Theoretically. The shift from the rah-rah political messaging of a few years ago to simple proclamations of womanhood also signals a larger change occurring within the microcosm of feminist fashion, as well as beyond it: The tilt from a politics of visibility toward an economy of visibility.

Visibility has always played a critical role in feminist movements. Pride marches grew out of a need for a public presence for L.G.B.T.Q. identities. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework made visible the unique discrimination black women experience to account for their lack of representation in workplace policies, laws and social movements. The success of #MeToo was in large part thanks to the newly public nature of what was once private sexual harassment. “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable,” Audre Lorde wrote, “is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

This is what Prof. Sarah Banet-Weiser calls a politics of visibility: the act of highlighting identity categories like gender and race to accomplish political recognition and, hopefully, structural change.

An economy of visibility, on the other hand, decouples this practice from its political end goals. Instead, visibility becomes valuable in its own right because of its monetizable potential. It’s at play in the near constant messaging to “invest in girls,” as if they were commodities. It underpins gender-equality-is-smart-economics activism. And it manufactures T-shirts that equate being a woman with being a feminist.

This isn’t to say, necessarily, that what we had in 2015 was “good” and that today’s shirts are “bad” for feminist goals. Arguably, any statement T-shirt is involved in an economy of visibility; all those “Future is Female” shirts — even the ethically produced ones — were almost certainly negligible in their political impact. Indeed, gender scholars have argued convincingly that capitalist feminism is hardly feminism at all.