Ellen Dunham-Jones' "Temporary Contracts"
Gail Faurschou's "Obsolescence and Desire: Fashion and the Commodity Form"
In her article, Dunham-Jones writes of the ubiquity of the temporary contract in today's world. Our society seems to be built to reap short-term profits and to avoid long term commitments and responsibility. This can be seen in the increasing temporariness of marriages, fashions, jobs and even companies. Wal-Mart can be seen as the perfect embodiment of the temporary contract – by fuelling our desire to consume and throw away and by typically leasing their buildings so they can exit a market when they can gain bigger profits elsewhere.
Faurschou ably describes the pervasiveness of fashion in our society and its role in supporting our capitalist economy. She argues that fashion removes symbolic ties from things, aiming to turn anything into a mass-produced commodity product (that people must buy and replace as soon as the next improved and more up-to-date product is available).
Faurschou’s discussion of fashion fits well with Dunham-Jones description of the temporary contract. Fashion is the ultimate temporary contract – encouraging one to buy certain products to look a certain way until the fashion is changed, requiring one to buy new products to reflect a new image.
Is fashion and the temporary contract a necessary result of capitalism? Capitalism is designed around the “free market” that determines what, where and how goods are produced and distributed to consumers (all for creating profit – the more profit, the better). In the quest for ever-increasing profits, markets are created to drive consumption of new products, aided through fashion. The temporary contract underlies most of capitalism, allowing people and corporations to chase bigger profits by casting away previous commitments. If we agree that fashion and the temporary contract are not ideal ways of running our world, are there anyways to discourage these practices within capitalism? Do we need an entirely new system of values and/or economy?
1 comment:
"If we agree that fashion and the temporary contract are not ideal ways of running our world, are there anyways to discourage these practices within capitalism? Do we need an entirely new system of values and/or economy?"
The answer lies in the speed at which things happen. It seems that we require perpetual destination in order to live, that we must be jumping from one activity to the next whatever the situation. The previous situations have become threads rather than fabrics. Fashion has to become 'indigenous', we must be able to modify our second skins in the way that we modify our environments. The is no universal, no one solution.
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