Fashion Revolution

A revolution is a forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favour of a new system — but a fashion revolution is never forcible, and needs no force at all. In fashion the word means something gentler and, in its own way, just as dramatic: a complete or dramatic change in how people dress and make clothes.

What Counts as a Fashion Revolution?

Several quite different events earn the name. Consumers can attempt to overthrow the reigning fashion queen or fashion king, shifting loyalty and spending until the old order falls. Emerging designers can take the leadership role from popular, established designers, redrawing what the industry promotes. And sometimes nothing is overthrown at all: style choices simply change so completely — as when 1960s corduroy pants and bell bottoms replaced 1950s taste — that the change itself is revolutionary.

Technology supplies another kind of revolution. Clothing and textiles transform significantly through innovation: smart fabrics and wearable technology, compared with the fabrics and clothing of the 1800s, represent a revolutionary advance in what a garment can do. The Industrial Revolution's effect on fashion is the standing historical example, and the digital revolution — designers trading runways for Instagram-based shows, with social media as fashion's new government — is the current one.

The Fashion Revolution Movement

The phrase also names an organisation. Fashion Revolution believes the whole fashion industry needs a radical paradigm shift, and that the way clothes are produced, sold, consumed and disposed of needs to be holistically transformed — toward an industry that values people, the environment, creativity and profit in equal measure.

The World Economic Forum's writing on the sustainable fashion revolution makes the connected case: the industry must move away from take-make-dispose consumption of clothes produced in inhumane conditions, as its Agenda pieces on the hidden costs of the fashion industry and the environmental costs of fast fashion set out.

Revolutionary Faces on T-Shirts

Revolution also reaches fashion as imagery. The Che chic phenomenon put Ernesto Che Guevara — the Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician and guerrilla leader who was a major figure of the Cuban Revolution of 1956-59 — onto endless T-shirts, hats, posters and even bikinis. The high-contrast monochrome graphic of his face became one of the world's most universally merchandised images.

The irony is widely noted: a Marxist icon who fought the economic system became a commercial success inside it, popular especially with younger adults and university students drawn to the rebelliousness the image signals. Critics answer that the face belongs to a man accused of using violence to achieve his objectives and who presided over the La Cabaña prison — which is why the shirt rewards a wearer who knows the history behind the graphic. Fashion victims, it should be said, are victims of an entirely different kind.

Revolution Without Force

The fashion meaning keeps the scale of the political word and drops its violence. A style can be overthrown by shoppers quietly buying something else, and a technology can revolutionise dress without a single decree.

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