Fashion as an Industry of Becoming

Becoming: the continuous flow of reality, the passage from one state to another, constant movement, the perpetual unfolding of time and things.

Could this be one of fashion’s deepest characteristics? That, in order to exist, it must continually transform itself? To live through variability, to breathe novelty and the ephemeral, to feed on that continuous becoming through which what we desire today may already belong to us less tomorrow, has been described as one of fashion’s essential attributes.

The idea of change as an essential element of the fashion industry is not new. Giorgio Armani described fashion as “the industry of change and renewal”, while Alber Elbaz stated: “We are in an industry that is the industry of change.” Change has therefore long been part of the way fashion thinks about and describes itself.

Speaking of becoming, however, allows us to go further and to question what fashion continuously sets in motion: matter, culture, desire, identity and our own possibility of transformation. And yet clothing originates from one of the most elementary human needs: covering ourselves to protect the body from environmental conditions. But if we think about it, fashion is not simply about getting dressed.

That need already belongs, in some way, to the realm of culture, to the interpretation of the body, nudity and sexuality within a social, cultural and historical context in which the gaze of others assumes particular importance.

Between that primary need and the image that finally appears before our eyes lies an extraordinarily complex system. There are nature and matter, human labour, investment, technology, knowledge, production and exchange. Matter is transformed by culture into an object and the object, as it enters culture, is transformed once again: it becomes meaning, identity, desire, belonging and distinction.

This is where being, appearance and becoming meet. In this sense, fashion inevitably belongs to the realm of appearance and of being seen. Yet behind that surface lies a material, productive, social and cultural structure that also offers us something different: the possibility, at least for an instant, of becoming something else.

Perhaps, then, the need for change belongs to our very essence, to our desire to become, to the need to appear, at least for an instant, as something different from what we are.

We invented culture. We produce forms, objects, images and meanings. And we continue to transform them. Perhaps because we need time to produce something new, for the future to continue to differ from the present, even though so often we fail to achieve this in any substantial way. Novelty offers us a promise: something can still happen.

And perhaps this is also why it would be so difficult to live in a world in which everything always remained the same. Fashion, then, tells the story of what we wear and, through what we wear, tells us something deeper. It tells the story of our need to continue becoming.