As significant mass-produced items of ‘conspicuous consumption’ for the masses in capitalist society, it is appropriate that a discussion of clothing and textiles as ‘fashion’ follows a discussion of consumption. In applying the Frankfurt School to these cultural texts, the chapter highlights how fashion can be critically understood as an excellent example of ‘commodity fetishism’, designed by the cultural industry explicitly to drive surplus value and create false needs. Utilising historical and contemporary examples, it is shown how fashion has become both essential to the continuance of global capital as well as symbolic of the system’s exploitation of people and material resources. These ideas, however, will be tempered by an acknowledgement of subcultural arguments for audience engagement with fashion and style as forms of negotiation, through which readings of the text can be subverted and re-appropriated as statements of resistance written on the body and confirmed through collective identities. The remainder of the chapter broadens this discussion to consider the potential consequences of high street fashion consumption in neoliberal society as a celebration of the self-governing individual and a symbol of cultural capital (or, on the contrary, as a reinforcement of the social class divide, as epitomised by ‘high-end’ fashion brands).