Fashion is often dismissed as surface — colour, fabric, taste. Something cultural, creative, or even indulgent. Yet this misunderstanding has cost governments, especially in emerging economies, one of the most powerful and inclusive economic engines available to them.
Fashion is not soft.
It is structural.
At its core, fashion is an industrial system: it converts raw materials into value, labour into income, identity into exports, and culture into economic power. The fact that it is worn on bodies rather than stacked in warehouses has al
