Brands want you to consume activism, not engage with it

If activism demands structural change, redistribution of power, and genuine solidarity, what does activism on a luxury T-shirt demand?

By Reda Merzoug

In luxury fashion, where products now mostly alternate between reverent nods to archival pieces and generic lifestyle merch, designers have begun playing second fiddle to brand mythology. Or perhaps more accurately, they have become as interchangeable as the products they once helped define – as evidenced by the revolving door of artistic directors.

Here lies the consequence of risk-averse conglomerates embracing the "cultural brand" model. A model that deliberately unburdens itself from a reliance on design as a core differentiator in favour of media dominance.

The rise of branded entertainment – LVMH’s 22 Montaigne (its in-house content division), Kering’s majority stake in Creative Artists Agency, Saint Laurent Productions, and institutional partnerships such as Louis Vuitton’s with the École du Louvre – marks a tactical turn in how fashion exerts influence. By internalising media production and sidelining external contributors, fashion brands insulate themselves within echo chambers where critique is defanged and dialogue gives way to sterile self-reference. What once functioned as an imperfect but vital conversation between the industry and independent observers is contracting into a monologue, a profound erosion of fashion’s historical role as a site of friction, negotiation, and change.

This isn’t just a shift in communication; it signals a deeper realignment of power and a strategy of cultural infiltration. Film festivals, restaurants, art fairs, museums, club nights, concerts, hotels – fashion’s pursuit of ubiquity borders on manic. So, inevitably, protests, too, have been clumsily appropriated – stripped of their disruptive potential and redeployed as a seasonal mood board by its noisier players. Curated, consumable, and hollow in its intentionality. Climate slogans, Pride merch, BLM statements – calendared gestures that soothe more than they stir.

Drawing on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle – where life is no longer lived but staged, then fed back to us as saleable fantasy – and Hannah Arendt’s warnings about performative politics and bureaucratised inaction, this piece does not aim to dismiss all political expression in fashion; rather, it asks whether genuine activism can emerge from an industry structured around capital accumulation, exposure, and planned obsolescence, or whether activism, too, has already been absorbed and rendered inert.