bers take part in the service as if they mattered and as if their social conditions
mattered too. This is a bending of the established lines, empowering believers
through community and shared practice. This is tuning the system, but keeping the
power on.
We must keep this in mind when applying the line of practice from liberation the-
ology onto fashion. We do not want to drop out or split from fashion, instead we
want to keep as close to fashion as possible, but still address crucial social questions
and question the relations of power within the belief system. To better frame this
we should have a short look at the actors and power plays in the fashion cathedrals.
As we move on we should try to see what it means to create empowering base com-
munities for fashion.
fashion heresy
A fashion heresy is not something that happens when one fashionista makes his or
her own fashion statement, or revolts against the latest trend. This type of per-
sonal reaction is part of the system. A heresy has to be an organized community
effort, even if rhizomatic in its form, as with the widely distributed medieval Move-
ment of the Free Spirit. Today a fashion heresy could be inspired by the theology of
liberation and it would primarily oppose the stratified model of the fashion sys-
tem, form base communities where believers are encouraged to interpret and make
own forms of “worship”, based on praxis.
So in what way can liberation theology inspire us to engage with fashion differ-
ently? Can we even compare the scenarios?
To begin with, we can see immediate connections between the cathedral of Ca-
tholicism and that of fashion. The hierarchical organization of fashion is very sim-
ilar to the Catholic Church. The Pope interprets the official version of the faith in
relation to the central questions of its time that is something similar to fashion’s
delegation process to star fashion designers who interpret the zeitgeist. A heretic
fashion would deal with the power relations in this delegation process and attempt
to bypass the priests to assign power to the hands of the laymen, giving the right to
access both exegesis and ritual. This would frame a structural reorganization and a
renewed right for interpretation at the street level.
When I compare a fashion designer acts as a “pope”, I often think of Karl Lagerfeld
as one of these classic fashion authorities, at least within the Paris-centred fashion
system. Even if there is no official pope of the fashion system, he is as close as it gets.
At least he is the pope of his own cathedral-like organized brand. He is a true in-
carnation, an avatar, of the fashion logic. His comments are as if he is fashion him-
self, at least he is the incarnation of the spirited Chanel brand, since Coco Chanel
herself is dead. Every word he says is an echo of that spirit. In interviews he says he
is never happy about himself, but constantly has to remake himself. He can only
look forward, and never more than six months, and history is nonexistent. And he
is only happy in Dior (Lagerfeld 2004). Together with his appearance and hyperac-
tive design practice he becomes a seamless representation of fashion itself; glam-
our, glossy surface, perpetual status anxiety, mixed with the promise of eternal
life.
For a stereotype image of the classic Paris-centred hierarchical fashion system La-
gerfeld can be regarded as the Pope, or at least one of many, if each brand has its