This year, for International Women’s Day, the fast fashion giant Pretty Little Thing released an entire ‘shop-by’ category in celebration. There seems to be nothing particularly feminist about the clothes, other than a few girlboss-slogan-type tote bags. PLT are manipulating and commodifying a global day of recognition and activism for women into a marketing ploy to maximise profit. But the deepest irony of this entire campaign is that fast fashion companies are actually responsible for supporting and entrenching patriarchy in their own production lines.
80% of garment workers worldwide are women. This is no coincidence. Women are considered desirable workers in the textiles industry, particularly in countries with more outdated gender norms, as employers can take advantage of cultural roles that assign passivity and accommodation to women, enabling the industry to exploit and oppress female workers. Additionally, the countries which produce the most clothes globally (China and India) have extreme gender pay gaps within the textiles industry. In India, this gender pay gap is larger than in any other sector and stands at 34.6%. In China, this wage gap is 22% and, in garment factories, women make up a minority of ‘technical’ positions: male employees tend to hold ‘skilled’ cutting and ironing positions, whereas women are more likely to have sewing or assisting roles. The fashion industry exploits and profits off women’s oppression under patriarchal society, and no number of witty caption tees can negate this fact. In turn, the consumption of these products also contributes to, or at least enables, the continued oppression of garment workers.
However, fast fashion’s desire for easy profit is not the only way capitalism contributes to and upholds the patriarchy. For another example, look no further than your bathroom cabinet. Makeup, hair products and skincare all have largely female markets: 83% of women in the UK wear makeup every day, women buy more hair care products than men and 82% of women use skincare products regularly (compared to 37% of men). The pressure placed upon the appearance of women is also apparent: barely 50% of women are ‘happy’ with their appearance, whereas 74% of men are. Makeup and other beauty products seem to be a way of reconciling with this insecurity, seeing as 54% of women wore makeup as teenagers because they were self-conscious about their appearance, and 44% of women feel less beautiful when not wearing makeup. The average UK women spends nearly £300 on hair and beauty products annually. Additionally, women’s cosmetic products and toiletries tend to be 34% more expensive than the equivalent men’s products (this is often called the ‘Pink Tax’). The price of beauty is high for women.
In short, women are told that we must buy our femininity. We must qualify and then demonstrate it by performing muliebrity in a way that is complicated, expensive and time consuming. The pressure placed on us to conform to certain beauty standards generates profit for the cosmetics industry, meaning that capitalism benefits further from the oppression of women.
But the cosmetics industry is not alone in its profiting off women’s insecurities. The diet industry and anti-aging industry do so in perhaps an even more toxic way, and are also predominantly targeted towards women. Women are told from a very early age that they need to be prettier and thinner to be ‘worth more’, in a way that men are not. Although men do experience some of the same appearance-based pressure, it undeniably affects women more severely. The fact that we are then told that this expected beauty and body can be ‘bought’ seems to be a terribly convenient rhetoric for capitalism, doesn’t it?
Women’s beauty standards also change completely every decade or so (once again, a way that men’s do not). And so, even if you buy every single glow-up makeover product, scheme or lifestyle on the market, by the time you have finally achieved society’s ‘ideal’, it will have shifted entirely, and you will have to start from scratch.
When laid out like this, it is very easy to identify this system as an extremely damaging one. But, when you consider the billions of pounds beauty and wellness industries turn over annually, one can see why, in a capitalist economy, it is a very desirable scheme of profit for those who hold wealth – and therefore – under capitalism – power.
But why do women spend so much to achieve some arbitrary, transient standard of beauty in the first place? Well, historically, and today to some extent, a woman’s appearance and sexuality has been one of their chief forms of power within society. A woman’s beauty denotes her value and acts as a social currency, allowing her influence and agency. We are taught that beauty is power, and that beauty comes with power. For an example of this theory in practice, consider the ‘femme fatale’ archetype: a woman who has influence and control (over men) due to her beauty and sexuality.
And of course, this kind of beauty cannot be accessed for free; the right mascara, shoes and bra all cost significant sums. Effectively, women are told by our capitalist, patriarchal society that they, too, can have the power and influence that is deliberately held just out of reach for them, if they spend all this money on makeup and heels and hairspray to purchase some commodified, objectified femininity.
Furthermore, beauty is an external and conditional form of power. Its value is defined by those around you, rather than you yourself. It is also transient: changing beauty standards or aging will both eventually disqualify you from accessing it at all. In short, women are sold beauty under the guise that it will grant them comfort and confidence and control, only to find that this supposed power – if it ever exists as all – is limited and comes with an expiry date. This model, which has been at work for centuries, is part of what keeps those great capitalist cogs turning – never mind the women crushed in between them.
It is clear that our current model of capitalist consumerism facilitates and supports patriarchal power structures and profits off the oppression of women. But are feminism and capitalism truly incompatible? Well, fundamentally, capitalism runs on exploitation. It is a system which compounds and exacerbates inequality in the name of profit margin and market growth. Feminism, on the other hand, stands diametrically opposed to these principles; it is an ideology centred around equality and justice on every level. That said, although true equality cannot occur under capitalism, for now, it may be most realistic to achieve whatever progress we can within a capitalist framework. For now…
