And even if that step you suggest, to actually analyze not only the structure, but the practice of consumption, is taken, the importance of the consumer experience is relegated to critiquing it, framing the consumer as dope, or fetishizing counter-cultures over the mainstream.

I think the limits of critical theory become quite clear even in the way you try to formulate the question of how critical theory would address the dilemma of the dress. It kind of makes my point, because even with your careful consideration, the question basically subsumes the practices of consumption under the relations of production. What I tried to address in this post is that the analysis of consumption should not be predetermined through this lens, because something significant gets lost in it. What that is, is worth exploring further.

Critical theory suggests that it is better to be conscious of this mediation than unconscious of it, and that there is an unavoidable political dimension to the mediative properties of culture vis-a-vis social life and practice, meaning-making, production, etc. that has implications for the political and historical dimensions of a society or social group more broadly—one, again, that imperils those populations that ignore it in various ways.

My sense, in other words, is less that critical theory might yell, “Stop this nonsense with the dress! It’s so bogus!” and more that critical theory might ask, “What does this dress mean for you? Can we elaborate it and come to consciousness of it so that this choice and dress/dress-maker serve you and your well-being and ends, in all their complexity, rather than vice-versa?”