“Global emergency is teaching me to see Fashion violence through a broader lens, violence in which we are all complicit”.
Sandra Niessen, Violence by Definition, in Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (Ed),
On Colonial Violence in the Fashion Schools,
The Yarn n°1 — October 2023.
Acknowledgments [1] and citation [2].
1. The multiple and interconnected violences of fashion
Understanding contemporary industrial fashion [3] as a “system of systemic violence” requires expanding the concept of violence beyond direct physical harm. Within the peace studies tradition, Johan Galtung (1969) defines structural violence as that which is exercised when social structures produce avoidable harm and inequality in “life chances,” without the need for a visible individual perpetrator. This perspective makes it possible to read industrial fashion as a normalized machinery that distributes harm throughout the global value chain. Added to this reading is the notion of slow violence, through which Rob Nixon (2011) names forms of gradual, cumulative, and spatially displaced environmental destruction that become difficult to perceive as violence precisely because they occur “slowly” and often outside the media spotlight. From these perspectives, industrial fashion can be analyzed as a system that produces harm across multiple dimensions—spiritual, psychological, physical, epistemic, cultural, ecological, structural, and political—in an interdependent manner.
The spiritual violence of fashion -which can be also taken as violence to the soul -the very core of what makes us human- becomes visible when dress ceases to operate as a relational and meaning-making practice—linked to community, memory, territory, and care—and is transformed into a technology of identity based on consumption, comparison, and lack. In consumer societies, the subject is pushed to turn themself into a desirable commodity; social life is reorganized as a shop window and a competition for belonging. Bauman (2004, 2007) describes this shift as a central feature of “consumer life,” in which the condition of acceptability rests on the need for constant “updating” of the self.
In continuity with this, psychological violence is not a collateral effect, but a device functional to the market. The fast/ultra-fast fashion model needs to accelerate the social time of desire: to produce anxiety over obsolescence, pressure for novelty, and shame for “not measuring up.” The social psychology of consumption has documented how consumerist culture and media ideals of appearance affect identity and well-being, feeding body dissatisfaction and endless aspirations. Within fashion studies, the “fashioned” body appears as a social object permanently evaluated and disciplined: dress is not only coverage, but a regime of exposure and social legibility of the body. Thus, fashion can operate - e.g. through the messages of advertising- as psychological violence when it organizes personal value around unattainable aesthetic standards and turns discomfort into fuel for consumption.
Physical violence is perhaps the most evident dimension: industrial accidents, chronic exposure to chemicals, occupational illnesses, bodily deterioration due to unsustainable working hours and production rhythms. Yet even here the key is not the isolated “event,” but the structure that makes it probable and repeatable. Analyses of environmental injustice in fast fashion have shown how environmental and health costs are distributed along the supply chain and displaced onto populations with less bargaining power (frequently in low- and middle-income countries), producing occupational and community health risks.
Epistemic violence appears when industrial fashion imposes hierarchies of knowledge: it defines what counts as innovation, what counts as “design,” what counts as value, and reduces Indigenous and popular systems of dress to “inspiration,” “folklore,” or “craft.” Mignolo (2009) conceptualizes the coloniality of knowledge and proposes “epistemic disobedience” as a break with knowledge regimes that present themselves as universal while subordinating other epistemologies. Complementarily, Spivak (1988) refers to “epistemic violence” as processes through which colonialism constitutes the “other” and erases its history, rendering their forms of speech and knowledge illegible within dominant frameworks. In the field of design, Vázquez (2017) proposes that decolonizing design implies reconfiguring the relationship with the land and with relational worlds denied by colonial modernity, which helps explain why industrial fashion tends to “un-world” (de-world) systems of dress that do not conform to its grammar.
Cultural and intergenerational violence manifests when the fashion system homogenizes imaginaries and displaces local systems of dress, weakening the transmission of knowledge and community continuities. Fashion operates as a system of social signification: it defines categories of distinction, belonging, and relevance. Classical sociological analyses of fashion show how dress participates in the production of class, gender, and identity across different historical formations.
Natural (ecological) violence constitutes one of the most extensively documented fields of contemporary critique. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) has described the linear character of the textile system (produce–use–discard) and the scale of its waste, arguing for the need for systemic transformation toward a circular textile economy. However, understood solely as a strategy for efficiency and waste management, the circular economy can become a functional reconfiguration of the fashion industry system, without altering its sacrificial nature, its dependence on growth, or the normalized production of social and ecological damage. The Fossil Fashion report by the Changing Markets Foundation (2021) further demonstrates the structural dependence of the fast fashion model on synthetic fibers derived from fossil fuels, and warns about the volumes of waste and toxic microfibers associated with that expansion.
Political violence appears when the industry conditions collective decisions and produces consensus: regulatory capture, greenwashing, the displacement of responsibility onto individual consumption, and the foreclosure of the transformative horizon (the idea that “there is no alternative”). This translates into indoctrination: crucial for capitalism in general and industrialized fashion in particular. Part of this political violence is sustained by symbolic violence: the capacity to impose legitimate categories of value and taste that naturalize the social order. Bourdieu (1991), in his analysis of language and symbolic power, offers tools for thinking about how markets of legitimacy are constructed and how hierarchies are reproduced through apparently “neutral” signs. In fashion, this becomes a politics of aesthetics: the system not only produces clothing, it produces cultural obedience to a temporality and a hierarchy of value that sustain its continuity.
Finally, structural violence. Here, Galtung’s point (1969) is crucial: when a social structure produces avoidable harm and systematically reduces the life chances of certain groups, we are facing structural violence. In fashion, this is expressed through labor precarization, the externalization of socio-ecological costs, and the unequal distribution of risk. Along these lines, Niessen (2020) critiques the conventional framework of “sustainability” when it functions as a superficial adjustment that does not confront the sacrificial character of the system—“sacrifice zones” in fashion in the service of economic growth—and argues that frameworks are required that recognize and dismantle that logic.
In summary, structural violence cuts across all the previous dimensions: harm is embedded in the design of the system.
2. Social murder
The notion of social murder formulated by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) constitutes one of the earliest and most radical diagnoses of the structural violence of industrial capitalism. Engels argues that when a society deliberately organizes its economic, labor, and urban conditions in such a way that certain groups—particularly the working class—see their life expectancy, health, and dignity systematically reduced, that society commits a “social murder.” This is not direct homicide, but a death produced through the normalization of lethal conditions: unhealthy housing, exhausting working hours, subsistence wages, pollution, and institutional neglect. The key element in Engels is social and political responsibility: even if there is no individual executioner, the harm is foreseeable, avoidable, and therefore morally and politically imputable (Engels, 1845).
More than a century later, Johan Galtung (1969) systematized this intuition by introducing the concept of structural violence. In his foundational 1969 article, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Galtung defined violence not only as direct physical harm, but as any situation in which social structures prevent people from fully developing their capacities. Scott (2026) sees this as a diminution of what we are as humanity: from individuals and communities with agency and autonomy, to mindless/brainwashed consumers of things we don't need [4]. Fanon (1952) analyzed how colonialism produces profound insecurity in the colonized subject, weakening their confidence in their identity and their capacity for autonomous choice. This form of psychic dispossession constitutes a fundamental antecedent for understanding how, in later contexts, consumer capitalism relies on structurally insecure subjects dependent on external validation. This relates to structural violence, which operates indirectly, without a visible agent, and manifests as inequality in access to resources, health, power, and longevity. In this sense, Galtung provides the theoretical framework that generalizes Engels's concept of social murder: what Engels observes empirically in the industrial proletariat, Galtung conceptualizes as a structural pattern reproducible in multiple contexts. Social murder thus appears as a historically specific form of structural violence.
Rob Nixon introduces a key shift by emphasizing the temporality and perceptibility of violence. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Nixon defines slow violence as gradual, cumulative, and deferred harm that unfolds over time and space, and that often falls outside media and legal frameworks of recognition. Pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, and chronic exposure to toxins produce deaths that are neither spectacular nor immediate, but are massive and structurally induced. It's also psychological death; a waste of talent, a waste of ambition, a waste of intelligence and ideals. And people feel it, and they feel very frustrated and disillusioned. Nixon engages directly with Engels by showing that social murder does not occur only in factories and working-class neighborhoods, but also through ecological and extractive processes that disproportionately affect impoverished and racialized populations. Slow violence can thus be understood as the contemporary ecological articulation of social murder.
Taken together, these authors configure a continuous line of critical thought on the social production of death. Engels names the phenomenon and points to its capitalist roots; Galtung theorizes it as structural violence; and Nixon extends it into the environmental and temporal domain, showing how social murder can operate in slow, diffuse, and transgenerational ways. Far from being isolated concepts, these formulations reinforce one another and make it possible to understand how economic, political, and cultural systems can become normalized machines for producing death, even—and especially—when they do not appear violent in an immediate sense.
3. Fashion, violence, and social murder
The contemporary fashion industry can be understood as a specific and globalized form of social murder, in the sense inaugurated by Engels in 1845. This author used the concept to describe how an economic system can produce death without the need for direct violence, by deliberately organizing living conditions that erode health, reduce life expectancy, and destroy human dignity and capacities. Industrial fashion reproduces this mechanism systematically: precarious supply chains, chronic exposure to toxic substances, exhausting working hours, subsistence wages, and unsafe labor environments configure a landscape in which bodily and social harm is not accidental, but structural and foreseeable. Lack of time, family contact, and absenteeism from cultural and maintenance tasks are also consequences of this.
From this perspective, fashion fully embodies what Johan Galtung (1969) conceptualized as structural violence. The harm does not stem from an identifiable individual actor, but from the very architecture of the system: profitability depends on the externalization of human and ecological costs onto racialized, feminized, and geographically distant bodies and on cultural difference. No one “breaks the rule”; on the contrary, violence is built into the design of the productive system. Fashion not only tolerates these conditions, but normalizes them through narratives of employment, development, and progress, also visually through ways of dressing correlated with power structures and dynamics, reproducing exactly the kind of diffuse social responsibility that Engels had already identified in early industrial capitalism.
This logic is articulated with particular clarity through the notion of slow violence developed by Rob Nixon (2011). Fashion is one of the most water-, energy-, and chemical-intensive industries, and a significant contributor to climate change and microfibre pollution. These harms are rarely spectacular or immediate, but they accumulate over time, disproportionately affecting poor and racialized populations. Chronic illnesses, degradation of soil and water, loss of livelihoods, and transgenerational damage constitute a form of diffuse, prolonged, and ecologically mediated social murder, which is rarely recognized as violence.
4. Conclusions
Taken together, industrial fashion can be described as a system of multiple violences because its normal functioning depends on: (a) producing subjective lack and disciplining the body; (b) displacing physical and environmental harm onto less visible bodies and territories; (c) subordinating non-industrial and non-Western epistemologies; (d) homogenizing cultures of dress; and (e) politically naturalizing the expansion of the system as if it were inevitable. Reading fashion in this way does not mean denying the human universal of adorning the body, but rather distinguishing it from the contemporary industrial regime that captures this universal and turns it into a motor of sacrifice.
Taken together, the violence of fashion can be understood as a contemporary updating of social murder: structural (Galtung, 1969), global and disposable (Bauman, 2004 and 2007), slow and environmental (Nixon, 2011), yet coherent with Engels’s original intuition. It is not a matter of “excesses” or “failures” that can be corrected within the system, but of a productive regime whose viability depends on the normalized production of harm. For this reason, attempts to “reform” fashion without questioning its industrial logic tend to fail or to become trapped in greenwashing and the symbolic management of guilt.
Notes
[1] The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Sandra Niessen and Kirsten Scott, which he considers essential to the development of this work.
[2] This work should be cited as follows:
Gardetti, M. A. (2026). Fashion, violence, and social murder. Buenos Aires: Centro Textil Sustentable.
[3] In this work, the term "industrial fashion" is used in reference to the "global fashion system" that aims to be "universal" by making other local fashion systems invisible.
[4] Kirsten Scott (2026). Group email correspondence (Niessen/Scott/Polesello/Gardetti). Published with permission.
References
Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming life. Polity Press.
Bick, R., Halsey, E., & Ekenga, C. C. (2018). The global environmental injustice of fast fashion. Environmental Health, 17, 92.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.
Changing Markets Foundation. (2021). Fossil fashion: The hidden reliance of fast fashion on fossil fuels.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation. (2017). A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future..
Engels, F. (2009). The condition of the working class in England (D. McLellan, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published in 1845)
Fanon, F. (1952/2008). Piel negra, máscaras blancas. Madrid: Akal.
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191.
Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought, and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181.
Niessen, S. (2023). Violence by Definition. In Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (Ed), On Colonial Violence in the Fashion Schools, The Yarn n°1 — October 2023.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Macmillan.
Vázquez, R. (2017). Precedence, earth and the anthropocene: Decolonizing design. Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), 77–91.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miguel Angel Gardetti is a Textile Engineer (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina). Prior to his Doctor of Philosophy Degree earned in the United States of America, he earned two Master’s Degrees, one in Business Administration from the IAE Business School (Universidad Austral, Argentina), and the other in Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development from the Universidad de Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales (Argentina).
In the field of sustainable luxury, he founded the Center for Studies on Sustainable Luxury, the first initiative of its kind in the world with an academic/research profile. Besides, for his academic contributions in the field -- he was editor and co-editor of several books published in the USA and the UK -- he was granted the “Sustainable Leadership Award” in the “Academia” category in Bombay (India) in February, 2015.
He is an active member of the Global Compact in Argentina, which is a United Nations initiative, and was a member of its governance body -- the Board of The Global Compact, Argentine Chapter -- for two terms. He was also part of the task force that developed the “Management Responsible Education Principles” of the United Nations Global Compact. This task force was made up of over 55 renowned academics worldwide pertaining to the main Business Schools.
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