The Dark Side of Fashion:
Learning to see Hidden Systems
Part 1: Take-off
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| Face of the Moon |
Last month, spaceship Artemis II blasted off with 4 astronauts on board. The goal of the mission was to fly past the dark side of the Moon.
There could scarcely be a more fitting analogy for fashion than the luminous face of the moon.
For a century our attention has been focused on the face of fashion, lit up by the lights of the industry. Our minds, like our eyes, have been riveted by glossy magazines, cat walks, shop windows, movie stars, royalty and influencers. Tickets for the annual MET Gala in New York this month, a pinnacle of fashion, cost US$100,000 a person. The media were replete with images and stories of who wore what.
In an unprecedented move, New York’s Mayor Mamdani went to visit the underpaid workers of fashion instead of attending the Gala, but his move received less media attention.
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| Tidal Locking |
The moon has a dark side that we never see. The Moon is locked in by the gravity of the Earth, so it turns at the same rate as it orbits the Earth. This is called ‘tidal locking’. It means that we always see the same face of the moon.
This is another fitting analogy for fashion. Fashion, too, has a hidden side.
A reporter for The Guardian, wrote, “the golden rule in fashion, as in life, is that those with the gold make the rules.”
We could also say, “Those who make the rules, show only the gold, and keep the dark side of fashion hidden.”
Fashion glamour is a business strategy, the lady-of-the-night of the industry. The industry is about growth; fashion production is its means to achieve that growth. Owners of fashion holding companies are amongst the richest on the planet. The focus on the bright side of fashion enables ‘business as usual’.
The industry of fashion -- and industry in general -- have been on a trajectory of exponential growth for a century. Regardless of the impact of fashion growth on people and planet, the industry continues to grow.
“Going for the moon” is an expression meaning ‘to go all out’.
Place yourself for a moment in the astronaut’s chair. Consider the determination and the longing to go to the moon that you must have.
What on earth could compel such a longing? Philosopher Hannah Arendt thought it was humanity’s “desire to become immortal”. …”to leave behind the natural restrictions of the body and nature”. Arendt warned against “alienation from Earth”. Naomi Klein, together with Astra Taylor, discovered amongst the superrich, preparedness to toss Planet Earth as soon as technology permits the construction of a new home ‘out there’.
The hype surrounding journeys to space draws more attention than the needs of an ailing planet.
Fashion’s extensive dark side is among the forsaken needs here on Earth.
Part II – Rounding the first corner:
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| The trajectory of Artemis II |
Artemis II made it to the dark side of the moon in a brief fly-by. Humans were able to lay eyes on what had never been seen before. The astronauts beamed back pictures of dark craters and bleak rocks.
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| Rocks and craters on the dark side of the moon |
This century, fashion’s dark side became too blatant to ignore. Our engagement with the dark side of fashion has lasted longer than the fly-by by Artemis II. Fashion’s dark sides are just next door, hidden in plain view. They are in our minds: blind spots, conceptual blinkers, constructed collectively. Like ignorance being bliss. These blind spots manifest in sacrifice zones everywhere on earth.
The term ‘sacrifice zone’ is used for physical areas of the planet destroyed for economic growth, for example where coal and oil are mined. Even the term carries a blind spot. Those ‘areas’ of destruction are not just ‘places on the map’. They are ecosystems, parts of the whole puzzle called planet Earth, Or as Van Peborgh pointed out, a bioregion is “not a territory. It is a living field where ecology, culture, economy and memory co-evolve”. The concept of ‘sacrifice zones of fashion’ is systemic. It applies to all situations of fashion damage, from the conceptual -- the delusions we may suffer from fashion advertising -- to the physical - rain forest loss from cotton cultivation - to the social -- sweatshop conditions -- to the cultural -- loss of traditional dress systems outcompeted by fashion.
Why are there sacrifice zones enabled by blindspots?
It is existentially imperative that we explore the why and do something about it.
Blindness is complicity in fashion’s sacrifice zones.
It is painful to learn to perceive the damage wrought by fashion. The process can trigger outrage and denial. But denial is as easy as buy-wear-toss.
Learning to see can also bring relief, delivering us from alienation from an important facet of our existence.
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| January 1, 2025, the Kantamanto Market fire |
‘Conceptual blinkers’ are worn by those who stand to gain from having them. They are a tool to retain the status quo. They can be personal, and they can be collective and systemic. A biennale devoted to ‘hidden systems’ implicitly addresses those of us who wear blinkers especially designed to block out the sacrifice zones of fashion.
There are many for whom fashion’s dark side is not hidden at all.
Awareness of fashion’s sacrifice zones varies, depending on one’s position vis-a-vis fashion. Responses range from resentment at having to labour like a slave to make clothing for another, to self-alienation born of self-exotification to achieve status through fashion, to anger at having access only to water that has been poisoned by textile dyes. Awareness of fashion’s sacrifices can be ambiguous, contradictory, and incomplete. But they are systemic, making all of us victims, in one way or another, and some much more than others.
How did and do we become collectively blind to the hidden sides of fashion? There are many answers; I touch on three very briefly.
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| A focus on the ledgers is a kind of blindness |
One is the way profits are counted by the global economic system. GDP takes account of money made but not of damage wrought when that money is being made. There is enormous pressure on businesses to increase profits and when the damage in the process is not counted, strategies can be pursued with impunity. Unless there is change in the way ‘profits’ are measured, there is no incentive to provide a so-called ‘living wage’, improve quality of fashion items, or reduce the quantity of production and advertising.
Second, there is something called ‘the shifting baseline’ syndrome. A previous norm can be forgotten when something changes. For example, few of us remember our relationship to clothing prior to the Industrial Revolution. Now that clothing is so cheap and plentiful, how is it possible to re-learn relationships we had to it when it was scarce?
Destruction runs on Diesel
Third, the American thinker, Nate Hagens, is teaching us that we suffer from ‘fossil fuel blindness’. Students of fashion have not yet worked out the full extent to which the industrial fashion system is a function of access to plentiful fossil fuels. During the Industrial Revolution, the speedy turnover of fashion styles in the West was attributed not to access to fossil fuels, but to Western superiority. The sheer physical power of fossil fuels has enabled systems of global inequality from colonialism, to global financial institutions, to billionaire lifestyles characterized by the MET gala and joy-rides to space. Fashion has co-operated with the fossil economy to amplify notions of Western superiority, white supremacy and human exceptionalism. This has hugely enabled the emergence of fashion’s hidden side.
Fossil energy fuels ‘earth alienation’ as much by enabling sky-high social hierarchies as by enabling physical departures from Earth by spaceship.
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| Earthset |
Part III – Going Home
After flying past the dark side of the moon, Earth, luminous and blue, came back into view in an endless black void.
In a flash, Victor Glover, one of the astronauts on board, saw Earth as a counterpart to the spaceship that he was sitting in. He was overwhelmed by emotions that have been called ‘The Overview Effect’: a “feeling of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole" (Yaden, et al (2016). “Thinking about all the cultures, all around the world…this is an opportunity for us to remember … that we are the same thing, in that we gotta get through this together,” Glover said.
At the start of the voyage, fossil and a longing to go away fueled the blast-off. Now Earth’s gravity was pulling them back.
At the outset, I characterized ‘going for the stars’ as alienation from Earth expressed in willful blindness to anything but fashion’s gleaming face. I then compared our visits to the dark side of fashion to stripping off the blinkers and piercing through blind spots.
So now, what is the significance of turning the second corner and seeing Earth again?
I believe that we, now, are at the start of a return journey to earth. And it is still a long way off.
The ecological philosopher, Rupert Read, foresaw that “We’re going to be going through a constant series of transformations in the coming years, because of ecological decline and climate degradation.” Our immediate task is to learn how to “get through what is coming, in the best way possible,” he said.
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| Yayra Agbofah being interviewed by Emma Vloeimans |
During the public opening of State of Fashion, on May 14, Emma Vloeimans, editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, interviewed, among others, Yayra Agbofah from Accra, in Ghana.
Once a trader in second-hand clothing in the Kantamanto market, one of the largest garment dumps in the world, Yayra established “The Revival”, a community non-profit that upcycles discarded clothing. He peered at us from under the brim of his large black hat. “When you throw away your used clothing,” he said, “where do you think it goes?” All of us in the audience knew how little is recycled, that it doesn’t break down, that it’s toxic, -- what I am calling here ‘alienation from Earth’. But when he said, “We deal with it. Every day,” waste was suddenly no longer abstract. His life was being spent dealing with our cast-offs. “No system should produce waste,” he said.
Yayra had come to us from a sacrifice zone, not just the ‘away’ from when we throw our clothes ‘away’, but a place that has been traditionally characterized by the global fashion system as ‘having no fashion’, a black man treated by the West as inferior, whose humanity has even been questioned, whence slaves for cotton fields had come, from a culture that we in the West colonized and treated as inconsequential. “In the past, we weren’t invited to the table. Decisions were made forus. I am glad that I can be here now,” he said softly. That evening, he was no longer hidden, ignored, or erased. He was a partner in the quest to find ways back to a healthy planet. His hat was that of an advisor. Of all of us, it fit only him, the only experiential expert in the room. We needed his voice. For a precious moment, his hands were joined with ours in the audience, across the divides of race, culture and class that fashion has depicted and reinforced.
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| Said by astronaut, Victor Glover |
During my travels as an anthropologist, I have lived in very poor villages. I have repeatedly discerned that sacrifice zones are zones of waste: waste of ancient cultures filled with regionally-specific and universal wisdom; waste of the lives of talented people and their skills; waste of sustainable dress systems that are hidden in plain view; waste of unending capacities to enable achievements in every possible dimension of humanity, waste of our collective pasts and futures. This was the painful substrate of my article about the sacrifice zone of fashion.
Students of fashion have come a long way since I wrote my lonely critiques of fashion two decades ago. New initiatives are now so plentiful that it is hard to keep track of them all, as though they are swirling around me, my ideas merging with them in a rising tide. Despite the continuing growth of the industry, the fashion community is vibrant with experimentation.
I believe that none of us know the way home. The future of fashion is our collective call. The return journey is about learning to listen to each other, to share our respective discoveries and to forge plural fashion ecologies to replace the single, dominant global system.
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| Murmuration of Starlings |
Will the future be shaped by coalescences of initiatives, like seemingly arbitrary murmurations of starlings? Like the confluence of partners and funders supporting State of Fashion? Like “the collective and collaborative process” described by the curators in the Visitors Guide? I am encouraging Conferences of the Parties, fashion COPs, to construct intentional roadmaps to futures without fashion sacrifice zones. The paths to the future will not be just about materials, technological advances and living wages. They will be about healing divisions. About not leaving out cultural sustainability. About learning to see fashion as ecosystems. About literally putting fashion back in our own hands. About never alienating ourselves from the thin biosphere in which our Earth is wrapped, and where all that is precious takes place.
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| The biosphere is a thin line wrapped around Earth |
Bibliography
Arthur Bermans interviewed.by Nate Hagens
A World on the Precipice: The Last Oil Tanker From the Strait of Hormuz has Arrived – Now What?
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/220-art-berman
Hagens, Nate. (The Great Simplification)
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/resources
Klein, Naomi and Astra Taylor. ‘The Rise of End Times Fascism,’ In The Guardian 13 April 2025
Sandra Niessen (2020): Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability ,
Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture , DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984
Niessen, Sandra 2023. “Fashion: Be Careful What You Celebrate! Status and Othering in Fossil Fuels and Fashion (with an appended 'Table of Industrial Fashion Myths') Blogspot. Batak Textiles.”
https://bataktextiles.blogspot.com/2023/09/fashion-be-careful-what-you-celebrate.html
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/hannah-arendt-outer-space/).
Cartner-Morley, Jess, The Guardian, Tue 5 May 2026 14.02 CEST)
Peborgh Ernesto van. Bioregions or the return of the living? 2026
'Thrutopia' with Rupert Read, The Verb, BBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lngwuFOLt8M
Solastagia https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18027145/
Albrecht G, Sartore GM, Connor L, Higginbotham N, Freeman S, Kelly B, Stain H, Tonna A, Pollard G. Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australas Psychiatry. 2007;15 Suppl 1:S95-8. doi: 10.1080/10398560701701288. PMID: 18027145.
Going for the moon.
Yaden, David B.; Iwry, Jonathan; Slack, Kelley J.; Eichstaedt, Johannes C.; Zhao, Yukun; Vaillant, George E.; Newberg, Andrew B. (2016). "The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight". Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. 3 (1): 1–11. doi:10.1037/cns0000086. ISSN 2326-5531.
State of Fashion Message from the Curators (State of Fashion 2026 Visitor’s Guide)
Razavi. Sharif Razavi – on Cultural Sustainability
Images
Full moon
https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/the-best-full-moon-ritual-according-to-your-star-sign/ss-BB1izdXr
Hockey-stick of global prosperity
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/hockey-sticks-and-crosses/
Tidal Locking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cFLhim9ej0
Dark side of the moon
Kantamanto fire
Salomé. Kantamanto Market Fire Analysis in Ghana: Lessons for Sustainable Fashion. UvA Green Office
https://www.uvagreenoffice.nl/articles/hey-there!
Bulldozer making a sacrifice zone
Course material in: “Beyond Duality: Unlearning modernity. relearning Ecology”. was created from our own journey of unlearning and remembering. Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov and Erin Remblance
Murmuration
https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/pictures-2023/starling-murmuration
Yayra Agbofah being interviewed by Emma Vloeimans, photograph by Sandra Niessen, 14 May 2026
Catching Sight of Earth Again
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/07/science/artemis-2-lunar-flyby-images-earthset
The Dazzling Planet
https://www.planetary.org/articles/the-best-images-from-artemis-ii
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