I revisited this after seeing the link for the audio interview. Long-form audio is inaccessible to me in this context, but I figured this is as good a time as any to crystallize my response to this line of argument, getting beyond my initial reaction last year of "what nonsense" and moving on.

Everything is political. "They shouldn't be so political - they should just [surface level of what they do]" almost always means "there is a political reality embedded here that I am uncomfortable with, and I do not wish to be made uncomfortable." It's telling that he's fine with "elegant" (ignorable) references, too. MLK Jr's "negative piece that is the absence of tension instead of the positive peace that is the presence of justice" all over.

It's especially shocking to support this view by saying they can't effect change so they should keep shtum. Fashion brands most certainly can effect change if they choose to do so. The fact that so many virtue signal without challenging themselves to follow through is an indictment of THEM, not of "being political." By all means, excoriate them for hypocrisy! Urge them to do better! But "ugh, you're not fixing anything, just stop pretending" is ... well, it's not a good look.

But he really tells on himself with "before cancel culture went into lunatic overdrive." The only thing that's going into "lunatic overdrive" is authoritarian forces lashing out at civil rights and diverse inclusion. Getting back to Ukraine: consider some of the culture war cries coming out of Russia, indeed that have been raised there since well before Rabkin's 2015 op-ed - "distasteful" barely scratches the surface. The last 7 years in the US have been bruising, but the table was being set for its most disgusting excesses - for decades - by the collaborative and synergistic work of dozens of organizations representing the most unpopular views in the country, from the smallest local abortion clinic harassment group to the Federalist Society.

There will always be pockets of slacktivists and purity testers, and it's frustrating that they provide talking points for disingenuous critiques of movements to improve societies. Corporate cooptation is gross, too. He is right, for example, that Lagerfeld's "feminism" diorama was fakery, but "Fashion is frivolous by nature" is nonsense, too. Fashion is not a single thing, to start with, but since the garment industry presides over so much abuse and unfairness, it really has to be held to account. Insisting on immunity from politics with that backdrop is far more "distasteful" than any dumb cooptation of a topical political concern.