There is a question I keep returning to every time I walk through a neighborhood that is changing, and I mean really changing, not just getting a new coat of paint. The question is not who owns the buildings. It is who owns the look.
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. What Zukin identified decades ago is now unfolding at an accelerated pace, and fashion has become one of the most precise instruments for reading it. Not high fashion. Everyday dress. The language of the street.
This essay expands on an argument I first developed for Bénieller, where I explored the relationship between fashion and urban transformation from a brand perspective. Here I return to that same question from a more personal and academic register.
The City as a Dress Code
Culture, Zukin argued, operates as a mechanism of legitimization. It renders certain territories desirable for a new urban elite, displacing previous practices and reorganizing the social life of the neighborhood. This is not just a matter of aesthetics, it is a matter of who belongs and who does not. And few things signal belonging as efficiently as what you wear.
Over the past decade, the mass arrival of digital nomads has intensified these transformations in ways that earlier theories of gentrification did not fully anticipate. Research on cities like Delhi documents how the presence of international remote workers alters housing markets, raises rental prices, and reshapes commercial landscapes, generating visible tensions between long-term residents and global consumers. The study does not focus explicitly on fashion, but it describes a profound transformation in consumption habits and public life that inevitably reaches the body.
Digital nomadism has evolved from a marginal phenomenon into a global movement, driven by digital technologies, accommodation platforms, and the expansion of remote work. As Bozzi (2024) notes, digital nomads generate new urban demands, coworking spaces, coliving facilities, specialty cafés, that contribute to gentrification by increasing costs and reconfiguring commercial offerings. These transformations frequently arrive with double-digit rent increases in neighborhoods where tourism, international mobility, and short-term rentals converge. The neighborhood changes. And the dress code changes with it.
Bodies as Territory
Within this context, fashion emerges as a language that translates territorial transformation into something visible, wearable, and socially legible. New residents tend to adopt dress codes associated with global middle-class lifestyles: functional garments, technical materials, design-driven basics, accessories linked to remote work and cultural consumption. These codes are not imposed by force. They do not need to be. They become dominant simply by accumulating presence, inscribed on enough bodies, in enough coffee shops, on enough streets, until they begin to define what the neighborhood looks like.
Fashion, in this sense, does more than reflect urban change. It participates in constructing an imaginary that legitimizes certain ways of living over others. The body becomes a territory. And territories, as we know, can be claimed.
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 are often adopted by locals, particularly younger generations seeking to integrate into global circuits. In gentrified neighborhoods across 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. Often out of aspiration, social pressure, or the need to avoid appearing out of place in spaces that have been transformed around them.
Fashion becomes, in this dynamic, a strategy of symbolic mobility. A way of aligning oneself with a cosmopolitan imaginary that promises opportunity, visibility, and status. The promise is real enough to be compelling. The cost is rarely calculated upfront.
The Erasure That Happens Quietly
When a neighborhood embraces a globalized aesthetic, local styles do not disappear overnight. They lose visibility, prestige, and eventually legitimacy within the new symbolic order. The Delhi study documents the replacement of traditional businesses with establishments oriented toward global consumers, an aesthetic standardization of space that inevitably influences how residents dress and represent themselves in it. 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 process, can be reduced to a vestige. Or transformed into decorative merchandise for tourist consumption.
I think about what this means for cities like Medellín, where the gentrification of neighborhoods like El Poblado and Laureles has been extensively documented. The barrio paisa aesthetic, its textures, its colors, its specific relationship between the body and tropical climate, is being replaced block by block by the uniform visual grammar of the global creative class. Not because anyone decided to erase it. Because no one decided to protect it.
This is how visual hegemony operates: not through prohibition, but through the slow accumulation of alternatives that seem more desirable.
Resistance and Its Limits
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. These responses are real, and they matter. But they operate with fewer resources and less visibility than the dominant aesthetic associated with international mobility and creative-economy consumption.
Fashion, then, occupies an ambivalent position in this story. 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 pressure. The same garment can do both things simultaneously, depending on who is wearing it and what they are choosing not to wear.
The Question the Mirror Asks
The question that remains, and one I cannot resolve neatly, is how to narrate, dress, and inhabit the city without contributing to the erasure of those who made it possible.
I write this as someone who moves between cultures, who has built a brand that sells garments to people who travel, who works at the intersection of design and creative economies. I am not outside this dynamic. None of us who benefit from global mobility are. The uncomfortable position of the cosmopolitan who also values local cultures is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is a tension to be held, consciously.
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 is being decided.
Fashion, in this light, is an uncomfortable mirror. It reveals not only who we are, but also whom we are leaving behind.
References
Zukin, S. (1987). Gentrification: Culture and capital in the urban core. Annual Review of Sociology, 13, 129–147.
Bozzi, N. (2024). Digital nomadism from the perspective of places and mobilities: A literature review. ResearchGate.
Research on gentrification and digital nomads in Delhi (2025). ResearchGate.
JSTOR Daily. Global gentrification and its effects on vulnerable communities including Roma populations in Eastern Europe.