In recent decades scholars and critics have begun to expose how imperialism has left its mark on the very fabric of global dress – a legacy of domination woven into styles, supply chains, and aesthetics. In brief, this argument runs like this: centuries of colonial rule destroyed and subsumed indigenous clothing traditions, replacing them with Euro‐American norms and consumerist fetishism; today’s fast‐fashion industry simply extends those colonial relations in new forms. Historically, European empires systematically dismantled local textile economies (for example, British tariffs on Indian muslin or French dress codes in Indochina) and mandated Western-style uniforms and garments as symbols of “civilized” identity. The colonized thus internalized a racist aesthetic hierarchy: as Frantz Fanon observed, *“for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white”*, a chilling admission of how colonial culture made subject peoples aspire to the colonizer’s image even as it robbed them of their own. This pattern of enforced eurocentrism recurs worldwide. Anthropologists and postcolonial theorists (Said, Spivak, Bourdieu, etc.) have shown that the cultural imperialism of the West shapes how the “Other” is represented – and that extends to dress. As one analyst bluntly puts it, *“the industry as we know it still adheres to colonial precepts of old, [and] reinforces eurocentric standards with no regard for other peoples”*. In practice, this has meant that people in the Global South are commonly portrayed either as “primitive” curios or as exotic ornaments whose styles can be mined by fashion houses without respect. Famous cases abound: for instance, Vogue’s Met Gala in 2015 themed on China had *“almost all the A-list celebrities [in] stereotypically Chinese clothing and aesthetic, without bothering to consult designers from the said country.”* Such tokenistic appropriation – of kimono motifs, kente prints, Navajo jewelry, etc. – recycles orientalist clichés and renders subaltern cultures voiceless. As bell hooks warns in her critique of cultural appropriation, *“white cultural imperialist appropriation of black culture maintains white supremacy and is a constant threat to black liberation.”* In other words, the West’s habit of co-opting Global South styles (earrings, turbans, tribal prints) actually reinforces racial power by commodifying difference and denying agency to the originals.
Economically, imperialism has warped fashion through exploitative supply chains and labor regimes. Beginning with the slave plantations (producing cotton and silk for European mills) and continuing through colonial factories, indigenous labor was devalued. Today, Bangladesh and India have become the “garment factories of the world,” supplying cheap clothes to Western brands – but under grim conditions: more than 80% of countries in Asia routinely violate workers’ rights, and garment workers often toil 14-hour days for poverty wages. Tansy Hoskins vividly documents this brutal calculus: *“the fashion industry places more value on the clothes it sells than on the lives of the people making them”*, and Bangladeshi survivors still cry out, *“Why do I have to die making clothes for foreigners?”*. In other words, our clothes are literally soaking in the blood of the exploited. The exploitative economics follow colonial lines: Western brands *“make their sourcing decisions deliberately – following colonial pathways to industrial sites where they can evade [safety] standards”*. This is the new imperialism: global finance institutions pushed Bangladesh into monoculture garment exports decades ago, ensuring dependency on low-wage labor (over 4 million Bangladeshis work in fashion thanks to IMF- and World Bank-guided policies), and Western retailers now cancel billions in orders during crises while pocketing profits. The result is that “life and dignity are repeatedly sacrificed to a system that values profit over people”. In short, the capitalist–neocolonial economy behind fast fashion is little more than a transnational sweatshop complex – a direct descendant of the colonial plantation and factory economies – with critical theorists dubbing this “waste colonialism” or “neocolonial capitalism” of fashion.
Culturally, imperialism has stamped aesthetic values on fashion’s very soul. Pierre Bourdieu taught us that taste and fashion are forms of symbolic capital – class markers that the dominant impose on others – and in the imperial context the West’s tastes dominate the global stage. The prevailing images in advertising, cinema and social media typically idealize thin, white models in luxurious Western brands, excluding or exotifying people of color. Remake reports that *“at every stage of the fashion cycle, harm is placed on non-white communities in the Global South”*, not just in factories but also in representation: to many non-white youths it is *“disorienting to find that they’re essentially excluded in the pop culture and media images marketed to the global public.”*. Soft power bolsters this: Hollywood films sell American sportswear and denim as the default future, while U.S. subcultures (hip-hop, punk) get commercialized worldwide. Even the secondhand clothing trade reproduces colonial patterns: Western nations offload 15 million used garments weekly to Ghana and Kenya, flooding markets with cheap, mostly unwearable junk. This “charity” is in fact a dumping of capitalist waste onto formerly colonized lands – as one expert says, African ports become “dumping grounds of the north”, with 40% of Ghana’s imports declared worthless. In sum, the West exercises “soft imperialism” through branding and cultural imagery: fashion becomes a tool of cultural domination, *“another vehicle to enforce superiority and control,”* as Remake notes.
Anti-imperialist thinkers help us frame these dynamics. Fanon’s work shows that colonial rule wounds identity, so that decolonization requires reclaiming the body and aesthetics. His insistence on “becoming somewhere else and something else” speaks to fashion’s potential for new expressions beyond imperial codes. Edward Said’s critique of orientalism reminds us that no culture is “pure” – every garment is freighted with historical power. Gayatri Spivak would remind us that garment workers and Indigenous artisans (the subaltern) rarely author their own narrative: their labor and designs are spoken for by Western interests. Walter Benjamin’s insights on reproduction suggest how mass production strips clothing of its aura – which dovetails with how “fast fashion” tokenizes folk costumes as endlessly reusable images. And bell hooks teaches that desire for the “exotic” in dress is a symptom of white supremacist appetite (as she shows in *“Eating the Other”*), rather than genuine cross-cultural respect. Although we lack direct quotes from all these figures here, their thought permeates the argument: colonialism brands fashion with an ideology of white supremacy and class.
Yet we also see resistance and new imaginaries. Across Africa and Asia and among diasporas, designers and activists are reviving traditional crafts and hybrid styles as acts of defiance – riffing on the idea of *negritude* or *mestizaje* in dress. The Chikankari embroiderers of Lucknow, the weavers of Kente in Ghana, the Awajún eagle-tooth ornaments of Peru, Indigenous beadwork of North America: when communities invest these with modern political meaning, they reclaim agency over their image. As Serkan Delice (2025) suggests, an *“anti-racist praxis of fashion”* built on **reciprocity** and transformation could “challenge fashion’s hegemonic whiteness and racialized system of production.” In practical terms, movements like #DecolonizeFashion or “Slow Factory” call for solidarity, reparations, and crediting BIPOC knowledge (as Cèline Semaan advises: *“Colonialism is a question of exploiting across geographies…setting up colonies to extract resources and labor”*, so its opposite would be global redistribution of fashion’s wealth and know-how). Grassroots initiatives promote ethical supply chains, fair wages, and co‐design, insisting that formerly colonized people be treated as partners, not subjects. For consumers and designers in the North, the principle is clear: do not consume culture, but instead **exchange** it – learn from, compensate, and amplify marginalized voices, rather than commodify them.
In political terms, the crisis of fashion is bound up with neoliberal capitalism: the “race to the bottom” for the cheapest garments mirrors old colonial markets where raw materials were bought cheap and sold dear. The multi-billion-dollar fast-fashion industry today depends on shoring up global inequalities (as Hoskins bitterly notes, “fashion is just a word the robbers wrap their spoils in”). Dismantling this requires more than better PR; it requires structural changes – debt cancellation, ending trade imbalances, enforcing labor rights, protecting indigenous patents on traditional dress – in short, an anti-imperialist approach. Ethically, the industry must shift from extractive logic toward “planetary” consciousness. We might imagine principles like those Frantz Fanon and others called for: **solidarity** with labor struggles, **reparative justice** for stolen cultural heritage (perhaps by royalty payments to communities whose designs are adopted), and **local empowerment** so that Global South peoples determine what “style” means in their own lives.
Ultimately, fashion—as Walter Benjamin might put it—must recover its *aura*: not the aura of commodity fetishism, but the aura of cultural authenticity and self-determination. A truly decolonial fashion industry would celebrate plurality of dress, burying the last imperial fashion plate and opening wardrobes to a vernacular renaissance. As one Remake analyst concludes, the Global South has become “not only the overworked manufacturer of fashion, but also the dumping grounds of the North… A legacy of exploitation and waste colonialism is woven into the very fabric of fashion”. Recognizing this is the first step; the next is to reweave that fabric with justice.