Fashion is suspicious of the past and in particular of past economic and political theories that appeared to oppose the foundation of a fashion culture or ran counter to its promotion. Western cultural history shows us how bourgeois economists and historians have embraced fashion when it (be)fitted their understanding of a culture of consumption. In these instances fashion manifested through silhouettes, fabrics and accessories aspects of class, gender and ethnicity. In contrast, historical materialists and progressive economists have very rarely engaged with clothing or other elements of fashion, considering this a lost cause and structurally irrelevant to an emancipated society in which class distinctions and economic inequalities must be overcome. For them, bourgeois fashion was of the past and a progressive future would have to provide a different structure to clothe and distinguish people.

Of course this is a polemical summation, but it is indicative of both the position of fashion within a critical hierarchy of culture, the arts and design, as well as of its history as being written almost exclusively from a bourgeois, affirmative and positivist standpoint. It appears that if you do not appreciate fashion per se, if you do not applaud its fundamental principles and its ever-changing manifestations, you do not have to concern yourself with analysing it. A fundamental critique seems out of place and even out of the question.

I am arguing here that materialism should engage with fashion, by documenting how materialist and progressive writers have done so in the past, and how materialist positions can reveal much about fashion's principles, in particular the significance of production – in its interplay with consumption and, moreover, in its choice of working practices, use of materials and techniques, as well as labour relations. As explained in the introduction to this book, I read materialism as a focus on materials and as a progressive theory to explain economic, social, historical and cultural events; a theory that is often labelled closely as historical materialism, but one that expanded from a specific historical, socialist tradition to a wider critique of economic hegemonies and power structures.