The Fashion Swamp
Are governments finally regulating the fast fashion giants? And are these inclusivity measures from brands legit?
News & Reviews Magazine
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The piece you’re reading now is by Divya Venkataraman. Divya is a writer, editor and presenter based in London. She writes across fashion, culture, travel and sustainability for publications like The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar and more. Previously, she was an editor at Vogue Australia, GQ and Vogue Living, and also contributed regularly to Vogue Australia’s print editions. She has also been a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald. Her work has appeared in publications such as British Vogue, The Australian and Meanjin.
Fashion sits at the nexus of the most complicated, overlapping Venn diagram you can imagine. Like a family potato gratin in a too-small oven tray. You’ve got celebrity culture and capitalism (hyper-, late-) on one side, technology on another (Will AI ruin us all? is that low, repetitive hum you’re hearing), and questions of sustainability on yet another. Then there are the layers of colonialism, class, labour, and even more esoteric ideas, like the desire to possess beauty, or the question of who gets to create art for the sake of art, and who has to be prepared to commercialise it? Right in the middle of this mess—this sometimes beautiful, always perplexing swamp—sits the fashion industry. It straddles almost every issue and complicated idea in the world, and it’s hard to love. Especially if you care about the state of the world around you as well as (maybe even more than) lovely shoes.
So, Bri and I thought it might be worth breaking some of it down for you. These aren’t shopping recommendations, or missives on the latest celebrity shoe trend. (Confusingly, it’s the non-shoe. But there are other places to read about that.) This is the place where all of the terrible and wonderful things butt up against each other. The swampy place.
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