Fashion and Gentrification: The New Visual Hegemony of Transforming Neighborhoods
Gentrification has been described by Sharon Zukin as a process in which capital, global middle classes, and cultural industries reconfigure historically working‑class neighborhoods, transforming not only their economic structures but also their symbolic identities. In her foundational analysis, Zukin argues that culture—including everyday aesthetics—operates as a mechanism of legitimization that renders certain territories desirable for a new urban elite, displacing previous practices and reorganizing the social life of the neighborhood. This perspective helps explain why fashion becomes a privileged indicator of the shifts that accompany contemporary gentrification.
Over the past decade, the mass arrival of digital nomads has intensified these transformations. A study on Delhi documents how the presence of international remote workers alters the housing market, raises rental prices, and reshapes the commercial landscape, generating tensions between long‑term residents and global consumers. Although the study does not focus explicitly on fashion, it does describe a profound transformation in consumption habits and public life, suggesting that local aesthetic codes are also affected. The literature agrees that, following the pandemic, the number of people working remotely and moving between cities has grown to several million, prompting governments to create special visas and cities to develop new infrastructures tailored to this mobile segment.
A recent review of digital nomadism notes that this lifestyle has evolved from a marginal phenomenon into a global movement, driven by digital technologies, accommodation platforms, and the expansion of remote work. Bozzi (2024) highlights that digital nomads generate new urban demands—coworking spaces, coliving facilities, specialty cafés—that can contribute to gentrification by increasing costs and reconfiguring commercial offerings. These transformations are often accompanied by double‑digit rent increases in neighborhoods where tourism, international mobility, and short‑term rentals converge, according to various contemporary urban studies.
Within this context, fashion emerges as a language that translates these territorial transformations. New residents tend to adopt dress codes associated with global middle‑class lifestyles: functional garments, technical materials, design‑driven basics, and accessories linked to remote work and cultural consumption. These codes are not imposed explicitly, yet they become dominant within the urban landscape and act as markers of belonging in neighborhoods where international mobility and symbolic capital are visibly inscribed on the body. Fashion, therefore, does more than reflect urban change: it participates in constructing an imaginary that legitimizes certain ways of living over others.
The key question is how local residents respond to this aesthetic hegemony. Research on global mobility suggests that digital nomads introduce new values, habits, and aesthetics that may be adopted by locals, particularly younger generations seeking to integrate into global circuits. In gentrified neighborhoods in Lisbon, Mexico City, Medellín, Bangkok, or Barcelona, a recurring pattern emerges: young locals begin adopting aesthetic codes associated with newcomers—not necessarily out of admiration, but out of aspiration, social pressure, or the need to avoid appearing “out of place” in transformed spaces. Fashion thus becomes a strategy of symbolic mobility: a way of aligning oneself with a cosmopolitan imaginary that promises opportunity, visibility, and status.
Yet this adoption is not without consequences. When a neighborhood embraces a globalized aesthetic, local styles may lose visibility, prestige, or even legitimacy within the new symbolic order. The Delhi study documents the replacement of traditional businesses with establishments oriented toward global consumers, implying an aesthetic standardization of the space that inevitably influences how residents dress and represent themselves. In Eastern Europe, research on gentrification shows how the arrival of mobile workers displaces not only vulnerable communities—such as the Roma population in Cluj‑Napoca, but also their cultural practices. Local fashion, in this sense, can be relegated to the background, reduced to a vestige or transformed into decorative merchandise for tourist consumption.
Despite this, resistance persists. In many neighborhoods, local collectives respond by reclaiming their own aesthetics, reviving artisanal practices, or creating alternative micro‑scenes that challenge global homogenization. However, these forms of resistance often have fewer resources and less visibility than the dominant aesthetic associated with digital nomads. Fashion, then, occupies an ambivalent position: it is symptom, archive, and at times, resistance. It can homogenize urban landscapes by reproducing global codes, but it can also document, preserve, and reinterpret local aesthetics threatened by real‑estate pressures.
The question that remains—and that this article invites readers to consider—is how to narrate, dress, and inhabit the city without contributing to the erasure of those who made it possible. In a world where mobility, consumption, and aesthetics are so tightly intertwined, fashion becomes an uncomfortable mirror: it reveals not only who we are, but also whom we leave behind. Gentrification does not merely transform territory; it transforms the bodies that inhabit it, the gestures that traverse it, and the aesthetics that narrate it. And it is precisely on that surface—the skin, the clothing, the gaze—where one of the most silent and decisive symbolic struggles of our time unfolds.
