To paraphrase cultural critic Mark Fisher, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Theory of Style, but this is my last piece of couture-al marxism for Spike. Where do we go from here?

In our post-hauntological age, it’s always time to ask, what is the future of fashion? Because fashion, of all the art forms that are currently being aggressively defunded across the global minority world, has a future. And this is precisely because it’s the form most comfortably embedded in the capitalism whose endlessness Fisher lamented, but it also offers continuous and inbuilt resistance – as style demands the kind of personal expression that necessarily cannot conform entirely to what’s sold to us. Fashion might be uniquely populated by stylish people but it also exists to sell, often in bulk. As such it has to be reproducible and loses something of style in the process. Fashion provides the material détourned by style that, in turn, it recuperates: as capitalist cycles go, at least we get to look good.

The global withdrawal of state arts funding, led by Donald Trump’s bid to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts, leaves artists under increasing pressure to find an (often visual) personal brand. “Are you a mid-career artist? Are you wondering if now is the time to start/dressing like a fucking idiot?” asks Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams.

Bedwyr Williams, “Are you a mid-career artist?” posted on Instagram on May 28, 2025

If the visual persona of the artist has become central to their works, then, how should an artist dress? This is one of several questions asked by the exhibition “The Art of Dressing. Dressing Like an Artist” at the Musée du Louvre-Lens in France (26 March – 21 July 2025), which showcases the Louvre Museum’s collection of artists’ clothes including Salvador Dalí’s 1936 The Aphrodisiac Jacket (always at the juncture of art, fashion and commerce, Dalí included the jacket in his window display for the Bonwit Teller department store in New York).

The show comprises clothes the artists have worn for work, or liked to think they might, clothes as art, art as clothes, and artworks about clothes. These are often, as the show’s curator and director of the museum Annabelle Ténèze told me, works artists made about each other, designing for or styling each other: clothes as the literal material of political solidarities and queer non-biological kinship bringing bodies together in projects of self- and communal body-modding (sometime literally as in Nicola L.’s 11-person 1969 The Red Coat, displayed via video at the exhibition).

Reframing the body, where it can go and what it can do, remains the ground zero of style, from Urbanomic thinker Maya B. Kronic’s cute/janky bodies to designer Monique Fei’s inflatable body-extensions. “Production of yourself as a cute body,” writes Kronic, “involves the adaptation of your body to certain relations of proportion, curvature, expression, that tweak and amplify the cute response and make you feel cute (even if you might delete them later).” Cute, like fashion, has consumption inbuilt (see this year’s craze for Labubu bag charms – or, for those who can’t afford them, Lafufu dupes), but what Kronic calls cute accelerationism détournes cute from commerce by accelerating the process. Exposing humans to unprecedented levels of cuteness, it activates (unlike the many forms of accelerationism that lead us to the abyss) a hyperstitious relation of care.

Labubu x Coca Cola charm retails at €104

Care remains the most difficult work to automate. A presently undervalued range of care jobs, from childcare to hospitality, require a complicated combination of affective and technical skills. With the AI takeover of so many jobs, including the creative professions that had seemed humanity’s last bastion, what artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles in 1969 called “maintainance work” may soon be one of the few professions available. As care work becomes higher status, so will its clothes.

Unpaid care work, from child to elder care, to emotional labor and – yes – the labor of style, is the unacknowledged engine of capitalism. But when properly remunerated, it loses some of its ability to escape any monetized system, along with something of its capacity to offer an alternative. Similarly, the artists at the Louvre-Lens exhibition constantly played with clothes that demanded either that art be recognized and paid as labor, or that it remain outside work, beyond recuperation by capital.

Artists’ precarious position between work and leisure, labor and decadence, is one of the reasons that they have no stable professional “uniform.” In the ages of mechanical and digital reproduction, the position of “artist” seems half retro artisan, half bearer of the possibility of a utopian future. Which is why so many have worn either workwear, or its opposite, clothes labelled impractical, decadent, “unwearable.”

It’s also a key ingredient in fashion. If Kronic’s jankspace is not only a location but a “vague feeling that we’re not really wanted” by technology, then “faulty” human bodies are, similarly, the vehicles of fashion’s libidinal economy. They drive demand, even as the system rejects so many of them as “unfashionable.” But they are also the point at which capitalized fashion can be subverted.

While fallible human bodies are the grit in fashion’s oyster, they also produce the pearl: style. Style is always janky because, though fashion can be manufactured, style remains contingent. Style, which, in the 20th century, could never be mass-produced, no matter how fashion manufacturers tried to keep up, can now never be AI. It is an essentially human form of communication, a push-pull of exhibition and appreciation in which every participant is also an audience (the one aesthetic role AI can’t replicate). Just as AI can’t meme – though the question of whether it can make “art” remains – AI can’t have style.

Salvador Dalí wearing The Aphrodisiac Jacket, 1936

If the body always (in time) becomes jankily unfashionable, the practice of jankstyle might be (to quote philosopher Donna Haraway) a form of “staying with the trouble.” This can be as easy as inserting our janky bodies into whatever we like and declaring it style, something that sounds simple but, as anyone who’s ever tried to develop a personal style knows, there’s more to finding “what we like” than meets the eye.

Finding what we like is all about encountering what we don’t like: the limited sartorial options available, our janky bodies, the imperfect lives we dress for. Style is about making and making do. Style is a secondary, queer practice, all about imitating, appropriating, détourning. It is both a critical practice – working with what’s to hand without being subsumed by it – and necessarily collaborative, communicative, communal. These are skills we need and will continue to need. And we can learn them by getting dressed.

Stay with the trouble. Stay stylish.