The word that leads to misconceptions here is "appears": it is interpreted as being the opposite of "real," but that is not correct.
A ball of cottong _appears_ soft; and it _really_ does appear soft. That is not an illusion or a delusion.
Within capitalism relations between persons cannot appear otherwise than relations between things because that is their _real_ appearance.
The screen on which you are reading these words appears to be a relationship between your money and it. You exchanged money for a monitor. It cannot conceivably appear otherwise. That is its real appearance. It really appears that way regardless of your thinking or feeling. No change of mind on your part; no different psychological state on your part, can change that real appearance.
But behind that real appearance there are literally millions of human relations: for example, the relation between you and the iron worker who mined the iron that went into the freighter that carried the food to the farmer who raised the cotton that clothed the worker who installed a chip in that screen. Commodity fetishism is a way to get a theoretical grip on that impossible complexity of social relationships created by capitalism. The phrase really should not be misused to explain the alleged foolishness of a young woman's taste in clothing. The $400 per unit that my insurance company paid for the 4 units of blood I received back in July illustrates commodity fetishism as much as and no more than the purchase of clothing by young Japanese girls. (The nature of the clothing and their motives have no more to do with commodity fetishism than do my preferences for being able rather than unable to breathe.)
Carrol