Fashion is the perfect opportunity to express our individualism. What you choose to wear and how you wear it says a great deal about who you are as a person and some people make a fine art out of making a statement with their fashion choices.
According to Wikipedia, consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption that started with Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-American sociologist, economist, and author. Veblen is most famous for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. His subject of examination, the newly emergent middle class arising at the turn of the twentieth century, comes to full fruition by the end of the twentieth century through the process of globalization.
For consumers in dominant Western countries, globalization means an abundance of fashions sold by giant retailers who can update inventory, make transnational trade deals, and coordinate worldwide distribution of goods at the click of a computer. It means that what people are consuming is less the clothing itself than the corporate brand or logo such as Nike, Victoria’s Secret, or Abercrombie & Fitch. Consumers are purchasing the fantasy images of sexual power, athleticism, cool attitude, or carefree joy these brands disseminate in lavish, ubiquitous, hyper-visible marketing on high-tech electronic media. But much less visible is the effect of globalization on the production of fashion.
No longer manufactured by the company whose label it bears, clothing from large retailers is manufactured through a network of contractors and subcontractors. Pioneered by Nike, the largest retailer of athletic shoes and fashions, the outsourcing or subcontracting system was quickly taken up by giant retail chains like Express and The Gap, and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. These companies do not manufacture their own goods, but rather source and marketing goods produced on contract in low-wage environments. Because they make large profits, they can force manufacturers to contract with them at lower and lower prices. To reduce their costs, manufacturers subcontract much of the sewing, and even the cutting, to sweatshops in countries such as Mexico, China, Thailand, Romania, and Vietnam, where poverty is high and wages can be as low as 23 cents per hour. Manufacturers can also subcontract to sweatshops in the vast underground economies of immigrant communities in cities like Los Angeles, New York, or London. There is a huge contrast, but a tight relation, between production in sweatshops, where young women workers are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and consumption in retail chains filled with glamorous images. Jobs come without even the most basic worker safeguards and benefits.
Fashion is not the death of individualism, but instead a beacon of hope that helps people shape up their personalities and help them to stand out in this world as truly themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD545W0rLAo
http://www.dw.de/paying-a-high-price-for-cheap-fashion/a-16489159
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