The Fashion of Global Warming: Between counterculture and trend, discursive translations in post-consumerism

Abstract

The article reflects on the translation mechanisms operated by fashion and the transformation of countercultural discourses and practices into their mainstream versions. By exploring the recent boom of products, advertisements, and lifestyles utilising the communication of sustainability as a strategy, the work utilises Landowski’s socio-semiotic theory to analyse the absorption of post-consumerism by commodity capitalism, understanding the process of commodification as a transformation in the regimes governing interactions between subjects. Supporting the discussion with literature debating the countercultural critique—in politics, economics, and fashion—and the contemporary commentary about post-consumerism and the environmental crisis, the work concludes that fashion operates a narrative simplification of countercultural discourses, transforming its regime of risk and sense production, causing a transition from intricate webs of relations between subjects to a set of values that can be exchanged.