The Velvet Chain: Gucci, Dapper Dan, and the Illusion of Progress

 

A Marxist Analysis of the Gucci x Dapper Dan Collection

 

Gucci released a behind-the-scenes video of its Autumn/Winter campaign in partnership with legendary Harlem fashion designer Dapper Dan in 2018. The name of the video, "Gucci x Dapper Dan Made in Harlem A/W '18–'19 BTS for Numero Homme Magazine (Day 1 Part 1)," is itself a polished, high-sheen window into the creation of a fashion advertisement that was hailed as the fashion world's turning point an intersection of high end and street, institution and outsider, whiteness and Blackness, Europe and Harlem. Targeted by fashion press and devotees as well as cultural communities alike as an experiment in inclusion, the union told a tale of redemption: a formerly criminalized Black fashion designer embraced by the same fashion brand that had once attempted to silence him.

 

But considered in Marxist analysis, this union of Gucci and Dapper Dan tells a more nuanced, and far more unsettling, picture. Beneath the visual display is a process irrevocably entangled in the rationality of late capitalism one that commodities subversion, hides the labor of production, and re-performs the very inequality it seeks to transcend. Far from a radical act, the collaboration between Gucci and Dapper Dan is a textbook example of capitalism recuperating dissidence, commodifying culture, and asserting its hegemony.

Cultural Commodification and the Packaging of Resistance

Dapper Dan's fame was sealed in the flames of 1980s Harlem fashion. As luxury fashion brands excluded Black consumers and branded the duplication of logos as shameful, Dapper Dan famously copied designer logos specifically Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi and reworked them into these exquisite one-off garments for local celebrities, rappers, and street vendors. His 24/7 open shop was a light on Black ingenuity, strength, and creative resistance to an apparel culture that did not welcome Harlem.

But that subversive spirit the illegal use of trademarked safeguards, the transgressive re-mixing of luxury fashion codes was anathema to luxury houses. Suits were brought and raids were made. Dapper Dan's store was shut down. His business was relegated to the periphery, labeled as counterfeit or criminal.

Fast forward to 2017, when Gucci inserted a jacket in its runway collection that was almost identical to one of Dapper Dan's 1980s creations without so much as crediting him. The backfire was instant. In a turnaround for the ages, Gucci not only owned up to the homage but entered into an official partnership with Dapper Dan, granting him a Gucci-sponsored atelier in Harlem and co-designing several collections.

Marxist, this cooperation reflects the commodification of culture how cultural production, and especially that deriving from marginalized or oppositional communities, is decontextualized and re-packaged for sale. Dapper Dan's fashion, once an act of defiance, becomes a branded commodity, legitimated only when it passes through the machinery of global capitalism. Harlem style is extracted, sanitized, and retailed back to the very class that heretofore shunned it.

 

Alienated Labor and Ownership of the Means of Production

One of the core postulates of Marxism is the opposition of labor and the means of production. Workers, be they physical or mental, sell their labor for wages, but not ownership of the process of production or profit it generates. Capitalists the proprietors of the means of production appropriate surplus value from labor and re-invest it to maintain the system.

While the video portrays Dapper Dan as a creative genius, he does not own Gucci and is not controlling factories that produce and distribute the garment. Gucci belongs to the Kering Group, a multi-billion-dollar company that owns not only the factories and the label but even the narrative. Dapper Dan's atelier is Gucci-branded and capitalized. He is on salary, symbolically positioned above, but structurally still dependent upon the capital of fashion aristocracy.

Moreover, little of the actual work involved in producing the clothes is revealed in the video. The factory laborers, cloth producers, and seamstresses who toil under often precarious circumstances in the Global South are not visible. Their exploited labor, which enables the luxury, is out of view. Rather, what the audience is left with is the spectacle of photo shoots, styling, and creative direction a fetishized labor that eliminates the exploitative foundations of the fashion universe.

 

Ideology, Recuperation, and the Myth of Inclusion

One of the key roles of ideology, in Marxist theory at least, is to represent the interests of the dominant class as universal truths. In capitalist culture, this frequently expresses itself in accounts of individual achievement and redemption narratives that imply that problems of the system can be addressed through individual inclusion, not systemic reform.

The Gucci x Dapper Dan collaboration is bathed in this ideological function. The narrative is one of redemption and building: a business accused of theft makes amends by promoting the same designer it had once marginalized. But this happens as capitalist recuperation, a process through which opposition is de-politicized by being brought back into the system it opposes.

Rather than confront the underlying inequalities that prevented Dapper Dan from participating in high fashion decades earlier, Gucci offers symbolic inclusion. The gesture appears radical, but it leaves the structural hierarchy intact. Gucci maintains control over capital, production, and distribution. Dapper Dan’s creative work is now market-validated only through Gucci’s imprimatur.

The result is cleansed multiculturalism that provides the façade of diversity without addressing the reasons for economic inequality. It's not change it's spin.

 

The Spectacle and the Manufacture of False Consciousness

Behind-the-scenes footage is a classic example of what Marxist critic Guy Debord has referred to as the "society of the spectacle." It is not produced to reveal the operations of production, but to produce awe, desire, and illusion. Viewers are presented with fashion as dreamscape: elegantly charismatic models, famous Harlem landmarks, luxurious fabrics, moments of nostalgia and ambition.

In this spectacle, the consumer is not invited to think about who profits, who labors, or who are not included. Instead, they are invited to covet, to copy, and to buy. This is the function of false consciousness a condition of mind in which people misrecognize the source of their subordination and are enticed into participating in their own oppression.

Kids, particularly those in low-income or Black communities, can view the video and see a sign of progress: Dapper Dan "made it," so everyone else must be able too. This obliterates the structural realities that continue to deny most entry into these upper levels. The illusion of access substitutes for striving for fairness.

Conclusion

At first sight, the Gucci x Dapper Dan video appears as a hymn to culture, survivability, and to respecting one another. But upon closer examination through a Marxist eye, we have the fact that actually what we are looking at is a much more insidious thing: the appropriation of cultural resistance into the apparatuses of capital, the erasure of work, the production of inclusion without sharing.

This collaboration may have symbolic value, but its material function is clear it reinforces the hierarchy of global capitalism. It transforms Harlem’s defiance into Gucci’s asset. It offers the spectacle of progress while leaving exploitation intact.

Eventually, the video is not a revolutionary gesture. It is a lesson in capitalist pragmatism a harsh lesson in how institutions needn't suppress dissent if they are able to market it instead.