To understand where fashion is going, you need to know where it has been

By Aniela Hoitink  ·  Founder, Fashion Innovator, Biomaterial Pioneer
Biomaterials
Circular Fashion
Personal Story
MYCOTEX

The pattern that keeps repeating

Every time I speak at a conference about automation in fashion about removing human labour from the manufacturing process, someone in the audience raises the jobs question. What happens to the people whose work is being replaced?

It is the right question. But it is also, I have come to believe, an ancient one. The debates the fashion industry is having today about automation, speed, globalisation, and sustainability are not new conversations. They are the same conversation that has been happening; with different technologies and different vocabularies, for the past three hundred years.

Understanding that history does not make the current moment less urgent. But it does help clarify which fights are worth having, what kinds of change actually stick, and what patterns tend to repeat regardless of the technology involved.

The consumer revolution nobody remembers

Most histories of fashion’s problems begin with fast fashion in the 1990s, or stretch back to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. But the shift that made all of this possible began earlier — in seventeenth-century England, with what historians call the consumer revolution.

Before this period, clothing was purchased primarily out of necessity. What changed was not wealth, exactly, but motivation: a growing middle class began buying things for status and self-expression rather than utility. Fashion – the idea that clothes should change seasonally, that last season’s perfectly functional garment was somehow no longer suitable – was not a natural human instinct. It was a commercial invention, deliberately cultivated by manufacturers and merchants who understood that desire could be manufactured as reliably as goods.

The potter Josiah Wedgwood is the most documented example: he engineered the adoption of his products by the aristocracy, knowing that the middle classes would follow. He created aspiration deliberately. The spread of fashion as social aspiration was not an accident of human nature. It was an early marketing strategy, and it worked so well that we have forgotten it was a strategy at all.

“Fashion – the idea that last season’s perfectly functional garment is no longer suitable – was not a natural human instinct. It was a commercial invention. We have simply forgotten that it was invented.”

The Luddites were not wrong; just about the wrong thing

When mechanised textile production arrived in the eighteenth century, skilled workers destroyed machines, attacked factories, and organised what became known as the Luddite movement. The British government responded by deploying troops, executing several men, and making machine-breaking a capital crime.

The Luddites are remembered today as a metaphor for irrational resistance to progress. That reading is unfair and ahistorical. The original Luddites were skilled craftspeople; weavers, lace workers, hosiery makers, facing the genuine destruction of their livelihoods and communities. They were not opposed to technology in principle. They were opposed to the use of technology to eliminate jobs without any corresponding support, transition, or alternative.

They were wrong about whether machines could be stopped. They were right about the human cost of unmanaged disruption.

When I hear concerns today about automation in fashion; about dark factories, about AI replacing garment workers, I hear the same legitimate anxiety underneath the same reasonable-sounding objections. Innovation will happen. It cannot be stopped and, in many cases, should not be. But the people whose work is displaced deserve more than a shrug and a reference to “different jobs emerging.” That promise has a poor historical track record of being delivered on time, at scale, and for the people most affected..

What industrialisation did to the value of cloth

The industrial revolution did not just change how clothes were made. It changed what clothes meant.

Before mechanisation, cloth was genuinely scarce and genuinely valued. In many cultures it functioned as currency. Specific fabrics and dyes were restricted by law to particular social classes — wearing the wrong colour was not a fashion faux pas, it was an offence. A well-made garment was an investment, repaired, remade, and passed between generations. The making of textiles was skilled work, recognised as such.

Historian Beverly Gordon describes textiles as uniquely powerful objects precisely because they combine qualities almost nothing else does: they are intimate (they touch the skin), labour-intensive (they carry visible evidence of time and skill), portable (they move across borders and generations), and symbolic (they encode identity, status, and belonging).

Mechanisation made cloth cheap, fast, and abundant. It severed the connection between maker, material, and wearer. When the process of making becomes invisible, when you have no knowledge of or relationship with the people and places that produced what you wear, the value of the object cannot survive. You cannot value what you do not understand.

We pay ten euros for a single artisan chocolate bar without hesitation. We debate paying the same for a T-shirt. The difference is not quality or effort: a well-made T-shirt requires more. The difference is visibility. We can taste the quality of chocolate. We can learn the story of the bean, the maker, the region. The story behind most garments has been deliberately made invisible by the supply chain that produces them.

Elizabeth Hawes in 1940 — and why she was right

In 1940, the American designer Elizabeth Hawes published a book called Fashion is Spinach. It is one of the most prescient critiques of the fashion system ever written — and almost nobody in sustainable fashion references it today.

Hawes distinguished sharply between style and fashion. Style, she argued, evolves naturally in response to genuine human need and taste. It reflects something real about a period and its people. Fashion, by contrast, is artificial: a construct created to serve the commercial needs of the industry. Meet payrolls. Sell magazine pages. Perpetuate a myth.

“Style gives the feeling of a certain period in history,” she wrote. “Fashion is a parasite on style. He is the horrid little man who tells you last winter’s coat may be in perfect condition but you cannot wear it because it has a belt.”

She made the case with a mundane example: men’s suspenders. Men universally preferred wide, elastic, comfortable suspenders with button fastenings. What the industry offered was narrow suspenders with metal grips that cut into shoulders and damaged fabric. The gap between what customers actually wanted and what the market provided was not accidental. A comfortable, durable product would last longer and generate fewer replacement purchases. The industry’s incentive was to offer something less good.

Eighty-five years later, this critique maps precisely onto the fast fashion model. And Hawes’ distinction between style and fashion – style as personal and long-term, fashion as seasonal and commercial – is one I find myself returning to constantly.

The automation jobs question; my honest answer

When I started MYCOTEX years ago, one of the most frequent concerns raised was about jobs. Automation takes jobs. New production methods displace garment workers. Who am I to build something that makes human labour in manufacturing less necessary?

My honest answer is this: innovation will happen. The dark factories are being built with or without my involvement. The question is not whether automation comes to fashion, it is whether the new systems it enables are better or worse for the people and planet downstream.

A production system that is local, on-demand, and zero-overproduction creates different jobs than a globalised, bulk-manufacturing system; but it creates jobs. Closer to home. With more accountability. In facilities that can actually be visited and verified rather than ones three layers of subcontracting away from anyone with authority to insist on standards.

I am not naive about this. The transition is real and the human cost of disruption is real. But the answer is not to preserve a system that already exploits people in order to protect those people from a different system. The answer is to build the new system with their interests, not just commercial efficiency, as a design requirement.

What history tells us — and what it does not

Three patterns emerge consistently from the history of fashion and textiles.

First: the pace of change is driven by commercial pressure, not consumer preference. The system shapes behaviour more than behaviour shapes the system. Consumers adapt to what is affordable and accessible. Change the system, and behaviour follows.

Second: resistance to technological disruption tends to lose, but the concerns behind it are often legitimate. The Luddites were right about the human cost. They were wrong about the solution.

Third: the severance of the connection between maker, material, and consumer is not inevitable. It is a design choice. The industrial system chose invisibility, and paid for it in lost value, lost accountability, and lost trust. A different system can choose differently.

We lost the value of clothing. Here is what I think we do about it.

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