“Who made my clothes?” How transparency apps bring politics to cultural fields

Abstract

As the climate crisis accelerates, consumers, lawmakers, and activists demand transparent supply chains in industries that form the material backbone of cultural fields such as fashion. Consequently, new apps have emerged that promise to make supply chains transparent by translating opaque production data into easily comprehensible product ratings. Integrating the literature on transparency, cultural intermediaries, and digital consumption apps, this article asks: how do these apps, which I call transparency apps, afford politics in cultural fields and new political ways of consumption? Using fashion as a strategic case of a cultural field with strong material underpinnings, this paper combines a walkthrough analysis of Good On You, Retraced, and Renoon with interviews of employees of the first two. I found these apps to afford a politics of transparency consist of eco-progressive values embedded in ideologies of consumer rights and self-optimization, which elevates the technical-material logic of fashion at the cost of its aesthetic logic. This politics is usually offered in a personalized form resembling platformized cultural production. Transparency apps are thus politicizing cultural intermediaries that simultaneously enable and limit the political contestation of fashion. This article demonstrates how transparency apps bring politics to cultural fields, upsetting usual logics in the process, carrying implications for any cultural field that faces demands for supply chain transparency.