, in soil, water, or atmosphere. The less the public perceives fashion as an engine of economic, ecological, and political consequence, the more freedom it retains to operate without structural reform.

Fashion begins in the ground

To understand fashion’s real scale, we must step past the spectacle and look a little deeper and start at its core. To illustrate its complexity, urgency, and global significance, we focus here on one dimension, knowing it is impossible to capture the entire system within a single article, its ecological and agricultural foundations. Why? Fashion is an agricultural industry before it is anything else. Every garment begins in a field, pasture, plantation, or extraction site. Cotton, the world’s most widely used natural fibre, is grown on roughly 33 million hectares of land worldwide - about 1.3 times the size of the entire state of Washington - and almost entirely in monocultural systems, meaning the same crop is planted season after season on the same land. This practice accelerates the depletion of soil of organic matter, disrupts the balance of soil microbiota, and reduces biodiversity. It creates a fragile ecosystem that cannot regulate itself.

The ecological instability of monocultures leaves cotton fields highly susceptible to pest infestations. To maintain yields, farmers apply enormous quantities of agrochemicals, making cotton one other the most chemically intensive crops on earth. It has been estimated that it accounts for between 5-6% of global pesticide use and, within that, for 10- 16% of all insecticide use worldwide - a disproportionate share given its relatively small contribution to global agriculture compared to other crops. In countries such as India, Pakistan, and the United States, this chemical load contaminates groundwater, contributes to the collapse of pollinator populations, and poses serious health risks to farm workers, including pesticide poisoning and long-term chronic illness.

This chemical and ecological dependency translates directly into human vulnerability. The best example for this is the situation in India, where genetically modified Bt cotton now covers over 95% of cotton fields, the economic and ecological risks for farmers are severe. Bt cotton is engineered to produce a toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis that kills the cotton bollworm, initially reducing pesticide use. But the seeds are patented and cannot be legally saved, forcing farmers to buy new, expensive seeds each year - often at prices three or eight times higher than conventional varieties - along with proprietary fertilisers and pesticides. Why are farmers buying it? Because Bt cotton is marketed as a high-yield, pest-resistant “contemporary” solution, while market monopolies, disappearing non-Bt seed options, credit systems tied to seed dealers, and social pressure leave them with virtually no viable alternative.

These purchases are frequently financed through informal credits at interest rates of 24-60% annually. Over time, pests develop resistance to the Bt toxin, and secondary pests like aphids and whiteflies proliferate, requiring yet more pesticide applications. The varieties are also bred for high yields under irrigation, making them vulnerable in India’s semi-arid cotton belts where droughts, delayed monsoons, or unseasonal rains can slash yields by 30-50%.

Monoculture cultivation magnifies the fragility: planting cotton year after year depletes soil organic matter, reduces biodiversity, and increases susceptibility to pests and disease. With no crop rotation or diversification, farmers are exposed to both ecological and market shocks - a poor harvest or a fall in global prices can erase a year’s income. This “technology treadmill” traps farmers in cycles of rising input costs and declining resilience. Between 1995 and 2018, over 300,000 Indian farmers died by suicide, with cotton growers disproportionately represented. This crisis continues: in 2022 alone, there were 11,290 recorded suicides in India’s farming sector, including 5,207 farmers and 6,083 agricultural labourers. In Maharashtra’s cotton-intensive Marathwada region, the toll reached 1,116 deaths in 2023 and 952 in 2024. These numbers reveal a stark truth: the global demand for fashion’s fibers is inseparable from soil degradation, chemical dependency, and the human cost borne in the fields where every garment begins.

Cotton is also one of the world’s most water-intensive crops (©Edie Lou)

Water Stress - The Thirsty Industry

Cotton is also one of the world’s most water-intensive crops, with a single kilogram - enough for one T-shirt and a pair of jeans - requiring on average 10,000 litres of water. In regions like Maharashtra, India’s largest cotton-producing state, irrigation often depends on overdrawn groundwater aquifers that are already in critical decline. The competition for water between agriculture, domestic use, and industry pushes farming families into further precarity, particularly during drought years. Globally, cotton cultivation accounts for an estimated 3% of total agricultural water use, but its impact is magnified in semi-arid zones where rainfall is irregular. Here, climate change intensifies the problem: delayed monsoons or unseasonal rains can turn a fragile planting cycle into a complete crop failure, further entrenching the dept spiral that drives rural despair.

The water crisis extends far beyond the field. Textile dyeing and finishing - much of it outsourced to countries with minimal environmental regulation - is the second-largest source of water pollution worldwide. Rivers in industrial hubs like Tiruppur in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Guangzhou in China have been found to contain toxic levels of heavy metals, formaldehyde, and ago dyes, rendering them unsafe for drinking, fishing, or irrigation. These contaminated waterways feed back into the agricultural system, damaging soil microbiomes and reducing crop viability, creating a feedback loop of ecological degradation. The same water that once sustained fibre production becomes a carrier of poisons - a literal embodiment of fashion’s transformation of life-giving resources into waste.

Water scarcity is also reshaping the geography of fashion’s supply chains. As climate change intensifies droughts in traditional cotton-producing regions, growers are forced either to drill deeper into diminishing groundwater reserves or to abandon the crop altogether, shifting production to new regions that may have weaker labour protections or fragile ecosystems. Synthetic fibres like polyester, often presented as a water-saving alternative, avoid the need for irrigation but create a different crisis: their production relies on fossil fuels and their laundering releases microplastics into waterways, where they accumulate in marine life and, eventually, human bodies. Whether natural or synthetic, fibre production is bound to water - either in the vast volumes needed for cultivation and processing or in the long-term contamination of aquatic systems. In this way, the fashion industry’s material choices ripple outward into food security, climate resilience, and public health, further proving that water is not a peripheral concern but a central axis of the system.

Fashion as a Playground?

Most people imagine fashion as a playground for style, art, or frivolous self-expression, yet behind its visible surface, as we can see, lies a deeply interdependent system rooted in soil, water, and human labour. Every garment - from a haute couture gown to a basis T-shirt - begins not in a design studio, but in a field, pasture, or plantation. The quality of fibre that designers drape on mannequins depends on the fertility of the land where it was grown, the availability of clean water for irrigation and processing, and the human condition under which it was harvested and spun. In cotton productions, degraded soils demand heavier irrigation, placing immense strain on already stressed water reserves, while dye effluent and pesticide runoff contaminate rivers that sustain both communities and ecosystems. These are not abstract environmental metrics; they are structural forces that shape what materials exist for design, what they cost, and who bears the risks of their production. Without living soil, fashion - as both an art form and an industry - simply cannot exist.

This ecological foundation is inseparable from its socio-political realities. The monoculture farming systems that feed the fashion supply chain often trap growers in cycles of dept and dependence, where volatile global prices, rising input costs, and climate disruptions can wipe out entire seasons of income. In regions such as India’s cotton belt, these pressures have driven farmer suicide rates to crisis levels, revealing the human cost embedded in the fibres that enter the global market. Obviously, water scarcity compounds the instability: prolonged droughts, depleted aquifers, and polluted waterways not only reduce yields but destabilise communities, deepen poverty, and trigger migration pressures.

So…Can we agree on that that to dismiss fashion as trivial is to overlook one of the most intricate and far-reaching systems in the contemporary world - a network that links artistic creation to agricultural policy, climate resilience to international trade agreements, and cultural expression to human survival. It is a sector that draws from multiple disciplines simultaneously: agronomy, chemistry, logistics, design, marketing, and political economy. Decisions made in one node - such as a change in cotton subsidy policy, a drought in a fibre-producing region, or the introduction of new textile technologies - reverberate across continents, shaping what materials are available, how they are processed, and who has access to them. This interconnectivity means that fashion operates not as a “decorative afterthought” to life, but as a structural component of global stability and risk. It is, in many respects, a barometer of wider societal health, reflecting the condition of our soils, our labour markets, and our geopolitical arrangements.

This, crucially, is only one dimension of fashion’s scope. Its reach extends into labour rights, human dignity, global economics, cultural identity, political symbolism, technological innovation, and much more. Fashion doesn’t just sell clothes - it reshapes labour markets, migration flows, cultural identities, and ecological future. Supply chain dynamics influence wage equity and migration patterns: these determine where production happens, under what labour conditions, and how wages are distributed. This affects rural-to-urban migration, cross-border migration for garment work, and the economic survival of entire regions. Branding strategies do not merely market products; they respond to and amplify cultural ideals, reinforcing status and lifestyle while embedding them into purchasing behaviour that sustains overproduction and ecological strain. Fashion doesn’t just reflect the world - it actively builds economic structures, cultural narratives, and power hierarchies that shape how people live, work, and relate to one another - it is a system that actively creates and distributes value, meaning, and power.

Does it become clear now why fashion cannot be reduced to a matter of style - and why we can no longer afford the comfort of indifference? It is a structural system that organizes resources, labour, and culture across continents, shaping both ecological outcomes and human destinies. When its operations remain unseen, the industry’s most damaging effects - from soil degradation and water scarcity to unsafe labour and the erosion of cultural diversity - proceed without challenge. The cost of such invisibility is measured not only in environmental breakdown but in the loss of human life and dignity.

Education and Law Regulation is the Missing Infrastructure

If fashion is to shed its reputation as a frivolous pursuit and be recognised for its full ecological, economic, and cultural weight, the transformation must begin with how it is understood. Here we have focused on only one dimension - its dependence on agricultural and ecological systems - but there are many others equally urgent. Changing the stereotypes embedded in public consciousness requires both structural transparency and cultural re-education, in schools, in universities, and across the industry itself, so that fashion is seen not as a decorative afterthought, but as a system inseparable from the land, resources, and lives it shapes.

If fashion is to be understood and redesigned as a system that is ecological, economic, and cultural in equal measure, its education must reflect that reality. At present, even at the university level, teaching in fashion largely revolves around aesthetics, garment construction, and market trends. Sustainability is too often confined to an elective module, treated as a secondary concern rather than the foundation on which design rests. This creates a structural blind spot: graduates may excel in visual innovation but remain disconnected from the agricultural, ecological, and labor systems that make their work possible. But let´s be fair: a few institutions, such as IFA Paris have demonstrated that such breadth is possible, combining conceptual design work with training in sustainability, ethics, branding and marketing, and global production systems.

A genuine transformation of fashion will not emerge from seasonal campaigns or voluntary pledges; it requires a reorganisation of how the industry is understood, taught, and governed. Fashion literacy must extend far beyond the aesthetic. A new model of learning - spanning not only schools or universities but also professional training, and public engagement - should connect the creative process directly to its agricultural, ecological, and socio-political foundations. Designers, executives, policymakers, and citizens alike need the capacity to read a garment not only for its style, but for its soil footprint, water demands, labour conditions, and place within global trade flows.

But let’s be honest. Education can shift perception, but it cannot on its own rebalance a system whose systemic non-disclosure and information asymmetry protects those who profit most. Expecting consumers to trace and understand every stage of a garment’s life is unrealistic; the system is too vast and complex. Voluntary transparency lets brands reveal only what flatters them. That means brands, when not legally required to disclose everything, will be tempted to choose to share only the information that makes them…look good - for example, highlighting “organic cotton” use while omitting the fact that it makes up only 5% of their total production, or promoting recycled fabrics while concealing exploitative labour practices. So, it is obvious, that binding legislation is essential - requiring full disclosure of supply chains, from agricultural origins and chemical use to labour conditions, water and soil impacts, and product end-of-life plans. These laws must be backed by enforcement and penalties, ensuring that environmental destruction and worker exploitation carry real financial and legal consequences.

And yet shifting the cultural narrative is the most underestimated step in transforming fashion’s role in society. The industry’s dismissal has deep roots: it has been historically coded as decorative and unserious through gendered and classed biases; public detachment has been reinforced by a subconscious defence against early exclusion from the “cool and stylish” sphere; and the industry itself has benefited from its own trivialisation, shielding its operations from the level of scrutiny faced by sectors like energy and agriculture. As long as fashion is framed as a superficial spectacle, its political, economic, and ecological stakes will remain obscured. Recasting it as planetary infrastructure - a system as consequential to soil, water, and human dignity as food or energy - would give both citizens and policymakers the urgency to demand reform.

Fashion will only gain the seriousness it deserves - and be transformed from a driver of depletion into a force for ecological and social regeneration - if three forces align: cultural redefinition that reframes it as planetary infrastructure, education that equips both citizens and professionals with systemic literacy, and legislation that makes transparency and accountability non-negotiable. Without all three, reform remains partial: laws without public understanding lack pressure for enforcement, education without binding rules lacks consequence, and cultural change without structural reform leaves the system intact.

However, Cognitive science research shows that sustained exposure is key to changing habits. One-off sustainability campaigns, no matter how well-funded, are quickly overridden by the relentless marketing of novelty and disposability. To build an embedded consciousness — one where soil, labour, and resource use become part of the everyday grammar of fashion — requires repetition across contexts. And foremost, independent, critical thinkers are the most important catalyst in this process. Once you think autonomously and understand the full weight the fashion industry places on the planet, you can no longer claim disinterest without acknowledging the selfishness of that stance. No one is naked - and therefore no one is outside the system.

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