While chatting with some colleagues about fashion, the word “empire” often came up.
The “empire” of a particular designer was praised; the strategy of another fashion house in re-building its “empire” in time of crisis was criticised and so on.
This little word of Latin origin (from “imperium”, that is "rule, command" and the verb imperare "to command") annoyingly kept on being mentioned in fashion-related chats, debates and gossips, with colleagues showing with a tone of approval how so-and-so had built a solid empire and in a disapproving tone how somebody else had totally failed.
There is an essay that doesn’t have anything to do with fashion but that fascinated me since it came out, Empire (Harvard University Press), written by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri.
The latter is considered a sort of controversial figure in Italy: in the '60s, Antonio Negri taught State Theory at the University of Padua, in Italy.
His works were mainly centred on themes such as labour theory and work.
During these years he joined the Marxist journal Quaderni Rossi and started taking part in the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group.
When the latter split up, Negri moved with another group, Autonomia Organizzata (Organized Autonomy).
Italy was living then traumatic years, usually known as "gli anni di piombo" ("the years of lead"), an expression that well defines the violence perpetrated at the time by different terrorist groups. On 7th April 1979, Negri, accused of being the head of various terrorist organisations and of having organised the murder of politician Aldo Moro, was arrested in Milan. In 1983, when Negri's trial took place the accusation of having been part of terrorist organisations was dropped and he was condemned on the substance of his writings. On 25th and 26th June of the same year, Negri ran as candidate for the Radical Party and, after obtaining parliamentary immunity, left prison. After the Chamber of Deputies requested the withdrawal of the parliamentary immunity, rather than going back to prison, Negri escaped to France where he spent fourteen years, teaching political science at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis). In 1997, Negri went back to Italy, entered the Rebibbia prison in Rome and served his sentence. Since then he has been writing for various magazines about politics and focusing on developing with Michael Hardt a trilogy that started with Empire, continued with Multitude in 2004 and has now closed with the recently released Commonwealth.
Empire was actually completed quite a few years ago, at the end of June 1997, yet it deals with something, an evolutionary process, which has been happening in the last few years. Negri and Hardt theorised in it the death of the nation state and the rising of a new Empire, the result of the various capitalistic processes occurred throughout history. The book, divided in four parts, tackled issues such as the new Empire, the concepts of labour and multitude, immigration, wars and the final destruction of the Empire. Hardt and Negri did not tend to identify the Empire with a single nation, but they claimed that the Empire is a sort of place without boundaries, which has been forming through a thick network of new laws and regulations. Though it is still forming, the new power has already been going through a deep crisis, analysed in the last part of the book, in which, very optimistically, the two authors confided into the power of the multitude to destroy the Empire.
I guess my favourite parts of the book actually concern the changes the concept of labour has been going through in the last few years: labour has become immaterial, a characteristic helped by the third revolution which has provided people with the technological means that allow to develop new forms of labour. In the past, it was the factory owner who gave his workers the tools to work with. Now things have changed: working means expressing intellectual and linguistic abilities, so that we ourselves own the tools, the instruments to work with.
In Empire there is also the formulation of a new concept, that of "multitude", a sort of strong, wise, subtle and dynamic force that opposes to the Empire reaffirming the individuality of single human beings.
These three words – empire, labour and multitude – and the concepts they stand for, have been buzzing in my head now for a while and I have been trying to apply them to the fashion industry.
The global fashion "empire" has in the last few years completely gone through a major revamp: production in many cases has been taken to other countries to reduce manufacturing costs; established designers who contributed to building the empire, showed in many cases they have hit a creativity block, producing pale imitations of what was fashionable in the past; many fashion publications closed down because of the financial crisis; the truth about the exploitation of the workforces producing the items (i.e. clothes and accessories) that empower the empire has been unveiled; the multitude – treated like a flock of buying sheep for ages – is slowly rebelling to what the empire has been feeding it with (read low quality items and fast trends that don't even last for six months).
According to Negri and Hardt the multitude represents the limit that the Empire and the global market can’t overstep and the power that will eventually destroy the Empire.
I just wonder if the same fate will occur to the fashion empire: will the multitude deal a final blow to it through consumer behaviour, blogs and tweets? I guess it may well happen one day, but if it ever happens, I don't think I will regret it: I'm confident that, in such case, the total destruction of the fashion empire as we know it can only generate a better, healthier and more exciting industry.
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