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Ways to Move Beyond Fashion’s Ego

ファッションのエゴを解体するための戦略

A Self You Can Buy

We’re all familiar with advertising slogans like “Express your true self!” or “Show the real you!”
We buy products to shape our personal taste and style, answering capitalism’s call to realize our identities through consumption. But haven’t you had moments of doubt? How can a brand that doesn’t know me insist that I need that garment to express my authentic self? And where, exactly, was that garment made—by whom—and what relationship does it really have to my life?

© ArtEZ Press

In Dissolving the Ego of Fashion: Engaging with Human Matters, Daniëlle Bruggeman argues that while contemporary fashion foregrounds the language of “self-expression,” it often pushes actual humans and material realities into the background. Does fashion truly help us express ourselves, or does it ultimately work to sustain and reinforce the fashion system itself?

Fashion as a Supermarket of Identities
To express what we believe to be our unique, authentic selves, we often buy and wear clothes made in places that have nothing to do with us, by people we will never meet. In this way, fashion turns identity into something that can be purchased with remarkable ease. Yet the imperative that fashion issues— buy in order to become yourself—does not so much support the formation of individual selves as it sustains and strengthens the identity of the fashion system itself.

Fashion continuously generates new trends and styles, and in doing so it repeatedly reasserts its own significance. This is what Bruggeman calls the ego of fashion. In that process, individual selves are pushed to the margins, while the fashion system reveals itself as self-centered and self-reinforcing.

It is a system that incessantly forms, shapes and (re)constructs itself; it creates its own ‘I’. In this sense, fashion has an Ego, which is an illusionary construction of I. The current system could be understood as linear, hierarchical and self-sustaining with its own norms, ideals and principles. In a society with many urgent socio-cultural, political and environmental challenges, fashion is thus always engaged with its own Ego-creation: it is a constant redefinition of what it is and means. 1

The Paradox of “Material Addiction that Disregards Materiality”

Daniëlle Bruggeman argues that the ego of fashion ends up disregarding fashion’s material dimension. At first, this sounds counterintuitive. Isn’t fashion an intensely material industry? You may have heard the phrase “material girl”, often used sarcastically to describe someone supposedly obsessed with possessions and appearance. Clothes are material objects, and fashion endlessly manufactures and sells things. So why does Bruggeman claim that today’s fashion system “disregards” materiality?

Because what fashion primarily produces is not material in the straightforward sense of cloth and thread, but the symbolic layer attached to them: taste, status, codes, images. What fashion consumption reveals, then, is not simply an attachment to “stuff,” but a fixation on the inflated symbolic value that hovers above material things. This is why Bruggeman insists: “Matter deserves to matter more.” The materiality of clothing precedes the images and codes generated by the fashion system’s ego—it touches our skin, interacts with our bodies, and becomes the most direct channel through which clothing connects to our everyday lives.

The constructed Ego of fashion consists of an abundance of non-material meanings, concepts and codes. At the same time, the Ego of fashion is highly materialistic, excessively obsessed with material products to consume. There is a paradox here. While fashion is materialistic, actual material things urgently need more care. Fashion’s capitalist Ego reduces the actual matter and materiality of fashion to something worthless, valueless, exploited for commercial aims. Matter deserves to matter more.2

Strategies for Dissolving the Ego of Fashion

So, can we imagine something other than the fashion system as it exists today? This book discusses alternative practices from three angles:

1. Questioning the fashion system
2. Restoring human value and subjectivity
3. Reconfiguring the relationship between materials and humans

Each section introduces philosophical concepts while also presenting real designers and projects, accompanied by images.

1) Questioning the fashion system

In Part 1, Bruggeman critiques the hierarchical fashion system led by large corporations and brands, and introduces designers whose work actively interrogates that system. For example, designer Elisa van Joolen, in her project Invert Footwear, turns existing Nike and Converse shoes inside out to expose seams and traces of construction—posing a pointed question that forces us to look again at brand value and the processes of production.

© ArtEZ Press

Hanka van der Voet, meanwhile, as editor-in-chief of Press & Fold magazine, seeks to build an independent platform that moves away from advertising- and sales-driven fashion media, and instead cultivates discourse around how garments are made and the contexts they carry.

© ArtEZ Press

2) Restoring fashion’s human value and subjectivity

Part 2 focuses on practices in which the wearer (or user) becomes more than a consumer—becoming an agent who forms an active relationship with clothing. Making one’s own clothes, or repairing and darning them shifts fashion away from viewing the body as a “blank surface” for projecting visual images, and toward fashion as a living, embodied experience through which we sense the world and come to know ourselves. To articulate this, the book draws on a range of frameworks from philosophy to design theory, including Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment and Jonathan Chapman’s concept of emotionally durable design.

3) Reconfiguring the relationship between materials and humans

In the final part, Bruggeman turns to new materialist philosophy to emphasize the agency of matter and its interaction with human life. New materialism understands matter not as a passive object, but as something that acts—something with agency. This perspective provides a philosophical basis for shifting fashion from a mere “object of consumption” into a medium of interaction. We do not simply master materials; we live with them, and we are shaped by them.

For instance, the artist Diana Scherer creates template boards inscribed with geometric patterns, guiding plant growth so that the roots that develop within the structure can be used as a patterned textile. Here, “making a pattern” is not completed by human design alone. The force of growing roots, time, and environmental conditions all intervene—and depending on how matter participates in producing the outcome, the result itself changes.

Fashion needs to open up its transformative potential in order to re-engage with all the people and materials involved. Human relations, self-expression, social interaction, cultural values and subjective identity are at the heart of fashion – it is about how we live and interact with each other, and how we engage with the material resources of the earth.3

Toward a More Humane, Relational Fashion

This book approaches fashion not merely as a matter of style or consumer behavior, but as a field of deep social, cultural, and philosophical significance. At the same time, it does not remain at the level of concepts: it offers concrete examples of alternative and sustainable fashion practices that have gained visibility in the Netherlands over the past few years. Above all, Daniëlle Bruggeman expresses a hope that fashion will be understood not merely as an instrument of consumption, but as a medium of interaction—one grounded in human values and in the tangible reality of materiality.

The question that lingers is a personal one: when I believe I am “expressing myself,” is that practice truly enriching my selfhood—or is it, in the end, feeding the ego of the fashion system?

© Textum Club. Copyright in the original work—including the book’s text, images, and cover—remains with the publisher and the author (rightsholders). Unauthorized use is prohibited.