Art and fashion have long been realms of human creativity, self-expression, and cultural significance—yet under capitalism’s influence they increasingly bear the marks of commodification, exploitation, and alienation. Capitalism, with its relentless drive for profit and its tendency to convert all values into market values, has permeated the art studios and fashion ateliers from Paris to Lagos, New York to Tokyo. As Karl Marx observed, “Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities”, and indeed even beauty, creativity, and cultural heritage have not been spared. In a global context, from Western metropolises to non-Western communities, the pressures of the market have reshaped artistic production and sartorial traditions in ways that often undermine their intrinsic meaning and social purpose. This critical-academic exploration traces how capitalism’s expanding influence over the past centuries has negatively impacted art and fashion across the world, examining historical developments and case studies alongside insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and political economy. The narrative blends Western and non-Western perspectives, showing how a global capitalist system has left its imprint on everything from Renaissance paintings to streetwear, and integrates theories from Karl Marx to post-colonial critique to illuminate the complex forces at play.
Under capitalist norms, art and fashion are transformed into commodities to be bought and sold, subject to the logic of supply and demand rather than purely the muse or communal ritual. The very definition of value shifts from aesthetic or spiritual worth to market price. The influence of wealthy patrons, global corporations, and speculative investors means that creative works are frequently judged less by their cultural or emotional resonance than by their exchange value on an auction block or their branding potential on a runway. A painting’s significance might be summarized by its latest record-breaking sale, a designer dress appraised by the logo it bears. The result is a pervasive commodification: artistic genius and cultural expressions are repackaged as products, and cultural heritage is mined as a reservoir of marketable motifs. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism is illuminating here: under capitalism the commodity form confers an almost mystical status on products, masking the labor and social relations behind them. A painting or a designer handbag is imbued with a “fetish” value far beyond its material worth, as buyers fixate on its prestige and price while forgetting the human work that went into it. In the art market, for instance, media coverage often focuses on auction prices – the spectacle of a Basquiat or a da Vinci selling for tens or hundreds of millions – rather than the content of the artwork or the conditions of its production. The object becomes a kind of idol of wealth, its price tag its most salient feature. Meanwhile, the workers who produce the luxury goods or the struggling artists laboring in obscurity are rendered invisible, their contributions obscured by what Marx would call the “strange” enchantment of the commodity. In fashion, the commodity fetish is evident when consumers ascribe “almost magical properties” to branded items – a logo on a shoe or handbag becomes a status talisman, the item’s aura enhanced simply by its price and exclusivity. As Walter Benjamin noted in his analysis of 19th-century consumer culture, fashion was a quintessential part of life in capitalist society, operating through commodity fetishism whereby people invest objects with almost mystical desirability, believing these commodities can transform their identity or social standing. Jean Baudrillard went further, arguing that modern fashion contains “the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing” – in other words, fashion is a play of symbols largely divorced from function or genuine meaning, its constant cycle of trends driven not by necessity but by the capitalist imperative for ever-new goods. The result is an industry where novelty itself becomes the selling point, and where the authentic cultural or utilitarian value of clothing is often lost beneath layers of branding and hype.
The Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously described this overall phenomenon as the “culture industry,” wherein popular cultural forms are standardized and mass-produced to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests. In their analysis, under monopoly capitalism even the realms of art, music, and entertainment operate like factories churning out cultural goods that reinforce the status quo. They theorized that all forms of mass culture – from Hollywood films to radio pop songs – become part of a single system geared toward profit and social control, such that genuine creativity or critical content is squeezed out. Dialectically, culture under capitalism both responds to market demand and creates it, in a self-perpetuating loop. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that mass-produced entertainment aims by its very nature to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, which leads to formulaic, bland content engineered to offend no one and excite everyone just enough to prompt consumption. This process, they warned, robs art of its autonomy and people of their capacity for imagination. Industrially produced culture, they wrote, “robs people of their imagination and takes over their thinking for them”, leaving consumers with only the task of ingesting and buying. Through endless repetition and trivial variations, cultural products condition audiences to prefer the familiar and the easy, discouraging independent thought or aesthetic exploration. Thus, the culture industry delivers the “goods” – a steady stream of distracting entertainment or trendy styles – while damping the critical or transcendent potential that art and fashion might have had. The public, in this view, is integrated from above, catered to in order to be lulled: fed spectacles rather than engaged with ideas. In sum, under capitalist mass culture, art and fashion risk becoming not means of human expression or social commentary, but mere instruments of social integration and profit, shiny commodities that uphold the very system that produced them.
From a historical perspective, one can trace this process back to the very birth of modern capitalism. In the late medieval and Renaissance periods, the rise of a merchant class and early capitalist city-states began to alter the patronage system for art. In feudal times and antiquity, art was typically commissioned by the Church or aristocracy and embedded in religious or courtly contexts; its value was measured by spiritual efficacy or symbolic prestige rather than exchange price. But by the 15th century, especially in places like Italy’s city-states, commerce was creating new wealth and a new class of art patrons. Fifteenth-century Florence—“the most important early capitalist city state in the world” according to one analysis —saw art flourish under the auspices of mercantile families like the Medici. Banking and trade wealth funded splendid civic projects and luxurious private art, reflecting both genuine civic pride and a new secular competition for status through culture. The general background of Florence was one of burgeoning republicanism and humanism breaking away from medieval feudal norms, and this spirit fed into its art. Michelangelo’s famous statue of David, for example, was commissioned by the Florentine republican government in 1501, not a pope or king, symbolizing the city’s identity and political ideals. The context of early capitalist urban prosperity helps explain the sculpture’s celebration of the human form and civic virtue. Yet even as Renaissance art achieved new heights of beauty and humanistic expression, one can see the early imprint of capitalist influence: artworks increasingly became objects that could be owned by private individuals, not just kept in churches or communal spaces. They acquired a dual nature – still steeped in meaning, but also commodities in nascent art markets. By the end of the Renaissance, paintings and sculptures were being bought and sold more frequently in open markets; for instance, wealthy Flemish and Italian patrons traded art collections, and early art dealers began to emerge. The art object was becoming something that could circulate and be valued in monetary terms beyond its original sacred or civic function.
As capitalism expanded in the 17th and 18th centuries, these trends accelerated. The Dutch Golden Age offers a striking example: in the Netherlands, a prosperous bourgeois society created a robust open art market. For the first time on a large scale, artists (like Rembrandt or Vermeer) produced works speculatively, without a specific commission, hoping to attract buyers among the middle class who had money to spend on art for their homes. Art became, in Dutch economist Hugo Munsterberg’s words, a form of commodity in Holland’s trading economy – as common as spices or tulips. Paintings of daily life, landscapes, and still lifes were mass-produced by workshops and sold in marketplaces or auctions. This indicates a significant shift from earlier eras: a painting of a windmill or a bowl of fruit might have no function beyond décor and status display in a burgher’s parlor, and its value lay in the novelty or skill it represented, convertible to cash. The contemporary observer notes how in Dutch society art had “ceased to be the privilege of the few” and became a commodity available (in cheaper forms or prints) even to artisans. On the one hand this democratized art; on the other, it meant that art production rose and fell with market demand, and artists were at the mercy of economic forces. Indeed, many Dutch artists struggled when the market became oversaturated with paintings, learning the hard way that under capitalism an oversupply can crash prices – a dynamic familiar to modern creatives. We see here the early outlines of the modern art system: artists needing representation (17th-century guilds or dealers played this role), speculative creation of inventory, and buyers treating art as an investment or tradeable good. By the 18th century, formal auction houses like Christie’s (founded 1766 in London) were established, and the first proto-art galleries began exhibiting works for sale to the public in places like Paris. Art was steadily moving from the workshop and palace into the marketplace.
A parallel transformation was occurring in the realm of dress. Before industrial capitalism, fashion evolved under a different logic. In medieval and early modern societies, clothing was governed by local tradition, social hierarchy, and sumptuary laws rather than by rapid trend cycles. Sumptuary laws in many European countries explicitly regulated who could wear what fabrics or colors – for example, only nobles could wear silk or ermine, while peasants were confined to plain wool or linen. These laws reflected a feudal social order where one’s attire signified one’s station, and excessive display by those of lower rank was seen as a threat to the social fabric. In non-Western societies too, clothing was deeply tied to culture and status: kimonos in Japan were regulated by class and occasion, in West Africa specific textiles or patterns could be reserved for royalty, and so on. The production of garments was largely a local, artisanal affair. Most people had clothing made by local tailors or family members, using regionally produced textiles. Fashion changed slowly; styles might hold for decades or even centuries with minor modifications. There was little concept of planned obsolescence in clothing – one wore garments until they wore out, and the idea of an annual or seasonal “trend” was mostly limited to the elite courts (for instance, the latest gown style from Paris might trickle down over years, if at all, to provincial gentry). Capitalist development began to disrupt this traditional model. As trade routes opened and colonial empires grew, new materials (like fine Indian cotton, Chinese silk, American furs) poured into Europe, and new tastes formed for the exotic and novel. Fashion became one of the early arenas of global consumer culture: by the eighteenth century, European ladies might wear calico prints from India and men might sport waistcoats made of Chinese silk brocade. This global intermixing was driven by profit-seeking traders and companies (e.g. the British and Dutch East India Companies) that treated textiles and garments as high-profit commodities. What had once been a local craft shifted toward being a globally traded product. In this period we also see the rise of fashion “marketing” in rudimentary form: the first fashion magazines appeared in France in the late 17th century, disseminating engraved images of the newest court styles, effectively creating desire for new looks among those who could afford to chase trends. Fashion was thus slowly transitioning from a marker of static social identity to a dynamic consumer arena – an early foreshadowing of modern fast fashion, albeit for a much smaller clientele at that time.
The fusion of capitalism and imperialism in the early modern era had particularly dire effects on textile artisans outside Europe. The birth of the global textile trade in the 17th and 18th centuries exemplified how capitalism’s thirst for profit could devastate traditional industries and livelihoods. Take the case of India: for centuries, India had been famed for its textiles – the vivid calicoes of Gujarat, the fine muslins of Bengal, the rich dyes and intricate handlooms that were unrivaled in quality. These fabrics were highly coveted in Europe. Initially, European traders simply bought Indian cloth to sell back home, which was profitable but meant wealth flowed to Indian producers. However, as British industrial capitalism gathered pace, a more exploitative pattern emerged. British colonial authorities in the 18th century enacted policies to dismantle India’s textile competitiveness. They imposed hefty duties on Indian finished cloth entering Britain while flooding the Indian market with cheaper, factory-made British textiles. Indian weavers could not compete with mechanized production. The once-thriving Indian handloom industry was pushed to collapse; millions of Indian artisans lost their livelihoods. Anecdotes – possibly apocryphal but telling – circulated of British agents cutting the thumbs off Bengali weavers to stop them from producing the fine muslin that had been a crown jewel of India’s exports. Whether literal or metaphorical, this story encapsulates the violence of the market invasion: a sophisticated craft culture was effectively muzzled to make way for machine-made imports. By the 1760s, reports noted famine and destitution in textile regions like Bengal, as spinners and weavers had no work. India, which had been an exporter of finished textiles, was reduced to exporting raw cotton to feed British mills in Manchester, only to import the cheap cloth produced from that cotton. This was an early case of deindustrialization induced by colonial capitalism. The cultural consequences were also significant: indigenous textile designs – such as the famous Indian “paisley” patterns – were appropriated and imitated in Europe. The town of Paisley in Scotland became known for mass-producing shawls with motifs copied from Kashmiri shawls, selling them as fashionable ladies’ accessories throughout the 19th century. European consumers eagerly wore these exotic patterns, mostly unaware of their origins or the fact that Scottish factories had supplanted the original Kashmiri craftsmen in the market. Here we see a forerunner of cultural appropriation tied to capitalism: the profit motive led to borrowing (or stealing) aesthetic elements from colonized cultures without credit or benefit to the originators. In sum, the era of mercantile and early industrial capitalism dramatically reordered the global fashion supply chain. Profit accumulation for European companies and the appeasement of European consumer demand came at the direct expense of non-European producers, whose labor and creativity were often exploited or outright plundered.
By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the nexus of capitalism, art, and fashion entered a new phase. Industrial capitalism brought mechanization, mass production, and the factory system, which had profound impacts on both how art was created/distributed and how clothing was made/consumed. In the textile and apparel sector, inventions like the spinning jenny, power loom, and sewing machine revolutionized production. What once took a skilled spinner days of work could be done by a machine in hours or minutes. This led to the rise of garment factories and the ability to produce clothing en masse. By the mid-19th century, department stores emerged in Paris, London, and New York – temples of capitalism that made diverse goods (including ready-to-wear fashion) available in one place. Fashion was no longer solely the realm of bespoke tailors for the rich; increasingly, the urban middle classes could buy factory-made attire in standard sizes, often mimicking high fashion trends at lower cost. This democratization came with a dark side: the workers toiling in the mills and sweatshops. Early industrial cities like Manchester or Lowell were notorious for hellish working conditions – long hours, low pay, dangerous machines – often staffed by women and children who had few other options. Fashion production, which had been a dispersed cottage industry, concentrated into urban factories that foreshadowed the sweatshops of today. The linkage between capital, fashion, and exploitation was stark: for the owners of textile mills or garment factories, profit came from scaling up production and minimizing labor costs, even at the expense of worker safety. Tragic industrial accidents, such as the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which killed over 140 young garment workers, highlighted how the drive for profit (the factory doors were locked to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks, a common practice) literally cost lives. The pattern here – overwork and peril for the many, cheap shirts and high dividends for the few – has unfortunately echoed across time and continents.
Industrialization also transformed the art world, though in different ways. The 19th century saw the emergence of a full-fledged art market infrastructure: commercial galleries, auction houses, and a new figure – the art dealer – who acted as intermediary between artist and buyer. No longer was an artist’s success predicated on securing royal or Church patronage as in the Renaissance (though state and aristocratic commissions still existed); now, success could mean selling well to the bourgeois public. This shift opened up opportunities but also introduced new vulnerabilities and dependencies. Artists in Paris, for example, found themselves at the mercy of the Salon (the official art exhibition juried by the Académie) for exposure. A rejection from the Salon could spell economic disaster. This happened famously in 1863, when the Salon jury rejected so many innovative works that Napoleon III, under public pressure, created a “Salon des Refusés” to show the rejected pieces – including Manet’s groundbreaking Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The Refusés episode highlighted a system in flux: academic standards and market forces colliding. In its wake, independent artists banded together (as the Impressionists did in the 1870s) to hold their own exhibitions outside the official system. They were effectively trying a new market strategy – bypassing gatekeepers and appealing directly to the public and to forward-thinking dealers. This spirit of independence was empowering, but it still ultimately relied on finding buyers. A painter like Monet might rail against the conservative tastes of the bourgeoisie, yet he needed enough of that bourgeoisie to buy his landscapes to pay his bills. The alienation of the artist under capitalism often took the form of this tension between personal vision and market viability. Many of the 19th century’s greatest artists experienced poverty and disregard in their own time: Vincent van Gogh, the archetype of the suffering artist, sold virtually nothing while alive and depended financially on his brother. His art, too uncompromising and ahead of its time, had no immediate market – an example of how the capitalist art market can fail creative individuals whose work doesn’t fit established tastes. Ironically, a century later van Gogh’s paintings would become some of the most expensive commodities in the art world, illustrating how capricious and retrospective the art market can be in assigning value. This underscores a key critique: capitalism does not necessarily reward artistic quality or innovation at the time it matters to the artist; it often discovers (or manufactures) value later, when works become scarce and cultish, and then huge sums flow not to the long-deceased artist, but to intermediaries and collectors.
Technological changes in the industrial age also altered art’s production and consumption. The invention of photography around 1839 had a dual effect on art. On one hand, it began to displace painting’s role in portraiture and documentation, pushing painters toward new frontiers (like Impressionism’s focus on light and feeling). On the other hand, photography itself became a new art form and commodity, reproducible en masse. Walter Benjamin later observed that the “age of mechanical reproduction” diminishes the aura of a work of art – its unique presence in time and space – because copies can be made and distributed everywhere. A painting had an aura; a photograph, infinitely reproducible, did not in the same way. Capitalism eagerly embraced the possibilities of reproduction: prints, lithographs, photographs and later film and recordings, all became products that could be sold at scale. This allowed art and fashion imagery to diffuse widely (think of the mass reproduction of fashion illustrations, or later, magazine photographs, spreading trends across continents) – a democratizing effect, but one that also further entrenched commercialization. By 1900, a famous actress’s image could be printed on cigarette cards and sold with tobacco, an early form of celebrity fashion endorsement and commodification of image. Fine art, too, saw early merchandising; for example, cheap engravings of popular paintings sold in department stores brought art into middle-class parlors as mere decorative commodities. Benjamin’s concern was that while mechanical reproduction and commodification made art more accessible, they also made the experience of art more shallow or distracted, turning it into background noise or collectibles rather than a focal, sacred experience .
The turn of the 20th century also revealed stark contrasts in how different socio-economic systems approached art and fashion. In the Soviet Union after 1917, a completely different model emerged: art was heavily subsidized (or commandeered) by the state, and fashion was initially de-emphasized in favor of utilitarian clothing for the proletariat. Avant-garde artists in Russia like Malevich or Mayakovsky briefly hoped that without a profit motive, art could truly serve social revolutionary goals. However, by the 1930s Stalinist policies imposed Socialist Realism, turning art into overt propaganda for the regime – a different kind of instrumentalization. Meanwhile, in the capitalist West, there was ostensibly freedom for artists, but subtle forces at play. It later came to light that the CIA, as part of Cold War cultural diplomacy, secretly supported and promoted Abstract Expressionist art in the 1950s, seeing it as evidence of the creative freedom possible under capitalism . Modern art became a weapon in an ideological battle: the CIA covertly funded exhibitions of American artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in Europe to contrast with the state-prescribed art of the Soviet bloc . Thus even in “free” capitalist societies, art could be co-opted by power structures – if not directly for profit, then for geopolitical influence. This underscores that under capitalism, art’s relationship to power and money is complex: sometimes it’s raw market forces, other times it’s elite uses of art for soft power or prestige. In either case, the autonomy of art can be compromised.
Throughout these developments, one constant has been the alienation that capitalism imposes on labor – including creative labor. Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, developed in the 19th century, described how workers in a capitalist system become estranged from the products of their labor, from the act of production, from their fellow workers, and from their own creative potential. Does this apply to artists and designers? On the surface, one might think artists – who often passionately love their work – are different from factory laborers. Indeed, some Marxist critics caution that not all artistic work is alienated. John Molyneux, for example, argues that artistic labor can be a form of self-expression and fulfillment not entirely subsumed by capital. He points out that many artists clearly work for reasons beyond money: Michelangelo carving marble into his late 80s, or Renoir painting despite crippling arthritis, suggest that for these creators art was “essential to their being” rather than a forced, external task . Unlike the assembly-line worker who might avoid work “like the plague” if not for necessity, great artists often continue creating even without external compulsion or after they’ve achieved financial security . However, as critic Chris Nineham and others respond, under capitalism no sphere is completely untouched by alienation. The artist, too, must operate in a society where money, competition, and commodification infiltrate every domain . Even if the act of painting itself feels liberating, the painter is still enmeshed in an economy that demands sales or teaching gigs to survive; even if a designer loves designing, they still face the pressure of appeasing a client or consumer base. Thus, from this perspective, artists and designers are relatively less alienated in the act of creation than a factory worker performing rote tasks – because creative labor engages one’s passions and intellect – but they are still alienated by the conditions surrounding that labor. They often do not control the distribution of their work (galleries, publishers, fashion buyers do), and their creative vision can be distorted by commercial demands. The relationship between creator and audience is also mediated by capitalist institutions (media, marketing), which can alienate both parties from a direct, authentic connection with each other. Consider how many artists feel compelled to make two bodies of work: one “for themselves” and one “that sells.” That is a symptom of alienation – a split self – induced by the market. Additionally, the majority of people who work in creative industries are not world-famous artists but anonymous pattern-makers, studio assistants, textile workers, etc., whose labor is highly alienated: a seamstress sewing luxury handbags in a factory may derive no more personal fulfillment from the task than a worker on a cotton mill did in Marx’s day. The product (an elegant handbag) is entirely separated from her life (she likely will never afford the item, nor is her name attached to its craft), and she works under the dictates of efficiency and corporate profit, not her own creative flow. In that sense, the creative fields have their own versions of assembly lines and alienated labor, hidden behind the glamour that a few “creative directors” at the top enjoy.
Moreover, the ability to engage in fulfilling creative labor has historically been limited to a privileged minority. Under capitalism’s unequal social relations, many would-be artists or designers never get the chance to hone their talents because they lack the resources or time. Until quite recently, women, people of color, and the working classes were systemically shut out from the art academies, guilds, and salons that could support an artistic career. Their creative energies were often redirected into unpaid domestic crafts or folk art that the elite did not recognize as “high art.” This too is alienation – a social alienation of whole groups from cultural production. A stark illustration: in the 19th century, middle-class European women with artistic talent often had to confine themselves to genteel “feminine” crafts (watercolors, embroidery) because professional oil painting or sculpture was deemed inappropriate and they were barred from studying the nude (essential for academic art training). Many women published novels anonymously for similar reasons. Their creativity had to find clandestine outlets, alienated by a patriarchal market that wouldn’t support them. Only in the late 20th and 21st centuries have these barriers started to be addressed, yet disparities remain. A recent study found that in the contemporary U.S. art world, 77% of artists who make a living from art are white , reflecting racial and class advantages that persist. Likewise, major fashion design houses remained overwhelmingly led by men until very recently despite the largely female consumer base and workforce. These inequities highlight that under capitalism, it is not just individual talent or effort that determines success, but access to networks, education, and capital – factors often distributed along the lines of class, gender, and race. The creative fields are not exempt from the broader alienations of capitalist society; they often mirror them in who gets to participate and on what terms.
If the production side of art and fashion reveals alienation and commodification, the consumption side – how art and fashion are experienced by the public – shows another dimension of capitalism’s impact. In the fashion world especially, the globalization of production led to an explosion of cheap, plentiful clothes for consumers in the wealthier parts of the world, fundamentally changing people’s relationship to their clothes. Today a typical Western consumer buys far more garments per year than their grandparents did, and discards them at a faster rate. The psychological underpinnings of this consumer behavior have been carefully cultivated by capitalist marketing. Fashion advertising has long aimed to create false needs, in Herbert Marcuse’s term – making people feel that to be confident, attractive, or successful, they must constantly wear new and in-season styles. The result is a cycle of desire and dissatisfaction. Psychologically, individuals are nudged into defining their identity and self-worth through purchases: wearing the latest sneaker or carrying the latest designer bag is portrayed as the key to social acceptance or personal fulfillment. This is deeply tied to what Marx called commodity fetishism, but on the consumer end: people come to believe that commodities (shoes, cosmetics, outfits) have almost magical powers to confer charisma or happiness. Modern marketing and influencer culture amplify this, blurring the line between genuine personal expression and paid promotion. Studies in psychology have consistently found that strongly materialistic values – placing a high importance on money, possessions, and status – correlate with lower life satisfaction and higher rates of depression and anxiety. Yet, capitalist societies bombard individuals with messages glorifying consumerism. Fashion and beauty industries, in particular, prey on insecurities: You’re not pretty enough, not trendy enough, not worthy enough – unless you buy our product. This strategy has proven effective in driving sales, but at the cost of widespread body image issues and chronic dissatisfaction. The average person is sold an ideal – the perfect body, the luxurious lifestyle, the confident persona – and simultaneously sold the products that supposedly help achieve it. But since the ideal is an ever-moving target (purposefully unattainable, because a permanently satisfied consumer wouldn’t keep consuming), people remain trapped in what scholars call the hedonic treadmill of consumerism: always chasing the next purchase for a happiness that remains just out of reach.
In the realm of art consumption, a slightly different but related phenomenon occurs. The culture industry has conditioned audiences to expect art and entertainment to be easily digestible and immediately gratifying. Adorno observed that under mass culture, people approach works of art with a passive mindset, looking for familiar formulas and instant pleasure rather than challenging or edifying experiences. In the 21st century, this trend has perhaps intensified. For example, museums have increasingly turned to blockbuster shows – say, a sprawling Monet or Picasso retrospective sponsored by a big bank – that draw huge crowds and media attention. These exhibitions often prioritize big names and Instagrammable moments (like immersive Van Gogh projections that recently toured cities worldwide as a kind of spectacle event) over quieter engagement with lesser-known art. The art becomes an “experience” to consume, often with a gift shop tie-in at the exit. Critics argue this reflects a capitalist approach to museum curation: treat the visitor like a customer who must be entertained and sold to, rather than a citizen to be educated or moved. The expectation of constant stimulation and novelty can make it harder for people to appreciate subtle, complex art that requires patience. It’s telling that many visitors spend only seconds in front of each artwork in famous museums – snapping a photo to say they “saw it” and then moving on. This spectacularization of art experience dovetails with Guy Debord’s concept of the Society of the Spectacle, where direct lived experience is supplanted by representations and appearances . In the spectacle, Debord writes, “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” . A museum visit can become less about communion with art and more about checking a box, catching a feeling of being part of the cultural scene, or consuming the aura of famous artworks as another kind of status good. Social media exacerbates this by rewarding shareable visuals: a visitor might spend more time taking selfies with a painting or a stylish museum interior than contemplating the works themselves. In fashion too, social media has accelerated the spectacle: platforms like Instagram are essentially endless fashion showcases where influencers model curated lifestyles. The line between genuine personal style and advertising is blurred, as many influencers are paid to promote brands while maintaining an “authentic” persona. Consumers scrolling these feeds are consuming a spectacle of fashion – a continuous stream of images that encourage envy, aspiration, and thus further consumption. Debord noted that the spectacle “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” . Fashion’s social relations today are indeed heavily mediated by images: people compare themselves to idealized photos, communicate their identity through posted outfits, and even form friendships or hierarchies based on digital appearance. This creates a kind of distance or alienation in human relations – one relates to others through the prism of commodities (the clothes, the curated image) rather than directly. In summary, the capitalist shaping of art and fashion consumption tends to encourage shallow engagement, endless desire, and social comparison, all of which serve to keep the wheels of production turning but can erode the deeper personal and cultural satisfactions that art and fashion might otherwise provide.
At a broad societal level, the negative impacts of capitalism on art and fashion manifest in a series of paradoxes and crises. One glaring paradox is value versus values: monetary value in these fields often inversely correlates with ethical or cultural value. Never have individual artworks and designer pieces fetched such astronomical sums at the top end of the market, yet this happens in a world where most artists and garment workers struggle to make a bare living. For instance, in 2017 Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi sold for $450 million at auction – becoming a pure trophy for a billionaire buyer – even as public arts education programs and small galleries worldwide were starved for funds. The global art market, encompassing galleries, fairs, and auctions, reached an estimated $67 billion in sales in 2018 , buoyed by economic elites. But those headline-grabbing sales are part of a highly skewed picture. These transactions are driven by a small clique of ultra-wealthy collectors competing for works by an even smaller group of superstar artists, represented by a handful of powerful galleries . Studies have found that just 0.2% of artists account for 32% of the total value of art sales in a given year – meaning a tiny fraction of creators (usually established blue-chip names like Koons, Hirst, Kusama, etc.) soak up nearly a third of all the money. Meanwhile, the vast majority of working artists may sell little or nothing. Their labor, no less creative or necessary, isn’t valorized by the market unless it can attract big money. An analysis by art economists confirms that the top-heavy nature of the market is extreme and growing: investment capital flows disproportionately to art seen as a sure bet or status symbol, leaving the “long tail” of artists scrambling. For the dealers and auction houses, the concentration of wealth is a boon – the existence of billionaires willing to drop eight or nine figures on art is precisely what fuels their business. In fact, one art-market economist frankly stated that “inequalities are never bad for the art market. When people have a lot of money, they buy art.” From the market’s perspective, inequality equals more big spenders and higher prices. Yet that very statement underscores how art under capitalism often serves to reinforce inequality rather than challenge it. High-end art functions as a luxury asset class: a way for the rich to park wealth (in paintings stored in climate-controlled freeports) or to flaunt it (through museum donations and high-profile collections) . This diverges sharply from the notion of art as a public good or a mirror of the human condition accessible to all. When a painting trades for millions in a private sale, the event registers as a data point in financial news, but the artwork itself might disappear from public view into a vault. It’s treated less as a piece of culture than as a stock or bar of gold. Indeed, specialized storage facilities called freeports in places like Geneva and Singapore now house countless treasures of art, wine, and jewels in tax-free limbo for investors. It is reported that the Geneva Freeport alone holds over a million artworks – more than many of the world’s major museums combined – kept as investment holdings . Such art hoards yield no aesthetic or social benefit; they are pure commodities.
This extreme commodification and financialization of art skews cultural values. Museums and galleries, which interface between art and the public, increasingly rely on billionaire donors or high-ticket art fairs for funding and prestige. This can subtly influence which artists get canonized or exhibited. There is a well-known bias in museum acquisitions favoring artists who are already market darlings – in part because accepting a donation of a multi-million-dollar painting (or buying one) from a famous name is easier to fundraise for, and can make the museum look more “valuable” itself. Meanwhile, less commercial but culturally important art – experimental, community-based, politically provocative – finds it harder to get institutional support. Similarly, in fashion, major museums now stage blockbuster exhibitions of famous designers (like Alexander McQueen or Christian Dior retrospectives) which draw record crowds and sponsorships; yet the work of anonymous seamstresses or the stories of traditional garment crafts are seldom elevated to that platform. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s insights are apt: what is deemed “high culture” often aligns with the tastes and interests of the dominant class. In art, the tastes of wealthy collectors and influential curators (themselves often from elite backgrounds) tend to define “greatness,” which then justifies high prices – a circular validation that can marginalize art rooted in other experiences or communities. In fashion, the hierarchy of brands (Haute couture at the top, fast fashion at the bottom) similarly reflects class stratifications: owning a Chanel suit is a status marker just as owning a Jeff Koons sculpture is. Bourdieu would say that in consuming these luxury cultural goods, elites are not just enjoying them but also reproducing their social position, converting economic capital (money) into cultural capital (discerning taste). Thus, capitalism uses art and fashion as arenas to naturalize inequality: the glamor around high culture and luxury fashion conceals the economic and labor realities underpinning them, instead promoting an image of a meritocratic world of beauty and genius available to those who can afford it.
The fashion industry presents its own crises under late capitalism, perhaps even more visibly to the average person. While art’s commodification is somewhat cloistered in galleries and auction houses, fashion’s cycle of production and consumption churns on every high street and Instagram feed. One of the direst issues is the environmental impact of fast fashion. The industry today produces an estimated 100 billion garments annually, an incredible volume enabled by globalized supply chains and cheap materials. The environmental cost of this frenzy is enormous. Fashion is said to be the second-biggest consumer of fresh water globally and is responsible for up to 20% of global wastewater . In textile manufacturing hubs, rivers have been turned into toxic canals. **** Accumulated garment waste and polluted water near a textile factory in Bangladesh, a stark illustration of fashion’s environmental toll. One report by the World Bank attributed about 20% of all industrial water pollution to the dyeing and treatment of textiles . The image above, for example, shows piles of discarded fabric and chemical runoff literally painting a Bangladeshi waterway with pollutants – a far cry from the pristine images in fashion magazines. Additionally, the fashion industry emits between 2% and 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions (estimates vary) , rivaling the aviation and shipping industries combined. This stems from energy-intensive production (often powered by fossil fuels in developing countries), the use of synthetic fibers (which are petroleum-based), and the vast transportation network moving clothes from factory to consumer. Another environmental issue is waste: fast fashion means quickly discarded fashion. In many Western countries, clothing has become nearly disposable – worn only a few times before being thrown out. It’s estimated that over half of “fast fashion” garments are disposed of within a year of production. Landfills and incinerators are filling up with barely worn clothes; the EPA estimates millions of tons of textile waste are generated each year. Some of this cast-off clothing is exported to developing countries as second-hand donations, which can create local waste problems and undermine indigenous clothing industries (as cheap used clothes flood local markets). The slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” finds little foothold in an industry predicated on continual replacement. Brands have even been caught deliberately destroying unsold merchandise (slashing or burning it) to prevent it from hitting the market at lower prices – a practice intended to protect brand value but which is ecologically egregious. All these practices point to a system fixated on profit and growth to the exclusion of sustainability. As a UK Parliament report in 2019 on fashion sustainability bluntly stated, “the global fashion industry is built on an unsustainable trajectory of ever-increasing production and consumption” – a trajectory driven by capitalist imperatives.
The toll extends to living beings as well. For one, the labor conditions in much of the fashion supply chain remain harsh, despite occasional reforms. The profit accumulation at the heart of capitalism and the fashion industry, as one NGO report noted, “drives the race to the bottom, pushing labour and environmental standards down and down”. This race culminates in tragedies like factory fires and collapses – the most infamous being the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in 2013. Rana Plaza was an eight-story building housing several garment factories that produced for numerous Western brands. Despite visible cracks in the structure, workers were ordered to continue their shifts. The building collapsed, killing 1,134 people (mostly young women) and injuring over 2,500 – a disaster that starkly revealed the human cost of $5 t-shirts and $10 jeans. Images of blood-stained fabric amid concrete rubble, and stories of workers who earned barely $50 a month losing their lives, briefly shocked the world. There were calls for change; indeed, the aftermath saw the creation of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, a legally binding agreement compelling some global brands to fund inspections and safety upgrades in Bangladesh. While safety has improved marginally in some places, the underlying pressure to produce cheaply and quickly has not abated. Factories simply shift locations: if Bangladesh’s wages inch up or regulations tighten, brands move orders to factories in, say, Vietnam, Cambodia, or Ethiopia where labor is cheaper and oversight lighter. This mirrors the colonial pattern of exploiting peripheral regions – now under the guise of globalized capitalism. As one analysis framed it, today’s fashion industry exemplifies “racial capitalism,” the commodification of nonwhite labor for the economic gain of (mostly) white-owned firms. Approximately 80% of garment workers worldwide are women of color, while the owners and CEOs of the fashion brands are predominantly from the Global North, often white and male. The inequality inherent in this setup is glaring: a female garment worker in South Asia might earn a few cents for each $30 shirt she sews; the brand CEO in a Western capital earns millions in annual bonuses and stock options. In 2020, Oxfam calculated that some CEOs of top fashion companies earned more in four days than a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her entire lifetime. This stark imbalance harks back to colonial-era exploitation, causing some scholars to describe the fashion supply chain as a form of neo-colonialism – the global South provides cheap labor and resources, while wealth accumulates in the hands of companies and consumers in the global North.
Another aspect often overlooked is the toll on animals and ecosystems. The fashion industry relies on a wide range of materials, some of which involve considerable animal suffering. Fur is an obvious example – animals raised or trapped in horrific conditions solely for their pelts. But even less apparent materials like leather, wool, and down can involve cruelty. Much leather comes from cattle in countries with poor slaughter regulations, or even from exotic animals (snakes, alligators) specifically hunted or farmed. As noted in one critique, fashion “relies on the exploitation and oppression of non-human animals” as well. Tannery workers, often in developing countries, face toxic chemicals (like chromium) that not only poison their own health but also local waterways. Thus, the cycle of exploitation in fashion is multi-layered – human workers, animals, and the environment are all pushed to bear hidden costs so that final products can be sold at enticing prices or profit margins. From a moral standpoint, this raises profound questions about capitalism’s prioritization of profit over life. A system that finds it acceptable to boil workers alive (as some tanneries have caused accidents where workers fell into vats) or to pollute entire ecosystems for the sake of fast fashion is arguably reaching a point of ethical bankruptcy.
Against this backdrop, intellectuals from various fields have tried to understand and challenge these patterns. The negative impacts of capitalism on art and fashion raise questions about authenticity, meaning, and the role of culture in human life. If art and fashion are largely driven by market forces, can they still serve as vehicles for truth, beauty, and social connection, or are they doomed to be just mirrors of commerce? Critical theorists have long wrestled with this. The Frankfurt School, as mentioned, was pessimistic about mass culture’s ability to liberate; they saw it mainly as a tool of domination masquerading as pleasure. Herbert Marcuse, one member of that school, coined the term “repressive desublimation” to describe how capitalist societies satisfy certain desires in a superficial way in order to prevent deeper dissatisfaction from surfacing. In the context of art, repressive desublimation means that potentially radical or profound impulses get channeled into safe, market-friendly forms. For example, the genuine human need for creative expression might be met with an endless supply of shiny entertainment and trivial art – scratching the itch just enough to keep people docile, but never encouraging them to fundamentally question the system. Marcuse feared that even art that seems rebellious can be rendered harmless by turning it into a consumer product. We see this when anti-establishment aesthetics (like punk’s aggressive style or hip-hop’s confrontational stance) are co-opted by fashion houses and record labels, sold as edgy chic rather than political statements. The subversive energy is drained once it’s a style on a shelf.
Jean Baudrillard, writing later in the 20th century, observed something similar in how signs and meanings operate in consumer society. He noted that capitalism creates a world of simulacra – copies without originals, symbols that refer only to themselves. Fashion, for him, was a prime example of a sign-system that endlessly recycles and recombines looks devoid of intrinsic meaning, thereby enthralling people in a game of pure differentiation with no objective end. Baudrillard pointed out that fashion’s constant change doesn’t signify progress or improvement; it is change for its own sake – the pure sign he describes. This aligns with how many feel about seasonal trends: last year’s outfit isn’t functionally worse than this year’s, but symbolically it’s outdated. So one must buy to remain within the accepted code. The concept of spectacle by Guy Debord also becomes relevant again here: Debord would argue that even dissent and critique can become part of the spectacle. A striking example is the street artist Banksy. Banksy built a reputation on anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist graffiti art that subverts advertisements and pokes fun at the art market. Yet, as discussed, his very critique became a hot commodity. When he orchestrated the shredding of one of his artworks at auction in 2018, he was attempting to show the absurdity of art prices – but the partially shredded artwork promptly doubled in value due to the stunt’s notoriety. This is capitalism’s ouroboros: it can eat even its own critique and regurgitate it as a profitable product. Baudrillard might say Banksy’s stunt was itself a sort of spectacle that ends up reinforcing the system by giving it a new story, a new thrill, without altering its structure. Debord warned that “the spectacle is a concrete inversion of life” and “the autonomous movement of the nonliving” – implying that these market-driven representations take on a life of their own and stand in for genuine human action. When outrage at the art market becomes itself an art-market event, one sees that inversion clearly.
This can lead to a cynical view that under capitalism, authentic rebellion is nearly impossible in art or fashion because the system is too adept at monetizing everything. But such a totalizing conclusion might overlook the spaces of resistance and alternative practice that persist. Throughout history, wherever capitalism’s influence on culture has been strong, there have been countercurrents. It is important to recognize these resistances and alternatives not as panaceas, but as reminders that other modes of creation and consumption are possible. For instance, the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain emerged as a reaction against the dehumanizing effects of industrial production. Figures like William Morris idealized a return to handcrafted quality and a unity of art, labor, and daily life. Morris, a socialist, envisioned a future where artisans could work freely, finding joy in making beautiful, useful objects without exploitation. The Arts and Crafts workshops tried to operate on principles of collaboration and quality over quantity. In practice, their furniture, textiles, and wallpapers were costly and mainly bought by the well-to-do – a contradiction that shows the challenge of escaping the market while living within it. Nonetheless, the philosophy of Arts and Crafts influenced later generations, including the Bauhaus in Germany which also sought to reconcile art, craft, and industry in a more humane way.
The early 20th-century avant-garde carried forward a rebellious torch. Movements like Dada and Surrealism explicitly positioned themselves against the bourgeois capitalist establishment. Dadaists during World War I created anti-art: nonsensical, provocative works meant to shock and thumb their noses at the values of a society that had descended into mechanized warfare and materialism. Tristan Tzara, a Dada founder, wrote manifestos gleefully rejecting reason and profit – insisting art should not make sense or money. Surrealists like André Breton, drawing on Marx and Freud, saw in imagination and irrational juxtapositions a way to break the chains of capitalist rationality and unleash liberatory desires. These movements were small in number, but their cultural impact was significant. Over time, however, their radical edge was dulled as Dada collages and Surrealist paintings found their way into prestigious museums and high-end art markets. What began as a revolt became assimilated into art history’s canon – another example of the co-optation process. Yet the ideas of these movements – the notion that art could be a tool of revolution or a means to live more freely – continued to inspire.
The 1960s and 1970s saw another wave of countercultural energy, intertwining political and aesthetic rebellion. In the West, the hippie movement challenged consumerist values, advocating peace, love, and a bohemian rejection of material excess. In fashion, this manifested as a rejection of stiff, formal attire in favor of casual, eclectic, often unisex styles. Young people shopped second-hand, made their own clothes, or wore jeans and simple garments as an anti-fashion statement against the corporate suits and housewife dresses of their parents’ generation. This could be seen as a democratization and a moral stance – why buy new and support the war-mongering system, the thinking went, when you could reuse old clothes and embrace a more natural look? The hippie aesthetic itself was quickly commercialized (fringe vests and bell-bottoms were on sale in boutiques by the late ’60s), but it succeeded in permanently loosening the norms of dress and introducing the idea that what you wear can be political. Then came punk in the mid-1970s, arguably the most vehemently anti-capitalist subculture in fashion. Punk style – tattered shirts, safety pins, repurposed trash as clothing – was a direct affront to the glossy, money-driven fashion industry. Punks embraced DIY (do-it-yourself): they often made or modified their own clothes, both out of economic necessity and as a statement of rejecting mass-produced consumer goods. The famous London punk boutique SEX, run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, sold deliberately shocking attire with anarchist slogans, aiming to scandalize and disrupt. Punk music’s fierce anti-authoritarian messages and punk fashion’s aggressive ugliness were meant to refuse the commodified slickness of mainstream culture. Nevertheless, by the 1980s, punk looks had entered runway collections and punk music was a profitable genre for record companies. The pattern repeated: genuine rebellion created a new visual language, and capitalism eventually learned how to speak it, albeit devoid of its original teeth. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall noted, the dominant system can “decode” subcultural signs and re-encode them in the dominant framework (for example, the meaning of ripped jeans changed from “I’m a destitute rebel” to “I’m fashionable”).
Does this mean resistance is futile? Not necessarily. Each wave of counterculture leaves behind some changes. The fact you can wear ripped jeans today without scandal is partly due to punk’s legacy; the fact that independent music and zine cultures thrive is a result of paths carved by past rebels. And some movements do effect concrete change. For instance, the Feminist Art Movement of the 1970s fought against the male-dominated art world by creating alternate spaces (like cooperative galleries run by women) and by introducing explicitly feminist content and methods (collaborative works, use of “low” materials like textiles traditionally associated with women’s crafts). Over time, this led to greater representation of women in galleries and museums and expanded the notion of what art can be. In fashion, the past decade has seen increased scrutiny on issues like body positivity and representation of diverse races and sizes – a response to longstanding capitalist beauty standards – and while much of it is co-opted or tokenized, there has also been genuine progress (for example, a number of high-profile brands have stopped airbrushing models or now feature plus-size models, responding to consumer activism).
In the contemporary landscape, some new avenues offer possibilities for circumventing traditional capitalist gatekeepers. The internet allows artists and designers to connect directly with audiences or consumers, potentially reducing reliance on big commercial intermediaries. An artist can showcase their portfolio on social media and attract buyers or patrons without going through a brick-and-mortar gallery (though often they still yearn for gallery representation for validation and higher prices). Designers can launch independent labels online, or use crowdfunding to produce ethically made clothing. There are even collectives using blockchain and cooperative models to empower fashion artisans in developing countries, ensuring they get a fair share of profits. These are small counter-currents relative to the mainstream, but they point to how technology might enable alternative economies of culture (albeit technology itself is largely controlled by giant corporations now, which presents its own complications). We also see a revival of interest in craft and locality – a reaction to global homogenization. The slow food movement finds echoes in slow fashion: people increasingly concerned about where their clothes come from, valuing items that are handmade, local, or have a transparent supply chain. While still niche, this trend has carved a market for sustainable and ethical fashion brands that operate on very different principles from fast fashion. They often produce less, pay more to workers, and price higher to consumers, essentially challenging the notion that endless growth and cheapness are the only way. Some of these ethical businesses frame themselves almost as anti-capitalist endeavors (though if they’re selling in a market, they are within capitalism, just practicing a kinder version of it).
From the angle of political economy, thinkers who critique neoliberalism have proposed structural changes that could improve the situation for art and fashion. Ideas such as stronger labor laws globally (to prevent the worst sweatshop abuses), carbon taxes or environmental regulations on fashion production (to internalize environmental costs), and public funding for the arts (to buffer artists from market pressures) are all in play. In the late 20th century, neoliberal policy-makers often slashed arts funding and pushed the idea of “creative industries” as important mainly for economic growth. Now, some policy voices are swinging back, arguing that art and culture have intrinsic value worth subsidizing, and that artisan skills and cultural heritage (like indigenous textile traditions) deserve support and protection from market extinction. Concepts like a universal basic income also have intriguing implications for creatives – if people had a livable stipend regardless of employment, many artists could create without desperation, and many fast-fashion workers could be more selective about jobs, forcing improvements in wages and conditions. These ideas remain largely unimplemented at scale, but they indicate that even within capitalist societies, different policy choices could significantly mitigate negative outcomes.
Where does this leave us in analyzing capitalism’s impact on art and fashion? The picture is undoubtedly sobering. Across the historical arc and up to the present, we have seen that the logic of capitalism – competition, commodification, profit maximization, growth – has again and again tended to erode the emancipatory or communal potentials of art and fashion. It is a global story: Western capitalism imposed itself on colonized cultures, altering their art and dress; now global capitalism envelops nearly all cultures, often diluting diversity into globally palatable, profitable formulas. The development of mass consumer society created unprecedented prosperity and cultural exchange on one level, but also unprecedented alienation, environmental destruction, and cultural homogenization on another. Art and fashion under capitalism have produced objects of great beauty and creativity, but also immense waste and injustice. They have provided avenues for individual expression, but often channeled those expressions into market-friendly directions. They have been sites of joy and community, yet also sites of exploitation and inequality.
Yet, the persistence of human creativity in the face of these pressures is itself a kind of hopeful note. Even within the culture industry, people find meaning – a teenager might find in a song or a style a sense of identity that transcends money, an artist might smuggle profound truth into a commercial medium, a designer might use their runway to make a political statement (as when Vivienne Westwood, once the punk provocateur, used her shows in the 2010s to campaign against climate change and overconsumption, effectively biting the hand that feeds her). The cyclical pattern of co-option doesn’t mean true innovation or resistance ceases to appear; it only means the struggle is ongoing.
In conclusion, taking a global and historical view and drawing on interdisciplinary insights, we see clearly that capitalism’s influence on the art and fashion worlds has been largely detrimental in terms of humanistic and social ideals. It has yoked creative endeavors to the drive for profit, often at great moral cost. It has propagated a consumerist ethos that undermines art’s higher aspirations and fashion’s potential for sustainable beauty. Historically, it turned art from a communal or sacred practice into a commodity and status symbol, and attire from a durable cultural expression into fast-discarded fast fashion. Around the world, it has tended to privilege the powerful – enriching collectors and executives – while marginalizing or exploiting the less powerful – be they garment workers in a factory or traditional artisans in a village or young designers without backing. The argument that capitalism has a positive impact by democratizing access to art and fashion (making things affordable and widespread) is not lost in this analysis, but we measure that against the concurrent loss of depth, quality, and equity. What use is affordable fashion if it poisons rivers and relies on sweatshops? What is the value of globally accessible art if authentic voices are drowned out by commercial noise and inequality is reinforced? The cohesive conclusion across disciplines is that art and fashion, to truly flourish as vehicles of human expression and social good, cannot indefinitely function on the logic of endless growth, profit above all, and commodification of all that is sacred or unique. Many theorists invoked herein – from Marx and the Frankfurt School to contemporary post-colonial and neo-Marxist critics – ultimately suggest that a different mode of production and exchange would be needed for art and fashion to realize their emancipatory potential. Whether that means a fully socialist system, or a drastically reformed capitalism with strong social and environmental constraints, or some hybrid model, is debated. But what is evident is that the current trajectory is fraught with problems: environmentally unsustainable, socially unjust, and, in the end, even creatively limiting (as monocultures of style and blockbuster mentalities set in).
Art and fashion both thrive on imagination, diversity, and the pursuit of ideals (be it beauty, truth, or innovation). Capitalism, by subordinating those ideals to profit, repeatedly undercuts them. To reclaim art and fashion as truly cultural (and not merely commercial) domains, a collective rethinking is required – valuing artisans and artists as more than economic agents, valuing culture as more than a commodity. This could involve policy changes, shifts in consumer consciousness, and new economic models for creative work. The task is daunting, as the system’s inertia is strong. But the very critiques and analyses compiled in this article are part of the effort to envision a better alignment of creativity with humanity. By understanding in depth how capitalism has negatively impacted art and fashion – alienating creators, exploiting labor, diluting meaning, and reinforcing inequality – we equip ourselves to imagine and perhaps inch toward alternatives where art and fashion can be, as they ought to be, realms of authentic expression, shared humanity, and sustainable beauty, rather than mere mirrors of capital.