Fast Is Never Free: Critical Analysis of Fast Fashion and Its Condition of Freedom vs. Its Repression of Freedom

Fast is Never Free:
Critical Analysis of Fast Fashion and its condition of Freedom vs. Repression of Freedom

Alejandra Carrillo-Muñoz
A&D 603
October 22, 2012

Abstract
Known to be a revolutionizing model for the ability of freedom that promotes artistic novelty while fulfilling function, fashion has certainly managed to establish some of those intents. In other ways, it has juxtaposed those intents and has functioned against its proposals. More specifically, what began as a utilitarian practice, morphed into an artistic manner of granting individual uniqueness in ones dressing, which then lead to a desire of constant newness and novelty in this need for personal styling. The consequence: a revolutionizing counterpart that once intended to grant freedom further evolved into fast fashion, a mechanism that oppresses the condition of freedom. Still, this new phenomena cannot be analyzed without previous consideration of philosophy’s perception on the overall view of fashion. This analysis will reveal close associations between philosophy’s disappointed suppositions regarding fashion to the consequences of modern day fast fashion. Ultimately, this paper analyzes the effects of fast fashion along with its freedom and its condemning the condition of freedom while merging the precedent philosophical perception of fashion as supported through Nickolas Pappas’s, Fashion Seen as Something Imitative and Foreign.

Philosophy has established a resistance against fashion since its ancient origins regarding fashion’s intentions, functions, and societal consequences. How much more opposition would be held at seeing that fashion’s evolution has further supported that resistance? Most definitely this would reinforce many attributed arguments made by philosophers who identify the conditions of fashion not as an acceptable practice of utilitarian art and design, but as a passive and empty condition of negatively acclimating man’s performances to wrong

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