McDean gives us a view into fashion world’s psyche, a low blow interrogated version of it, but there is some realness to what our subjects are saying and not saying. If someone stopped me point blank, I don’t know how I would fare in that confrontation. It’s tough to say but do we need to be fair to these people? Probably, but I personally admire McDean’s gull.

But how do we define Fashion? How do we define Politics?
If we are talking about parliament, presidents and policy most of the ways are not very fashionable. I think the ways we learn about governmental politics could be more savory, but over saturating political motivations with aesthetics could be a dangerous path to take. I wouldnt especialliay in regards to the end of "Bamia's" suggestion of it becoming an instrument of fascism, Hitler's platform was a purely aesthetic one based on classicist ideals.

However if we realize the definition of politics, (separate from governmental politics) as the ways that we, individually or collectively, mitigate conflict and power in our daily life, than there are many ways in which fashion influences our political dispositions; race, class, gender, sexuality, identity and so fourth.

Fashion in this sense is a tremendously powerful communicator of political messages. Messages we absorb most ubiquitously from imagery, moving and still but also in design.
You can insert the vast post-modernist rhetoric on visual culture here: Barthes, Foucault, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Lyotard etc. It’s important, but I will spare it.

Is it fair to assume most of us are equipped with this knowledge or at least the visual literacy that it professes? I would instead like to go back to Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” one of Modernity’s formative texts.

"The aim for [the artist] is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distill the eternal from the transitory. .... Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

Baudelaire defines for us a duality in modern life. To embrace and balance our lives between the temporary external and that which carries gravity and spirit. What I would like to convey with this passage is the ethos of style and consciousness… a way of life for the ‘spiritual citizen of the world’ and a disdain for “the many thoughtless people … who are grave without having gravity.”(Baudelaire)

Historian and activist Howard Zinn states in ‘Artist’s In a Time of War’ that the role of the artist in society is to be transcendent.

Before anything we decide that we are, professionally or individually, we are citizens and humans. The political device is one area of modern life in which we all share a duty.

If the goal of the avant-garde is to close the gap in consciousness between art and daily life, to live life freely and transcend autonomy, monotony, hegemony etc, than we shall consider ourselves citizens first then artists and then whatever else we choose.

Fashion is one of the many delicious coatings of the eternal.
Fashion and politics are both transitory, as are morals.
Spirit is eternal. Spirit is of the individual.

On a final note…
If I can yield one prime example of a creative entity in which the dialogue between politics and fashion is immanent it would be Rei Kawakubo. Her work through design, textile and architecture, allows us to consistently consider and redefine imperfection, ugliness, gender, identity and many other things. Her work is the crossroads of many things, politics and fashion being one of them.

"Fashion is one of the many delicious coatings of the eternal." What a ridiculous, pompous and muddled post.

It seems to me obvious that fashion is political - in the way that all things that play a role within human interaction are political. Obviously, day to day choices about what to wear support our desire to belong to social groups, individual notions of display, concealment and personal ambition - in other words purely selfish human impulses. Theres nothing wrong with this of course - it is one element of the oil that has kept the wheels of social interaction turning for centuries. However, it is possible to see this for what it is and minimize it's importance in your life.

The more pertinent question is what general political position does the fashion industry take. The answer to this is simple - the fashion industry supports the status quo. It's primary goal is to make money and to achieve this aim it bolsters the western capitalist model. Bamia you are missing this point when you say that fashion doesn't have a point to make. No ideology is an ideology. Not taking sides allows you to take the position that best suits your personal interest. More damingly it trivializes life thereby distracting attention from events/issues/politics that truly matter. It is decidedly right wing and reactionary...

Any discussion of fashion and politics that doesn't address the fashion 'industry' is foolish. Take a look at this website for example - the latest 'project' is a clumsy campaign for a women's lingerie company. This isn't art - its advertising with the primary goal to flog product. Nick Knight has gone out of his way to distract attention from this cold hard fact by employing smoke and mirrors and cloaking his work/this site in a fog of 'creative culture'

Finally, I might forgive this if the end result (the art produced) had any real value. But unfortunately it is generally clueless, obsessed with the surface of things and full of posturing. BAD art in other words. The series of films in this 'art + politics project' are a case in point - almost without exception they are shallow and clumsy with nothing interesting to say.

If your talent is to be a stylist - to experiment with form and function then be honest enough to embrace this. Attempting to dress your work up (ahem) any other way is just wrong headed and disingenuous.