When crisis is fashionable. Ethnicity, pauperism and environmentalism as value

This paper aims to define fashion as the context of a ‘special’ social production. The relationship between the 'cultural models' and 'structural conditions' of the global society is shaped through fashion and is invested with symbolic values - constructs of meaning and actions which are commonly identifiable, negotiable and treatable as products and as incitements to produce, consume and live. The most pressing questions of our time – those of ecology, universal rights, cultural differences and the social heterogeneity of the world – emerge forcefully from the professional environment of fashion as though constituting within it a perfect and empirical primacy to demonstrate, affirm or to save.