Part of the culture series of articles.
When we think of a decommodified society, we are imagining a way of living that has very little political flavour. The Commonwealth is a decommodified society without a consumer culture, and with regards to they clothes the wear and their taste in fashion, the result has been neither a regression to peasantry nor avant garde veneration of utility, as found in the Soviet prozodezhda experiments. Neither is their style of dress comparable to Jiang Qing’s ill-fated dress, or conspicuous luxury, or political uniform – their clothes, called unfashions here, are closer in fact to the jeans and tee shirt of the western capitalist world, as an honest indicator of the economic forces that produced it. In other words, if you arrive in the country expecting a straightforward inversion of capitalist fashions you will be disappointed.
What emerged instead was a sort of economic and social truthfulness in their styling, as representations of the total sum of their economic ability. This is clothing loaded with very few political ideas and many economic and social ones. If there is an item that captures Commonwealth fashions totally, it is the western working suit and tie – a garment of distinct and evolving heritage that today has almost no direct meaning, no specific ethnic or racial character, and which is pleasant enough to look at and says very little about you. This is what we call unfashions – not in the sense of being unfashionable, or as an inversion of fashion, but as effectively fashionless items that represent only the faintest and most abstract economic value-forms – dignity, comfort, utility, good-looking, attractive, very soft, good-quality, and so on.
In part, this might seem a synonym for plainness, or non-identity. It is true that the Commonwealth, through its central systems and department stores, commonly produces fairly neutral, functional, comfortable and multipurpose clothing that suits a wide variety of skin tones and body types. Because of this, the unfashions of the Commonwealth have other characteristics too – they tend to drape well, be made of mostly natural fibres, are often undyed or modestly patterned, and are not tailored aggressively or trendily.
Unfashions are not ugly, and although they are not aggressively fashionable they are also not uniformly plain. There are many designers in the Commonwealth working at regional and national scales who, in the great national traditions of the avant garde and transgressive, produce highbrow and novel styles of varying commerciality that often end up picked up by a factory somewhere and trickling into stores. Instead, what distinguishes unfashions from simple austerity or modesty or conformity is their honest representation of the physical forces that produce them. For good and bad, unfashions represent well the productive ability of the Commonwealth’s commons and its downstream culture indicators. These include:
- A strong preference for balancing comfort with a hygienic and pleasant appearance.
- Elevating textile literacy as an ordinary competency and not as a hobby or trivial distraction.
- A deep respect for material and texture, and the education of taste and mechanical processes.
- A clean separation of utility – accessories are explicitly ornamental, whereas garment items are objects of life designed for both comfort and appearance. The Commonwealth is famous for its beautiful jewellery and cultural accoutrement, which are not regarded as clothing at all – in unfashions, jewellery is an ornamental art-form seperate from worn objects.
- An economic reality of modification and personalisation – where “dressing like an individual” becomes “making like an individual” comprising home tailoring, mending, altering, monogramming, recutting and dyeing. This serves as the baseline of clothing, and is ready to be modified by the customer as they like with embroidery, tailoring or the addition of lace or pleats. This do-it-yourself approach is encouraged (“make do,” it’s called) and is readily taken up by a culture that is generally very social and has a lot of free time.
As such, you can see here that unfashions are not value-neutral, prescribed, drab garments – they are better described as representative extensions of the structure of Commonwealth society. The Commonwealth values direct relationships between productive forces and the consumer, and so unfashions reflect the materials and styles produced by machines available to them. The Commonwealth values independence from its universal baselines, and so unfashions are ready to be modified and personalised. The Commonwealth values taste and quality, and so even in their neutrality unfashions are of made of high quality materials (premium cottons are staples) and well assembled, and those facts are advertised and internalised by the public that wears them.
It is effectively a high modernist idea; a belief that clothes should not indicate your racial characteristics or wealth; that they should look good and fit well; that they should be useful and comfortable to carry out the tasks of life that matter, without slipping into drab utility or disingenuous reconstructions of working clothes. It is also for this reason that the Commonwealth readily appropriates and dissolves global styles (the upturned collar, for example, is common in the country and is not regarded as Asian specifically) – because, in their system of cotton fields, machines and taste, good things should look good on anyone from anywhere, as recipients of the gift of humanity and the general advancement of civilisation.
So what do unfashions look like? In addition to the many illustrations on this website, it has certain characteristics:
- Shirts are often undyed white cotton, because much of the country is in a warm climate and it helps hide sweat. Undyed white almost always appears somewhere in an outfit.
- Jewellery, wristwatches, belts and trinkets are worn regularly and enthusiastically.
- Clothes are often andrognyous, but not as a matter of policy. Many women wear male suits with trousers, but this is a matter of preference and is not universal.
- Climate is a major and celebrated feature of styling, and regionalises clothes substantially around the country.
- Women wear low or no heels, and nylon/hose is mostly replaced with cotton socks or (in the cold) wool stockings.
- Natural fibres are prevalant and among the finest in the world, including the Caribbean’s famously soft, extra-long-staple sea island cotton. Superb materials are a standard in the Commonwealth.
- Patterns and colours are simple and accommodating and, unusually for a country that celebrates its regions, rarely regionalised with local motifs. That sort of specialisation is usually offloaded to accessories. When it is regionalised it is often delightfully absurd – puffins on a shirt in the Caribbean, or palm leaves on a belt in the Antarctic.
- Public clothing is generally modest and considerate, and varies by region. The suit remains the basis of professional life.
- Sneakers (which they call training shoes, or “trainers”) and canvas tennis shoes are a common casual shoe and have even found their way into the office (at least for women).
- Uniforms are also broadly prevalent, even among office workers and university students. This sort of public legibility is common in Commonwealth society.
This is a fashion culture that imagines clothes not just as they appear in the department store but as worn and lived in by the general public, which is evidenced by its preference for utility and celebration of fine materials. This is what clothing hygiene means to them, beyond simple cleanliness; it is what clothing without commodity looks like, understood only on physical and social terms and personalised at the leisure and ability of the person who is using it. Its broader effects – hygiene, dignity, beauty, comfort – are raised up by the real agriculture and real machinery of their country, negating the disconnect between history, production, culture and the garment.