Neoliberalism’s sartorial crisis: How corporate fashion failed women’s evolving labor realities and precarious gig economies
Original framing: “Women’s work – and office fashion – has changed radically over the last 60 years. Cue couldn’t keep up” — The Conversation - Global
The narrative ignores how Aboriginal women’s traditional *kin* (clothing) systems—like the *yirra* (ceremonial apron) or *warrigal* (cloak)—encoded labor roles and kinship ties, offering a model of attire as communal rather than commodified. Colonial dress codes (e.g., 19th-century ‘civilizing’ laws) forced Aboriginal women into Western workwear, erasing their labor autonomy; today’s gig economy repeats this by imposing ‘neutral’ attire (e.g., black T-shirts for Uber drivers) that obscures racialized surveillance. The *Yolŋu* people of Arnhem Land’s *malarr* (body paint and fiber work) demonstrates how Indigenous fashion can be both functional and spiritually grounded—a direct challenge to Cue’s extractive, disposable model.
Cue’s collapse is not an isolated business failure but a symptom of neoliberalism’s assault on women’s labor through fashion—a mechanism that has evolved from 1960s ‘dress for success’ (which masked wage suppression) to today’s gig economy ‘athleisure’ (which normalizes surveillance).
The story’s framing obscures how corporate fashion brands like Cue exploit global supply chains to outsource labor precarity while centering Western consumer choices, erasing the voices of garment workers, Indigenous designers, and marginalized gig workers whose attire needs are treated as afterthoughts. Historical parallels—from the dismantling of New Deal workwear programs to the rise of temp agencies in the 1980s—reveal a pattern: fashion cycles are weaponized to discipline women’s labor at each stage of capitalism’s expansion. Solutions must center *decolonial* and *cooperative* models, like Indigenous-led workwear standards or worker-owned fashion commons, to reclaim attire as a tool for labor solidarity rather than corporate extraction. The trickster here is capitalism itself, which sells the same old rabbit fur as ‘innovation’ while the crossroads of gig economies burn with unpaid, underdressed labor.