In any area of design analysis, to overlook the economic, should be impossible. The battle Modern art fought with bourgeois complacency was simultaneous with the rise of consumer capitalism where every stylistic twitch was symbolic fodder for a new, different and often Modern codification of taste. Capitalism, of course, holds no special place for Modern values. Modern values simply serve to brand the image of one product or class of publication over the folksy or traditional image that another product might demand. Style is market driven.
Style has no intrinsic worth apart from the image it ascribes to a product.
So the white space presented in the abstract, asymmetrical qualities of a quality fashion layout is there simply to reinforce the market qualities of the fashion garment worn by the model who has also been chosen and photographed to amplify these same ends. In terms of graphic design, white space has been appropriated along with the Modern aesthetic, to represent the most expensive and desirable class of products being presented by modern consumerism. The history of the Modern movement in fine art is usually couched in these heroic terms. Design and architecture are couched in similar rhetoric, not helped by those manifesto-writing Futurists, Dadaists, and Bauhausists who describe the struggle to find the essence through function and truth to the material of construction, as the artists' greatest modern role. So the bourgeois aesthetic sought to hide the presentation of wealth behind a diversion of interest into areas supposedly outside the economic and the necessary, and so elevated the arts and presentation of self through them, to become the principle cultural values.