Zygmunt Bauman and the unbearable lightness of fashion

Abstract

The works of Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) are necessary and worthwhile to include in the fashion studies canon. Though Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity’ is regularly cited by scholars in critical fashion studies, his broader works have yet to be explicated in the same way as other giants of thought such as Bourdieu and Barthes. I posit that Bauman has more to offer than a passing mention; his accessible writings provide a clear-eyed assessment of the perils of being human today, providing fashion studies scholars a critical lens through which fashion as commodity and concept can be assessed in our contemporary context. This explication offers an appraisal and reframing of Bauman through application in the scholarly domains of fashion systems analysis, fashion and identity studies and sustainable fashion discourses. I engage Bauman’s key contemporary works to broaden the limited reading of him in the field. I argue Bauman’s work and fashion studies have a potentially mutually beneficial relationship, each challenging and enhancing the other when engaged in the exploration of everyday life in the twenty-first century.