A Dialectical Journey Through Fashion And Philosophy 9811508135, 9789811508141, 9811508143, 9789811508141

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xx
Fashion and Philosophy: An Overview (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 1-24
What Immanuel Kant Would Say About Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit of the Self by Way of Fashion (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 25-38
Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 39-49
In Search of Unintentional Truth (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 51-66
Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung), and Fashion (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 67-77
Formal Changes in Fashion and Hegelian Dialectic (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 79-92
Dialectic of Fashion History in Modern Times (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 93-125
Fashion as a Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy Via the Consumption of Fashion (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 127-141
The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion in View of the Philosophy of History (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 143-153
Fashion History in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of History (Eun Jung Kang)....Pages 155-173
Back Matter ....Pages 175-180

Citation preview

Eun Jung Kang

A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy

A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy

Eun Jung Kang

A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy

Eun Jung Kang Department of Fashion Design Sungkyunkwan University Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

ISBN 978-981-15-0813-4    ISBN 978-981-15-0814-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

Topics related to fashion have long been considered part of a somatic-sartorial domain whose main concerns are confined primarily to the body and bodily matters. Much literature on the politics behind appearance and bodily issues that are tied to fashion attests to this connection. Given this strong tendency, overcoming the inclination in academic circles not to accept fashion as a subject matter of philosophical discussion would seem to be a formidable task. Nonetheless, fashion is profoundly intertwined with distinctively modern issues that belong to the realm of the mind as well as to that of the body. Probably no other modern concepts or phenomena are comparable to fashion in terms of the manifestation of the proximity between philosophy and the mode of life in modern times. A proper philosophical probe into fashion should reveal that philosophy is interlaced with issues related not only to the mind but also to the body, and fashion hypostasizes the relation between individual and collective that has its origin in the subject-object dichotomy, which is one of the central themes of modern philosophy. Coming to grips with fashion helps us take in some of the most enigmatic philosophical questions, for example, how noumenon and thing-in-itself are different; how synthetic a priori cognition is possible in our mundane life; how one is unceasingly searching for oneself in [Kantian] time; how freedom and unfreedom have reciprocal relations with each other; and how [Hegelian] objectification is different from [Marxist] alienation. It is not a coincidence that fashion, one of the most mundane objects/concepts in everyday life, can be examined with philosophical underpinnings of such thinkers as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Georg Simmel, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, for it is one cardinal momentum of modernity as a source of newness as well as a medium of the pursuit of newness while, dialectically speaking, an outcome of modernity. Fashion does not pertain to all philosophical topics related to the new, because it is specific to the time called modernity. As such, philosophical investigations into fashion that involve such modern concepts as change, newness, and individual freedom in relation to collective freedom can disclose the ontological affinity between fashion and modernity.

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This book is neither a coherent philosophy of fashion armed with a grand sweep of ideas in respect of fashion nor a prime example of a philosophical approach to fashion studies in one direction only, as its main focus is on the process of elucidating philosophy as well as philosophizing fashion, which, however, are not disparate endeavors in this interdisciplinary undertaking. The aim of this project is to provide one way to analyze fashion through philosophical discourse while at the same time suggesting one way to do philosophization by applying systematic philosophical analysis back to the objective world. Clarifying fashion through philosophical discussion makes philosophy easier to comprehend; explicating philosophy through fashion brings fashion into the light as a distinctively modern phenomenon that is critical for grasping the trajectory of modernity. By investigating the essence of fashion through philosophical scrutiny, the nexus between fashion and modernity becomes easier to identify, and fashion can gain recognition as an area of critical inquiry. The philosophization of fashion carried out in this book has several significances: (1) it gives us a clearer understanding of fashion’s close connection to the development of modernity; (2) it opens doors for redeeming fashion from the objective, bodily world and positioning it as an indispensable part of the humanities; and (3) it is a direct application of philosophical discourse and concepts to fashion, demonstrating how metaphysics is of practical use in understanding the human mind and how it is embedded in empirical reality. Hence, the questions raised and postulates proposed in this book while in search of the attributes of fashion should assist philosophers in resolving philosophical quandaries; in turn, my philosophical methodology and inquiries should help fashion scholars comprehend the essential qualities of fashion as a concept and as a phenomenon that are intertwined with the development of modernity. Seoul, Republic of Korea  Eun Jung Kang

Acknowledgments

This monograph is a revised and expanded version of my dissertation, “Fashion: The Sine Qua Non of Modernity,” at Cornell University in August of 2012. I am indebted to Susan Buck-Morss, who served as a member of my dissertation committee, for her support, without which I would not have been able to graduate with a Ph.D. degree at Cornell. Cornell University supported me during the years of research and writing, which helped to shape mere ideas into a dissertation. The Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell University funded my doctoral program with a generous fellowship and grants. I would like to thank Alexandra Campbell and Ameena Jaafar at Springer Nature for their tireless efforts to bring this project to life. I would also like to thank Richard Harris, Gary Rector, Neil Armstrong, and Laura Glenn for all their help. In addition, I would like to extend my appreciation to the reviewers for their comments.

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My fascination with philosophy began when I found out that philosophy is the best tool to make a logical analysis about the underlying structure of fashion, especially in the manner that is in consonance with what is generally viewed as analytic philosophy today. However, I soon realized that the exploration of fashion by drawing on philosophy requires answering a range of questions that is more in line with continental philosophy as well. My very first quandary about fashion as part of this philosophical undertaking was a methodological question as to how to dissect fashion into a concept and a phenomenon, as the essence of fashion is something that is communicated in our mind, while fashion is also something tangible or concrete, something that exists as an object or a phenomenon. I searched for a scientific method by means of which to separate these two disparate predicates of fashion theoretically. Indeed, this was the very starting point of this book. The rest of this book is shaped while answering a series of ensuing questions after my initial search for a methodological instrument. It is Immanuel Kant’s schematism that not only availed me in moving on with a theoretical framework to divorce the conceptual and the phenomenal of fashion but also supplied an impetus for me to carry out further philosophical investigations into fashion; Kant’s notion of a priori sensible intuitions of time and space aided me in breaking down the mechanism of the concept of newness, which is indispensable to the construction of fashion as a concept and a phenomenon. Nonetheless, with Kant’s metaphysics, in which figurative and intellectual transcendental syntheses are intertwined with different aspects of the Kantian dualism between understanding and sensibility, and between categories and intuitions, I was not able to construe the workings of universal consciousness, which is evident in fashion phenomena. Due to the peculiar nature of fashion, which entails the relay between such polar opposites as subject and object, individual and collective, union and separation, and particular and universal, fashion cannot be bound in connection only with the mental activities that are confined to the thinking/perceiving subject. In Kant’s transcendental idealism, objects in time and space exist merely through self-consciousness, and even the empirical self remains as object, while the transcendental subject is the principle of the unity of apperception of the manifold. The transcendental subject is the combining act of judgment of ­knowledge ix

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or consciousness of the subject, not the subject itself, illustrating the Kantian chasm between noumenon and thing-in-itself. With his transcendental philosophy, I could not move beyond the absolute dichotomy between the subject and object of knowledge and between thought and being as represented in the transcendental subject and the empirical being. Although not a solipsist, Kant is not regarded as someone who furthered the Cartesian framework of subjectivity, as his transcendental subject is a mere unifying act of intuitions and concepts. The discernment of the ontic fundamentals of fashion at the level of desire requires a theory that accounts for the communicability of knowledge beyond the selfhood. Accordingly, I had to remove myself from the Kantian epistemic idiosyncrasy, the duality in which appearances as such and the unity of apperception merely exist. The due course was to dive into G.W.F. Hegel. By resorting to Hegel, in particular to his concepts of mediation (Vermittlung) and recognition (Anerkennung), I formulated theoretical underpinnings not only about the tacit communication between the individual and the collective that is intrinsic to fashion phenomena, bridging the rift between subject and object, but also about the mode of dialectical development of fashion history. His philosophy is often denounced as abstract speculation about the experience of consciousness. Karl Marx argues that in Hegel’s philosophy, abstract thought and objects of thought, or sensuous reality, are estranged; therefore, objects of thought appear as thought-entities, and the Hegelian history is nothing but a history of abstract and absolute thought (Marx 2000, pp.  104–118). However, with fashion, one can apprehend how the subject-object mediations in the realm of consciousness are dialectically related to the concrete and material expressions of the objective world. Examining fashion through the lens of the Hegelian dialectic can help us comprehend that seeking out the self is not just confined to self-consciousness but also connected to the subject-object/individual-­ collective mediations beyond the bounds of self-consciousness. With this understanding, one can also grasp how Hegel’s concept of the experience of consciousness, which is in operation by virtue of dialectical mediation, is enlaced with social and political life, and the consequence of the dialectical mediations between subject and object is a history of humanity. It is to this purport that a philosophical study of fashion history—by resting on Hegel’s dialectic—is proposed. Applying Hegel’s philosophy of history to fashion history is an intellectual exercise. This experimentation, insofar as it is to be regarded as a valid hypothesis for a Hegelian project, requires proving the close relationship between the spirit and fashion history, as Hegel puts it: “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” (Hegel 1975, p. 62). Hence, when proceeding with this task, it is vital for one to shed light on how the development of the fashion history has to do with the objectification of spirit, identifying the relationship between objective reality and subjective reason, which is crucial to Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegel offers a kind of schematic form (or pattern) of dialectical movement according to which history unfolds itself over time. On the basis of his “rational” logic, fashion history over the course of modern times is analyzed. Even so, I suspected that Hegel’s system cannot explain the cause of sublation (aufhebung) that is specific to modern times. One cardinal premise about the dialectical development put forward by Hegel

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is that sublation is logical and necessary. With his notion of necessity, Hegel accounts for the agent of sublation, but his encyclopedic philosophy does not guide us to identify, in terms of content as opposed to form, what it is that prompted the dialectical transformation during modern times, the timeframe with which fashion is closely associated, or the determining factor which is decisively different from that of other time periods. So I moved on to Marx, in an attempt to investigate if there is any necessity at a materialist level, other than a logical necessity, for the dialectical progression in fashion history. In point of fact, the focus of Marx’s dialectical materialism is on production and the mode of production. In Marx’s materialist view, products simply stand for use values, while the commodity is a concept that is entrenched with capitalist social relations between products and between producers, and the value of a commodity derives essentially from the sum of direct and indirect labor. However, the cardinal attributes of fashion this book is concerned with consist not in the value of either products or commodities, which is contingent on economic exchange, but the import of the mediations between such antithetical poles as individual and collective, union and separation, and particular and universal. And yet, Marx’s philosophical approach to reality, which was imbued with Ludwig Feuerbach’s sensuous materialism, led me to pay attention to objects per se and scrutinize the relation between the objective world and the Hegelian mode of dialectical progression in fashion history, in particular, from the seventeenth century onwards. Although I set out to step away from Hegel’s idealist dialectic at some point of my investigation, I have come to the conclusion that the Hegelian mode of dialectical movement in history is not incompatible to what I consider as a modified and inclusive materialist view on products or cultural artifacts, as well as to Marx’s own. In fact, Hegelian idealism and Marxist materialism are not necessarily contradictory or irrelevant to each other, at least during modern times, when viewed from the vantage point of fashion. To illustrate, contributing to the progression of capitalist economies while being a driving force behind the Industrial Revolution, the mode of production, such as the Watt steam engine for transportation, the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, and even slaves for cotton production—all of which served as a means to meet the demand of textiles and textile goods during the eighteenth century and, in particular, the nineteenth century—bespeaks the increasing power of fashion in a materialist sense. Not only the production side of sartorial fashion items but also fashion itself began to exercise its influence on the dialectical development of history during this time, not just restricted to that of fashion history. It is in the name of fashion that some of the most profound patriarchal ideologies that have strong bearing upon the politics of gender and sexuality, such as the norms of conventional feminine appearance, have been challenged or replaced. Thus, it can be said that from a materialist perspective, it is a victory of the material reality over ideology; however, from an ideologist viewpoint, it is still a manifestation of the superiority of the zeitgeist. It is of great significance to have an understanding that the Hegelian dialectical mediation between subject and object is embedded in fashion phenomena, such that the prevalence of fashion in capitalist societies means nothing other than the evidence that the objective world is inseparable from the Hegelian dialectical development of

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history, which starts from the subject-object dialectic in our thought process. Put differently, the spread of fashion is one clear proof that manifests the magnitude of various mediations between pairs of antagonistic forces, such as individual and collective, imitation and differentiation, and particular and universal, that are active in modern times, which have their point of departure in the subject-object dichotomy in our thought process. Although Marx’s materialist perspective drew my attention to fashion as part of the objective world, with Marx I was not able to grasp what entails the graphic (re) presentation of fashion as it is, except the role as a succor of capitalist social relations, while sustaining the material conditions of the capitalist system. Fashion that is reckoned as auxiliary to the development of capitalist social relations and economic bases is none other than a commodity that is sold and bought on the market. However, it has to be highlighted that what defines fashion is not the exchange value or social relations between products and between producers that a commodity carries with it, but the mediations between various pairs of polar opposites, such as the individual and the collective. The fact that fashion phenomena are found to be in effect in many areas of social life, such as academia, exercise trends, and cooking styles—not just limited to wardrobe choices—actually provides us with an inkling as to how ill-founded the misconception about the hallmark of fashion is. It has to be pointed out that not all consumer goods convey the principal trait of fashion, although some fashions can be linked with consumer goods, and the essence of fashion does not belong to the objects that are called fashion in the vernacular but originates from the mediated reality a fashion partakes in as an objectified spirit of the times. My dissatisfaction with the view that fashion is deemed as a mere commodity, which embodies social relations of capitalism or upholds the material conditions of the capitalist social order, led me to look for a theory by which to identify the implications of fashion as an objective reality as it is, without being tainted with any impartiality. It is Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image that helps pose fashion as something quite different from the commodity, which is considered to be responsible for deteriorating men’s consciousness owing to the reification created by commodity relations, according to Georg Lukács (1971, p. 86). With the concept of the dialectical image, Benjamin suggests that fashion exposes an unintentional truth while disclosing “the time of truth.” His theory about mundane objects, including fashion (i.e., sartorial fashions), assists us in coming to grips with his notion of nowtime (Jetztzeit), while discerning the connection between collective awakening and the “now of its recognizability.” The graphic exposition projected through fashion as a dialectical image is the (re)presentation of the objectified spirit of the time, which is the dialectical result of the mediation between the individual and the collective, accommodating no intentio of any privileged individuals. In order to inquire into Benjamin’s philosophy, I explored Plato and Aristotle’s different epistemological positions concerning how to reach truth claims. As one important keynote of this book, I have also discussed the concept of freedom. Not only is it a central theme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to which, world history is the “progress of the consciousness of freedom” (Hegel 2001, p. 33), but it is also a cogitative breakthrough with which one can cognize

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oneself, not as that which appears to oneself, but as the “thing-in-itself” of the self, as per Kant. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Kant states that while one cannot cognize oneself through inner experience, cognition of the self can be made through the consciousness of one’s freedom (2006, p.  32). For Kant, cognition of the self in time is a mere representation of the form of the relation between the subject and the sensations in the subject. The perceiving/observing being, which plays as the empirical apperception of sensibility, is not the subject but an object (Ibid., 31). Thus, in the flow of time, the I cognizes my unity of apperception, through which, however, the I perceives the me as it appears to myself, not as the me in myself. By grappling with Kant’s distinction between the thinking being and the perceiving being, one can decipher that it is the rudimentary gulf in human beings’ cognitive faculty that brings about insurmountable complexities involved in the struggle for subjectivity. To put it another way, Kant’s metaphysical explanation about the irreducible cognitive structures clarifies why the modern subject’s search for subjectivity cannot be fruitful. Kant’s elucidation about the difference between thinking and perceiving also helps us penetrate why the criticism on fashion—fashion is a vacuous, relentless, and meaningless repetition, detrimental to reaching a “genuine” self-consciousness of self—is not totally groundless, as consciousness of the self and consciousness of the movement of time or the temporal rhythm of the lineal progression of time are related at the level of inner experience only. According to the Kantian line of thought, the attempt by the modern subject to find his or her subjectivity through the latest fashion is nothing but looking for the “thing-in-itself” of the self in vain over time, which is the form of inner sense. The nexus between fashion and newness, which is a time-based concept, unveils that self-cognition of the self via fashion is a mere empirical knowledge of the unity of the self. However, Theodor W. Adorno’s explication about the antinomy between freedom and unfreedom aids us in advancing from the Kantian perspective and recognizing the role fashion plays in the progressive development of consciousness of freedom, although Adorno himself is opposed to the Hegelian notion of the unfolding of history toward freedom. Adorno’s illumination on freedom, in particular regarding the dialectical relation between an impulse and reason or rational thought, which is a critique of Kantian rational freedom, lays the bedrock of discourse on the function fashion serves with reference to both freedom and unfreedom. Adorno has elucidated that freedom is an antinomian concept. This is, we feel free and autonomous when our actions are triggered not only by reason but also by an impulse, and freedom does not exist without unfreedom, since individual freedom is not always congruent with collective freedom, all pointing to the fact that there is no universal, absolute freedom. With this theoretical anchorage, we can conclude that the task of fashion in modern times is to be an intermediary between the antinomies of modernity, such as the individual and the collective, freedom and unfreedom, and reason and impulse. In many moments of the oscillation between reason and impulse in everyday life, the modern subject makes a conscious or unconscious endeavor to find his or her subjectivity through fashion, not just in the form of clothing but also in many and varied types of social phenomena, while communicating with the collective. In and through this process, one realizes that the I exists in relation to others and eventually

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learns how to compromise one’s freedom for the sake of freedom of others in a manner, which is different from that dictated by the demands of categorical imperative in Kant’s moral philosophy, in which free choice is determined by pure reason. Adorno remarks, “In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’” (Minima Moralia #29) (Adorno 2005, p. 50), uncovering his pessimistic view on everyday experiences in late industrial society during World War II. Counter to this elitist argument, I have laid out the framework of theoretical reasoning that accounts for positive aspects of fashion as a domain in which the individual finds his or her subjectivity during many occasions of the day, beyond the vestimentary sphere of eclecticism, in the name of fashion. Some cultural products that are manufactured by means of a large-scale industrial operation, inasmuch as they are sought after as fashion, can take on the essential quality of fashion, that is, the dialectical mediation between the polar opposites—individual and society. In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944) Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who coined the term “the culture industry,” contend that individuality that is proffered and promoted in mass culture is fictitious (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, p. 125). For them, both the standardized mode of production of the culture industry and standardization of cultural commodities are responsible not just for providing capitalist societies with commercial and economic bases of capitalism but also for creating the condition in which genuine individuation cannot be attained while hampering the dialectical exchange between individual and society. According to them, in the cultural industry, imitation is not just optional but absolute (Ibid., 103); consumers compulsively imitate what they see in advertisements even though they know that what they imitate is false (Ibid., p. 136). Adorno also writes: “In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness” (Adorno 1991, p. 104). However, when it comes to fashion, Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument does not carry any weight. One notable example of consumers’ resistance against the power of the industry is the midi-skirt in the early 1970s. Following John Fairchild’s advice, who was the publisher and editor-in-chief of Women’s Wear Daily—the most influential trade publication in fashion at the time in the USA— buyers, designers, manufacturers, and retailers in the fashion industry all promoted the midi-skirt (Davis 1992, 12n, 126n; Reilly 2014, p.  122). Yet, in spite of the consorted effort made by the industry and powerful influencers, consumers did not adopt the midi-skirt; they even petitioned the industry to restock the store shelves with mini-skirts (Ibid.). Indeed, there was a time when entire economies were production-­oriented (Raju and Prabhakara 2008, pp. 1–3). In the early days of commerce, producers controlled the market under the production concept; before the 1950s, businesses centered on efficient modes of production. Although it is impossible to deny that consumers today are influenced by manufacturers, buyers, and/or fashion editors, for example, by way of promotional strategies and activities, there is plenty of evidence that demonstrates the interactive mediations between ­individual

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consumers and the industry are real in the business world. Successful retailers and manufacturers do not just push consumers to purchase their products; rather, they are eager to find what consumers want by making use of an array of such methods as interviews, surveys, questionnaires, or data analysis. The fashion industry works closely with trend forecasting agencies or fashion forecasters whose job is to predict what would be the next trend or fashion based on their research on the needs and wants of their target market. Push and pull marketing strategies reflect how keen the industry is to harness the interactive communication between the consumer and the industry in business practice. Notwithstanding, it is naïve to argue that there is a free-flowing harmony between individuals and society during late industrial capitalism. As Jon Elster points out, “[C]apitalism is an unjust system because some get more and others less than they have contributed” (Elster 1986, p.  95). However, Adorno and Horkheimer’s contention that mass culture or the culture industry as a whole represents the schemata of the capitalist industry while depleting the dialectical movement between individual and society is an overstatement. Numerous changes that have been made or followed in the name of the latest fashion indicate the fact that the dialectical mediation between the individual and the collective is at work in fashion. Yet, it is erroneous to maintain that the vast range of commodities as a whole exhibits the dialectical exchange between the individual and the collective. In fact, not all cultural products that are popular among people are to be considered “fashion.” A case in point is cultural products that become widespread due mainly to the rationale based on some morality or “ought to,” as they belong not to the realm of fashion but to that of social mores. The process of adoption and diffusion of fashion does not simply rest on passive imitation or conformity, as followers of Adorno and Horkheimer would argue. Fashion is not just about imitation or conformity but about imitation or conformity that is dialectically at play along with differentiation or demarcation. In fact, more to the point is the mediation that springs from the polar oppositions. This feature, which is integral to the constitution of fashion, is the underlying motor of fashion some scholars fail to consider in their assessment of fashion. Different sets of antithetical countertendencies found in fashion were already spelled out by Georg Simmel in his seminal article “Fashion,” whose delineation of fashion offers profound insights into what makes fashion significant, both philosophically and politically. Throughout the whole process of my investigation into fashion for this book, Georg Simmel has been a huge inspiration as well as a reference point based upon which to argue for and against current discourses on fashion. By linking with or comparing with other philosophers, I have delved into and brought around the two quintessential characteristics of fashion—change and the mediation or reciprocity that derives from the pairs of counterforces, especially one from the polarity between individual and collective, as this polarity is that which encompasses all the antagonistic tendencies that are found in fashion. Hence, it is my view that this book is an extension of the Simmelian critique of fashion in terms of the defining characteristics of fashion. Precisely because of these traits of fashion, that is, fashion as a medium that embodies the dialectical relation between the individual and the collective and as a conceptual construct that is coupled with the concept of change, the

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timeline with which fashion is considered to have been in effect starts from modernity. It is for the same reason that the terms “the fashion system” and “the prefashion system” that I used in this book do not refer to object-based sartorial fashion systems; rather, they represent arbitrary frames of reference by which judgments about the nature of antithetical opposites found in fashion history are made. Nevertheless, it is misleading to assume that sartorial fashion has little or no significance in our search for the implications of the mediation that is paramount for the constitution of fashion phenomena as such, in that fashion history demonstrates how the spirit realizes itself in reality and how the objective world is dialectically related to the actualization of freedom. After having completed all the questions I had with regard to the foregoing philosophers and their propositions, I discovered that what I had done is basically a philosophical investigation into fashion in light of German philosophy. Yet, from the very beginning, I didn’t intend to write a book about fashion grounded on all or some strands of thought that are subsumed under a particular school or sect of philosophy. Thus, this book does not claim to have systematically probed fashion under any branch of philosophy, although I have discussed German philosophers almost exclusively. My objective in the very beginning stage of this project was to logically analyze what fashion is and demonstrate how the remits of fashion are closely entwined with the topics that are important in the history of philosophy. Only in hindsight did I realize that fashion is deeply interlaced with topics discussed by continental philosophers, in particular with reference to such themes as the self, self-consciousness, desire, freedom, time, temporality, and the politics of gender and sexuality. I think that this thematic commonality is not a pure coincidence, but it only uncloaks that fashion is distinctively modern in its provenance. This is not to assert that fashion has little or nothing to do with postmodern times or post-­ postmodern times. The relationship between fashion and postmodernity and post-­ postmodernity is an important subject matter to examine in detail, which, however, is not the scope of this book. But in my forthcoming book chapter in Fashion, Dress, and Post-postmodernism (eds. Andrew Reilly and José Blanco F., Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), some of my thoughts about the connection between fashion and the time after modernity are to be delivered, with the focus on Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and Gilles Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity. Philosophy has not only served as a means by which to make a logical and conceptual analysis but also functioned as an important source of inspiration for researchers from other academic disciplines. I believe that with a more inclusive frame of mind to everyday topics and a nonpartisan attitude toward scholars outside the normative world of philosophy, philosophy can progress fruitfully as well. I have had many intellectual epiphanies whenever I discover that the philosophization of fashion allows the leap in grasping the wisdom from past philosophers and realize that some of the vexing philosophical enigmas of the past become more accessible, while also linking philosophers’ insights to important aspects of fashion. One example is Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic that a dialectical approach should start from the object that is mediated. It is in this context that this book approaches philosophical discourse from the perspective of fashion.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. Culture Industry Reconsidered. In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, edited and introduced by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London/ New York: Verso. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elster, Jon. 1986. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. The Philosophy of History, with Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Kant, Immanuel. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press. Marx, Karl. 2000. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raju, M.S., and R.J.V. Prabhakara. 2008. Fundamentals of Marketing. New Delhi: Excel Books. Reilly, Andrew. 2014. Key Concepts for the Fashion Industry. London: Bloomsbury.

Contents

1 Fashion and Philosophy: An Overview��������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Why Does Fashion Matter to Philosophy? ��������������������������������������    1 1.2 Why Should Philosophy Matter to Fashion?������������������������������������    9 1.3 On the Defining Characteristics of Fashion��������������������������������������   14 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 2 What Immanuel Kant Would Say About Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit of the Self by Way of Fashion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   38 3 Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique��������������������������������������   39 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   49 4 In Search of Unintentional Truth ����������������������������������������������������������   51 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 5 Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung), and Fashion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 6 Formal Changes in Fashion and Hegelian Dialectic ����������������������������   79 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   92 7 Dialectic of Fashion History in Modern Times��������������������������������������   93 7.1 The Genesis of Fashion and Its Etymology��������������������������������������   97 7.2 Introduction Regarding the Division Between the Prefashion System and the Fashion System��������������������������������  102 7.3 The Prefashion System ��������������������������������������������������������������������  106 7.4 The Fashion System��������������������������������������������������������������������������  116 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  123

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8 Fashion as a Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy Via the Consumption of Fashion��������������������������������������������  127 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  140 9 The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion in View of the Philosophy of History������������������������������������������������������  143 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  152 10 Fashion History in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of History������������������  155 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  171 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  175

Chapter 1

Fashion and Philosophy: An Overview

1.1  Why Does Fashion Matter to Philosophy? “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1951, p. 527). In similar vein to this metaphysical inquiry, this book seeks through the philosophization of fashion to answer the question, “Why is there something new rather than nothing new?” The distinction between concept and phenomena, i.e., between newness and new fashions of different kinds, can be pronounced through philosophical discourse, illuminating the epistemological meaning of fashion as both a concept and a phenomenon. This in turn will help us grasp certain attributes of modernity in the context of philosophy. The metaphysical question as to the genesis of something new, which is inseparable from the eternal return of the same that is in operation, is closely entwined with the period called modernity,1 during which fashion played a significant role. Metaphysics is often criticized for its detachment from the real world. However, by investigating fashion through metaphysical concepts and principles, certain esoteric aspects of metaphysics can be broken down, assisting us in finding some fruitful links between the most abstruse branch of philosophy and our objective world. Through this interdisciplinary journey, one should be able to see the salient connections between the thought processes presented in philosophy and the modes of life experienced in the course of modern times. Indeed, metaphysics represents a major point of departure in this unusual project. It is Immanuel Kant’s schematism that renders the theoretical basis upon which fashion is anatomized as an a priori concept of the understanding and as a phenomenal a posteriori appearance. The term fashion as used in common parlance is, in point of fact, a mode or style with countless examples that are often confined within the bounds of the body. On the other hand, the pursuit of something new in the form of fashion, originating as it does in the mind, requires synthetic a priori 1  See A.  K. M.  Adam, Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects (Macon: Mercer University, 1995), 13–25.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 E. J. Kang, A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_1

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cognition. Kant offers clarifications about our intuitions of time and space, with which the metaphysical attributes of fashion become easy to identify. With recourse to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, the pursuance of something new, the conceptual side of fashion, can be reckoned not only as part of the metaphysical domain arrived at by a synthetic a priori judgment, but also as an incessant attempt to seek one’s subjectivity. Whereas an analysis of fashion through Kant’s metaphysics guides us to tell the difference between the ontological and epistemological dimensions of fashion as well as that between fashion as a concept and fashion as a phenomenon, G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic provides a theoretical platform from which fashion can be viewed as a hypostatization of the union of a priori and a posteriori experience. Theodor W.  Adorno describes Hegelian philosophy as “a philosophy of experience,” which is in line with Fichte’s claim that philosophy must not be isolated from a posteriori facts and that a priori knowledge must coincide with our empirical experience (Adorno 2017, p. 75). As per Adorno, Hegelian dialectic is dialectic in its highest stage of development as a means of philosophical reflection (Ibid., p. 1 and 5), and its principal feature is that “how we think” and “the matter itself” that is in question go through the process of becoming, which Adorno calls the “programme of ‘the movement of the concept’” (Ibid., p. 9). This movement is perpetual in its default mode, since any being established by this movement, even the true, is to be sublated [aufgehoben]. What matters while in this interminable process of mediation is, therefore, “what happens with our concepts when we think” (Ibid.). In order to apprehend the cardinal point of this process, Adorno resolutely maintains, “the fundamental experience here must be approached from the side of the matter itself, from the theory of the object rather than the theory of the subject, from the thing which inspired the dialectic itself, from the experience of the fundamentally dynamic character of the matter” (Ibid.). Here comes another significant rationale for the philosophization of fashion, that is as one which can revitalize Hegelian dialectic’s seeking to make an endless mediation through sublation, between thought and the object of thought, and between how we think and what we think. To be more precise, the philosophization of fashion offers a concrete example that shows the pith of Hegelian dialectic not merely as a deductive structure that presents the principle of thought in connection with the object of thought, according to which our life experience is subjected, but also as a logic that comes from the matter it strives to comprehend. Indeed, with the philosophization of fashion, one can be appraised of Adorno’s advice that it is from the perspective of the matter itself that the key function of contradiction in the dialectic is deciphered, since while unfolding the matter that is under investigation, the thought that is involved in the dialectical thought process is separated as something that is “not identical with itself.” (Ibid., p. 81). If one applies this to the philosophization of fashion, then, from the perspective of fashion as an object of dialectical thought, thought can be recognized as that which is disparate from the matter itself—fashion in this case, such that “a philosophical understanding of what is not itself ‘subject’” (Ibid., p. 6) can be achieved. In other words, once the conceptualization of the matter (fashion) that is generated by the subject is identified, the subject is now transposed as the object of thought,

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just as “consciousness, in examining itself, also comes to experience itself as a kind of object” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as Adorno points out (Ibid., p. 76). A careful investigation into subject-object relations presented in Hegelian dialectical thought helps us see the link between fashion and the development of knowledge of human culture, as well as between fashion and the search for the concept of truth in philosophy. The subjective–objective dichotomy in philosophy is related not only to inquiries about being qua being, but also to epistemological questions as to human experience. Against this basic proposition or principle in philosophy, sociologist Norbert Elias, for example, argues that the ontological abyss between subject and object is an obstacle which prevents further development of the theory of knowledge and of sciences (1982, pp. 23–24).2 Elias’s critique about the polarity between subject and object is due to the first principles in metaphysics and transcendental philosophy, which are considered to be self-evident and innately given to us (Ibid., p. 8). Philosophy is often reprehended for its method, which entails probing what it is a priori without reference to experience. Adorno would repudiate this charge as not fully grounded and call it a mere “misunderstanding” deploring how philosophy gives a rational endorsement to the entire world by availing itself of the means of reason (Adorno 2017, p.  43). In his article “Why Still Philosophy?” (Adorno [1963] 2005b) he acknowledges that philosophy has lost its literal and figurative connections with the skills required to master one’s life; it is no longer esteemed as a means of educating oneself, nor is it an indubitable system of argumentative account without external assistance (Ibid., pp.  5–7). Accordingly, he holds that any philosophy that would claim itself to be a total system is to be imputed to a delusion (Ibid., p. 7). Notwithstanding, he states that if philosophy gives up the claim to totality and the development of a concept of the whole that represents a truth, then it goes against its entire tradition (Ibid.). He therefore advises that philosophy must shun the assertion that it carries the absolute value of its knowledge, but at the same time, that philosophy must not renounce the search for the concept of truth in return for anything (Ibid.).3

 Refer to the following remark by Norbert Elias.

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There are always subjectivists and objectivists or those who try to intermediary positions and compromises. … There is no end to it, nothing can ever reconcile the polar views and solve the problems arising from the fictitious assumption of an existential gulf between human beings and the world they set out to discover and to control—the world of which they themselves form part. … Nothing new, no advances in the theory of knowledge and of sciences are possible as long as the assumption of an ontological gulf between “subject” and “object”, explicitly or not, remains the basis of these theories. 3  Adorno states: After everything, the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command; indeed philosophy must forbid the thought of it in order not to betray that thought, and at the same time it must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth. This contradiction is philosophy’s element. It defines philosophy as negative.

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Now we have come to a critical point in which we can finally discuss how fashion is connected to the aim of philosophy in our time, the exploration of the emphatic concept of truth, as enunciated by Adorno. Although Adorno praises Hegel as first to grasp the “temporal nucleus of truth” (Ibid., p. 15) and claims it to be his own idea, Walter Benjamin is, in fact, credited with coming up with a concrete concept of a temporal crux of truth.4 Benjamin maintains that truth is tied to “a nucleus of time lying hidden with the knower and the known alike”5 (Benjamin 1999, p. 463, [N3, 2]), and a truth appears in the representation of phenomena (Benjamin 1977, p. 34). As such, he proposes that representation be the real methodology of philosophical investigation (Ibid., p. 29). Going further, with his concept of the dialectical image, Benjamin explicates his notion of unintentional truth and provides a justification of how to look upon fashion as a medium of “flashing” truth. In light of Walter Benjamin’s reading of Plato, the point at which fashion becomes a dialectical image coincides with the redemption of fashion from the phenomenal world, since that which dialectical images impart is nothing but truth. Fashion in the form of a dialectical image is redeemed from the site of phenomena because it, while still a phenomenon itself, visually discloses truth which originally resides in the sphere of Plato’s Forms or Ideas, which is a Platonic redemption—the salvation of phenomena and the representation of Ideas at once. Benjamin’s theory of experience (Erfahrung), which is impossible to sever from his epistemology, tells us that experience, the unified and continuous manifold of knowledge as opposed to knowledge (Erkenntnis) of experience, is tantamount to truth—“unintentional” truth that is communicable among people. In “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (1918) (Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie), Benjamin suggests making amends to the Kantian concept of knowledge, as it is directly linked to the rectification of the concept of experience (Erfahrung) as well (Benjamin 1996,

4  Refer to editor’s note 4 in Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. ed. Rolf Tiedemann. trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 287–288.

The concept of the nucleus of time that Adorno constantly claims for his own is one which he does indeed owe to Benjamin. Benjamin’s use of it can be found in one of the notes for the [sic] Arcades Project: … Also see editor’s note 18 in Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 260. In his Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie Adorno makes it clear that he owes this crucial idea of a temporal ‘core’ or ‘nucleus’ of truth to the work of Walter Benjamin (GS 5, p. 141; Against Epistemology, p. 135). 5  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. R. Tiedemann (ed.) & H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), [N3, 2], p. 463. Resolute refusal of the concept of “timeless truth” is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not—as Marxism would have it—a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden with the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea. [N3,2]

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p.  102). He avers that the immediate and natural concept of experience and the ­concept of experience in the context of knowledge are different; in other words, truth and knowledge that is arrived at by a process of scientific deduction are to be differentiated. In fact, grappling with Benjamin’s theory of experience requires an understanding of the epistemological distinction between apodictic and dialectic put forth by Aristotle as well as Plato, and of the reason as to why Benjamin questions the Kantian concept of knowledge.6 Repudiating the Kantian unity of transcendental consciousness of all empirical content, both Hegel and Benjamin make pursuit of a universal science, in which no absolute subjectivity can claim its permanent supremacy. Just as significant as the fact that the Hegelian dialectical thought process reexamines and reestablishes the validity of knowledge, including subject-object relations, is that Hegelian dialectic also combines identity with nonidentity so as to form a single whole. Via the philosophization of fashion, one can, from the side of the object of thought, decode the “dialectical equivocation” diagnosed by Adorno. The Hegelian dialectical thought process is designed to ceaselessly expose the oppositions between subject and object and between thought and the object of thought, which makes the Hegelian dialectic a dialectic of negation, and at the same time to posit these oppositions as one and the same, thereby postulating thought and being as identical (Adorno 2017, pp. 5–7). To put this another way, fashion can substantiate a paramount rationale for dialectical mediation, not only in self-consciousness but also in the individual’s social relations, since fashion represents a mechanism whereby the search for the self is not limited to self-consciousness but can be augmented to encompass the relation between the individual and the collective. From the perspective of fashion “which inspired the dialectic itself,” as Adorno would put it, one can identify the dialectical power of the whole, which is nothing but the search for the unity of subject and object, a fact that makes dialectic a highest level of form of philosophy (Ibid., p. 5). In fact, fashion is among the most peculiar examples that can illuminate modern aesthetic experience, which cannot be divorced from subject-object relations that extend to individual-social dynamics. Fashion is not only a spirit of the times, but also a concrete embodiment of modern social relations in connection with the aesthetic taste of the times. Georg Simmel’s sociological aesthetics, which is consonant with Hegel’s dialectic, helps us figure out how subject-object relations are operative in and through fashion and further puzzle out how fashion hypostatizes the dialectical relations between the mind and the body as well as the tacit communication between the individual and the collective. From the experience of the dynamic character of fashion, which has close ties with subject-object relations, one can also discern the common grounds between Hegel’s universal consciousness and Benjamin’s collective consciousness.7 Benjamin’s theory of experience

 For further discussion on this topic, see Chap. 4. “In Search of Unintentional Truth.”  For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 5. “Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung), and Fashion.” 6 7

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(Erfahrung) brings to light how collective consciousness is in play in modern times, backing up the Hegelian conception of universal consciousness. Human beings exchange intelligible information through social interaction. What we are talking about is not a supernatural power nor the kind of message that is transmitted by using any of our known channels. Fashion helps us grapple with this human capacity in us, the relay between the individual and the collective that has its origin in the subject-object dichotomy, thereby affirming Hegel’s explication of universal consciousness. In addition, with the concept of the dialectical image by Benjamin, fashion comes to be seen as among the unequivocal manifestations of the tacit communication between the “I” and others that has to do with unintentional truth for us to “see.” Another thing I would like to add to the reasons for the inclusion of the topic of fashion in philosophical discourse is concerned with a revision of the concept of freedom. A philosophical observation of fashion, especially via dialectic, can help us rework the Kantian notion of freedom, which is grounded on human rationality, and see how closely fashion is related to the development of freedom in modern societies. The traditional definition of freedom in philosophy is that freedom, free behavior, is equivalent to one’s determination to action in conjunction with reason, as postulated by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. However, Adorno’s elucidation of reflexive and spontaneous impulse as the unreasonable territory of freedom helps us to come to grips with the complex attributes of freedom from the perspective of dialectic. The main point of his argument is that our impulse is as decisive as rationality, our rational cognition or judgment, in triggering our actions; more importantly, through the process in which our impulse is involved we feel autonomous. In other words, and as for Adorno, we feel free and autonomous when our desire to be ourselves is satisfied, which has its origin in bodily impulse, along with various narcissistic or egoistic motivations, and our feeling of being autonomous is as of equal import as the autonomous exercise of reason when it comes to our true consciousness of freedom. Fashion, which is regarded as a crucial manifestation of the self in our time while simultaneously being deemed frivolous, capricious, and incompatible to rationality, can account for how everyday decisions or behaviors are related to the feeling that our actions seem to be identical with the self as subject. In contrast with the sphere of the Kantian categorical imperative, fashion is a domain in which impulse, or whimsical, unpredictable, and arbitrary eclecticism, is as appreciated as rational logic, or in many cases, even more welcomed, because fashion-­related matters are considered to be of personal, subjective, and somatic significance. Besides, fashion provides an empirical model for revealing the mechanism of freedom and lack of freedom. The fact that individual freedom writ large is not necessarily in accord with the freedom of all humanity ushers us into fashion’s role as an intermediary, while coordinating the disparate interests between the individual and the collective.8

 For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 3. “Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique.”

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The question, “why is there something new rather than nothing new?”—which I addressed at the beginning—is not just a pure metaphysical inquiry about being qua being, insofar as it is in league with the phenomenon called fashion. The impetus of change engendered by means of consumption of fashion in particular has some powerful potency to steer the course of history. The gist of fashion, change, or newness can be considered an ever-renewed momentum to move toward a positive utopian society, where collective freedom and individual freedom are in harmony with each other. In other words, fashion as a utopian impulse can proffer a never-ending schematic apparatus to move beyond existing social conditions and achieve the utopian idea of freedom.9 This perspective of fashion as an instrument to engender change in conjunction with social progress is completely different from the traditional view that fashion denotes the status of the wearer within the hierarchy of class or the view that fashion serves as a mere token of the surplus of goods necessary to consolidating the existing social order. Albeit, change or the pursuit of something new, which is the hallmark of fashion, poses fashion as not only politically charged but also historically significant, since change is an impelling energy that fuels a revolutionary vision of any kind toward progress. To be more concise, no progress can be made without the desire for change to move beyond the current status quo. Consumption has brought about an unprecedented progress in relation to freedom over the course of modernity. This bold statement rests on the fact that women have been emancipated owing largely to the consumption of fashion, which has facilitated the establishment of consumer culture not as a derivative of mass production but as a dialectical opposite with the power to influence the mode of production. Consumption, with which women were associated initially as a patriarchal confinement to the home, has been transforming asymmetrical power relations between men and women, little by little discharging women from masculine domination. In the light of Hegelian dialectic, one can fathom this dialectical consequence that is induced by the mediation between wants and means and between consumption and production.10 The liberation of women by virtue of consumption, in particular of fashion, is evidence of progress in view of freedom. The preeminent recipient of the benefits of the dialectical sublation by consumption is the female consumer; however, the scapegoat of the capitalist mode of production is the proletariat. Each serves to express the dialectical antinomy of modernity. This statement does not mean that women and the proletariat are different poles apart in social structure, nor does it suggest that absolute and universal freedom is possible to achieve by means of consumption. When I argue that women have been disenthralled gradually, if not completely, due in part to the influence of the consumption of fashion, women signify the collective entity that is set against male dominance, just as the proletariat denotes those who are set against the bourgeoisie. For centuries many women have labored for low wages in the fashion/clothing industry, and still the majority of 9  For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 8. “Fashion as A Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy via the Consumption of Fashion.” 10  For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 9. “The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion.”

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workers in clothing manufacturing are women (Tynan 2010). Nevertheless, it is fallacious to maintain that the consumption of fashion goods is the main cause of the exploitation of female workers in the clothing manufacturing industry. The blame should be directed first and foremost to the unfair and unjust practices in the fashion/clothing industry with respect to such areas as payment, working conditions, and the gender division of labor that have not been properly amended to this date. This is not to argue that one disregard the downsides of consumption. In many sweatshops today, underpaid male and female workers are working under harsh working conditions to meet consumer demand, while female workers are more exposed to forced labor against their will and often more exploited than male workers. Such problems as the asymmetrical distribution of wealth and resources between men and women, the gender division of labor, the discrimination against female workers, and the wage disparity between men and women, can be redressed with government intervention in the labor market, the efforts of policymakers, the political influence of labor unions, and consumers’ increased awareness toward sustainable business practices. Yet, whether workers of both sexes can be completely free from the oppressive conditions of the proletariat is a matter of social structure. Not all individual workers can escape the proletariat as long as capitalist social relations of production are the bedrock of the social system of contemporary society. Workers today are free to choose to stop selling their labor, except for some unfortunate and illegal cases. Nonetheless, many have no choice but to make a living as a proletarian in the real world. Not all working people are able to free themselves from the proletariat, although they have the freedom to leave. In “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” G. A. Cohen diagnosed this condition as “a structural barrier to mass exit from the proletariat” (Cohen 1983, p. 23). He opines that individual workers are free to leave but not all of them are able to escape the proletariat (Ibid., p. 12); therefore, a group of people (workers) as a whole are situated to encounter a collective unfreedom, as it is not possible for all its members to perform a certain action (Ibid., p.  16). As acknowledged by Cohen himself, the question as to whether workers are forced to sell their labor power is grounded on Marx’s positioning of the proletarian as the producer whose means of income is his or her own labor only (Ibid., p. 3). Because the ownership of the means of production belongs to the capitalist, not to the proletarian, the latter is forced to sell his or her labor. Cohen therefore posits, “[W]here relations of production force people to do things, people force people to do things” (Ibid., p. 6). For him, it is the social relations of production creating an objective situation that give rise to a collective unfreedom. His notion of collective unfreedom, which is a Marxist critique of relations of production, offers us an insight into why universal freedom is never attainable under the social relations of production. However, centered on the production side of a capitalist system, Cohen fails to see that personal and subjective feelings with respect to self-image have bearing on unfreedom.11 Subjective observations about the self influence our consumption patterns, which in turn have a mediating

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effect on the mode of production. For example, the means of production must undergo transformation in order to produce the kinds of products consumers want to purchase. Hence, when discussing topics of freedom and unfreedom in a ­capitalist society, it is crucial to have a fair understanding of the mediation between production and consumption, as consumers have the power to counteract some of the negative effects of production-centered social relations, while at the same time being affected by the forces of production, that is, the means of production and laborrelated variables. I would like to emphasize that a philosophization of fashion not only redeems fashion from the world of commodity fetishism or from the realm of corporeal matter, but also ushers us into penetrating the way in which we reflect on the things around us as well as about ourselves and finding out where we, whether layman or philosopher, feel that we are ourselves in everyday life. As Adorno points out, in despair at the thought that “one is nothing,” the apprehension of “impotence” (Adorno 2005a, p. 50), the modern subject strays into the agony of emptiness and meaninglessness. This recognition of the fragility of our life demonstrates one of those philosophical experiences that could be labeled “elitist and undemocratic,” as Adorno holds that they are not equally attainable to everyone (Adorno 1973, p. 40). In the domain of fashion, however, we often feel, albeit temporarily, that we are being ourselves in a least intelligent and most unreasonable manner as compared to when we are engaging in level-headed philosophical detachment. The enchantment or awareness of our being ourselves while in the midst of mundane life is different from the end result of philosophical experience, to which abstract subjectivity belongs. Regardless of the different levels or kinds of intellectual capabilities each one of us has, we as both individual and collective can sense what is in fashion. Egalitarian and democratic, fashion does not seem to be suitable to philosophical investigation according to the Adornian standards. Notwithstanding, the philosophization of fashion helps us locate the moment at which abstract subjectivity in philosophy and the feeling of being ourselves in everyday life are not necessarily disparate. Inasmuch as this rapture, in which impulsive and irrational acts in the domain of fashion become conscious, is cognized, it is redemptive. This understanding is none other than the philosophical endeavor which Adorno himself regards as the only responsible philosophy in defiance of anguish that today self-­ consciousness is nothing but a realization that one is nothing. As Adorno comments, “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (Minima Moralia #153) (Adorno 2005a, p. 247).

1.2  Why Should Philosophy Matter to Fashion? Setting themselves apart from the European humanistic tradition, some thinkers such ass Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin contemplated fashion as a serious subject of discourse and incorporated it into the philosophical arena. Owing to their

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insights, fashion was brought to light as a topic of intellectual investigation apropos to the time when numerous new products began to be introduced and consumed at an unprecedented rate, affecting the mode of self-consciousness as well as of social interaction. Self-consciousness and the thinking mind, which had been regarded as the unique faculty of human beings under the umbrella of the Cartesian dictum, “Cogito ergo sum,” no longer had the same potency as before with the advent of industrialization and consumerism. The emphasis on reason, objective science and empiricism during the Enlightenment, in which absolutism in sciences and religion was called into question, paradoxically helped gradually eliminate the idea that the divine mind rules over the earthly body. In aesthetics, likewise, the absolute, Platonic logic of beauty was shattered by the idea of universal validity and common sense (sensus communis), which harbingers the beginning of Immanuel Kant’s humanistic hermeneutics of beauty, which emphasized such emotional values as pleasure/displeasure as barometers for the judgment of taste. These metamorphoses in the Western belief system are important in locating the academic status of the study of fashion, as it is through this process that it lays its foundation as one of the disciplines that center upon the body and bodily issues. There are several reasons why fashion has been thought of as a lesser kind of academic interest. First and foremost is a nature/culture dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Traditionally, the mind has been associated with culture while the body has been associated with nature, which is an object of suppression and control. The Platonic and Christian traditions, which have been most dominant in Western ideology, value the supreme mind, which is immortal; as such, it is the real self. The body is a mortal and temporary station where the mind resides for a lifetime. Therefore, body-related topics are worldly, base, and unsophisticated; this in opposition to the mind, which is spiritual, noble, and immortal. Compared with the thinking mind, the body had been considered off-topic in academia until the Renaissance. And yet, it was mainly an artistic and cultural movement, rather than a social, political, and intellectual revolution, that revived an interest in Greek antiquity. It is during the modern era that the body finally began to be addressed as a territory for intellectual discussion. Indeed, many of the relatively new academic disciplines are body-related sciences, such as eugenics, anthropology, and its progeny, anthropometrics, all of which are attributed to the nineteenth-century interest in the body. Cartesian dualism along with Platonism has been a dominant ideology, and its influence is still so prevalent in many schools of social sciences that in recent decades some sociologists and anthropologists have lamented the absence of theories concerning the body.12 Yet, taking into consideration this underestimated corporeal matter, fashion as an academic discipline is still not viewed as being as strong as film studies or other applied arts, which also began to pave their way as new fields of academia in the first half of the twentieth century. This is mainly because topics regarding external  Sociology also generally ignored bodies until the late 1980s, when Bryan S. Turner in The Body and Society (1984) called for the inclusion of the body in sociology. See Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications. 1996 [1984]).

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appearance are deemed to be mainly a feminine area of interest and concern, something J.  C. Flügel diagnosed as the Great Masculine Renunciation during the Victorian era (Flügel 1969, p. 257). Fashion-related classes, for example, were first offered within the curricula of home economics, whose main objective, at the outset of its inauguration, was to educate women, soon-to-be housewives, about how to run the household economically as a homemaker (Elias 2008, p. 37). At the approach of the 1930s, co-ed courses in home economics gradually began to be accepted (Apple and Coleman 2003, p. 77). By the 1960s, the subject title home economics was challenged due to gender stereotypes that were evoked by that name (Elias 2008, p. 171). Since then, many colleges have changed the title to human ecology or other nongendered titles. Even now in many fashion-related departments of colleges in the U.S., female students far outnumber male students (Barnard 2002, p.  24). Although it has attained academic status in many colleges around the world, the study of fashion is a highly gender-prejudiced area which divulges the current hierarchy of disciplines and the unbalanced body and mind relations in our society. Another critical element that has kept fashion at a lower academic level is a paucity of scholarship in the theory of fashion. As the study of fashion has diversified into retailing, design, history, and clothing construction and production, it has become multidisciplinary in nature. As a result, in terms of theoretical groundwork, the study of fashion has failed to stand on its own without linking up with other disciplines; it has borrowed theoretical underpinnings and methodologies from other disciplines, depending on how closely it is related to them from the perspective of a researcher having a different research background and academic training. The problem stems, in part, from the fact that it is by no means possible to define the extent of the study of fashion as a distinctive academic discipline in a simple manner, since a unanimous description of fashion by scholars from different fields of study is almost unattainable. Thus, it would be futile to delineate the boundaries of theories of fashion; further, any effort to establish theories within the study of fashion that are completely independent of other academic disciplines would be nonsense. Nevertheless, it has to be pointed out that the main reason for the scantiness of theories of fashion is not just the short period of time that the study of fashion has been part of the scholarly domain, nor its overlapping research interests with those of other academic disciplines. Rather, the weakness in view of the theoretical development of fashion as an area of intellectual investigation has more to do with the feminine orientation of research approaches in its “traditionally” confined field. The study of fashion, which was led mostly by female dress/fashion historians for much of the twentieth century, focused on artifact-based research, ignoring the importance of theoretical development. Interestingly enough, Lou Taylor’s article “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History” (1998), which intended to reinforce the current object-based research performed mainly by curators and researchers in museums, paradoxically discloses the critical foibles of the methodology, which is heavily centered on articles of dress. To borrow Taylor’s words, there is a “great divide” that lies between object-based approaches and theoretical research in the study of fashion (Taylor 1998, p. 338, 346, 349, and 352). It is noteworthy that, according to Taylor, this split comes from a gender divide; that

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is, practitioners of the artifact-based approach are predominantly women, while social, economic, and cultural theories are produced in the larger university world (Ibid.). By implicitly equating academia with the masculine, she unintentionally reveals that a majority of dress historians whose research focuses mainly on articles of clothing have the limitation of not being able to produce theoretical accounts of fashion, which belong to the masculine way of doing research in the humanities. Recently, Taylor (2013) argues that the “great divide,” originally dubbed so in order to spell out the different research orientations “ between the university, museum curatorial research, and the wider fashion history world” (p. 24), is about to collapse. It is her opinion that “While it would be foolish to believe that all of this tension has dissolved, I have watched with much interest as this ‘great divide’ begins to disintegrate. Now researchers from various fields of study have realized the fascinating potential of the history and present of the design, making, retailing, and consumption of clothing and now accept this, … ” (Ibid., p. 25). Taylor’s statement should lead one to ponder the current status of the study of fashion in academia, not limited to the area of dress/fashion history, for it discloses the stumbling block of the study of fashion which I have already mentioned. It is helpful to look to the current state of sociology as a discipline, which was established in the nineteenth century, for the reason behind its predicament, which has to do with the absence of a coherent consensus of core theories, as well as with the separation of theory from research. According to Eric Dunning and Jason Hughes (2013), there is a general agreement among sociologists that sociology as a discipline is in crisis (pp. 2–3). In the wake of poststructuralism and postmodernism, which question the modernist privilege in human rationality and scientific knowledge as a means to make truth claims, sociological paradigms have been variegated, resulting in a lack of coalescence in sociology (Ibid., pp. 6–9). As Dunning and Hughes have observed, “There is currently no clear agreement on the staple propositional knowledge required for even a basic mastery of the discipline. There is little consensus regarding what might constitute a standard sociological curriculum; no hierarchy of concepts or models to mark a commonly agreed upon learning trajectory for a newcomer to the subject” (Ibid., p. 9). They further maintain that the abundance of sociological paradigms has brought about factions within the discipline and at the same time a tendency toward theoretical pluralism and eclecticism in order to achieve a synthesis of paradigmatic differences (Ibid., pp. 9–10). Along with these trends, an increasing severance of theory from research has come about, all facilitating a weakening of the status of sociologists and further inviting the intrusion of other disciplines into sociology, in terms of theory, orientation, and practice (Ibid.). Indeed, the struggle for the autonomy of one’s own discipline and survival from status rivalry in academia requires the development of theories and frameworks within which problems are put forward and solved, as Norbert Elias expounds in Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies (1982, pp. 44–45). Insofar as a considerable number of theories of fashion are not being produced, regardless of the theoretical buttress of other disciplines, stationing the study of fashion as an academic discipline with relative autonomy and independence would seem to be out of the

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question at this juncture. Thus one impending task of researchers in the study of fashion is to find out what should constitute the key fundamental theories of fashion that assist the study of fashion in moving beyond the current status quo and b­ ecoming more autonomous and self-sustaining. Accordingly, where to find the guidelines or yardstick for the cultivation of essential theoretical components of the study of fashion should become an important topic of discussion, although little consensus about any coherent theoretical foundation for the study of fashion has been reached. It is Elias who provides a clue to the solution to the deadlock when he states: “With few exceptions, philosophy to this day embodies a specific hierarchy of values which dominates the cast of its problems as well as of solutions that appear philosophically relevant” (Ibid., p. 12). Quite contrary to Elias, who runs counter to the authority of philosophy as the appraiser of scientific method, in an attempt to establish the sociology of knowledge with its own qualification while distancing it from philosophy, I suggest going along with philosophy for the development of theories in the study of fashion. By discussing how fashion is “philosophically relevant,” the study of fashion can find a way out of the current impasse and advance itself while in the midst of a status rivalry among various academic disciplines. However, it has to be mentioned that philosophy is not the only means by which to develop theories of fashion, nor is it an all-encompassing basis for the growth of theories of fashion. Rather, one of this book’s aims is to ignite a debate on how the study of fashion can reinforce its status as a legitimate academic subject on a par with other competitors in academia by demonstrating some possibilities for cross-disciplinary theoretical development. Nevertheless, it also has to be noted that a theoretical development through philosophy, in particular through metaphysics, has a special import in the study of fashion. As Elias opines, “Establishments of metaphysical and transcendental philosophy rank high in the present academic status hierarchy. Their representatives claim for their field to be ‘basic’ to all others. The rebuttal of an outsider’s argument as ‘not philosophically relevant’ can therefore serve as reproof of lower status persons by a person of higher status” (Ibid., p. 23). The discussion of fashion from the perspective of philosophy should not be regarded as a blind obedience to higher status disciplines, inasmuch as the development of theories of fashion is made in tandem with theoretical progression from the purview of philosophy as well. This strategical approach should make a big difference not only in the enhancement of the status of the study of fashion but also in the overall progress of knowledge about human culture. In contrast to sociologists, who are concerned about the destruction of the boundaries of their discipline by competitors, (Dunning and Hughes 2013, p. 202),13 researchers in the study of fashion should search for ways to promote the growth of theories of fashion, considering the current phase of devel13

 Refer to the following remark by Dunning and Hughes (2013, p. 202). It is perhaps also not so controversial to claim that, at its current stage of development, sociology in Britain has no clearly distinct boundaries from the disciplines of cultural studies and philosophy.

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opment, by seeking recourse to theories of other disciplines. However, as is the case with sociology today, the study of fashion needs to consolidate its identity as an academic subject not only by facilitating the inclusion of theories in research, but also by generating unique theories of its own, which have the power as research initiatives to influence other academic discipline. Again, this interdisciplinary ambition should be accompanied by concurrent theoretical developments in the target area of academic interests. Some people might be skeptical about the value of theoretical reinforcement of fashion that is in league with philosophy because it does not offer a clear direction about “what is to be done,” as the crux of philosophy is to “analyze relentlessly what is” (Richter and Adorno 2002, p. 16). And yet, Adorno would advise that researchers in the study of fashion not be afraid of building an “ivory tower” grounded on theories, even if they do not see the immediate connections with the real world. As he said in an interview: “a theory is much more capable of having practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to praxis from the start. . . . Historically, there have been countless instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical intentions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality” (Ibid., p. 15).

1.3  On the Defining Characteristics of Fashion In recent decades, a group of scholars have called into question the notion that fashion is Western in its origin and its temporality is linked with modernity, and have urged to revise the definition of “fashion.” Scholars whose research agenda and methodology revolve around the principles and practices of anthropology, ethnic studies, and archaeology maintain that fashion is virtually everywhere, with no time and space bounds. The revisionist approach in fashion studies implicates some critical concerns and issues, the debate of which itself is, in fact, constructive to shaping the disciplinary boundaries of fashion as an academic field, as well as instrumental in comprehending the essence of fashion in the context of the history of ideas and intellectual history. Before proceeding with the discussion, it has to be noted that one significant challenge in the deliberation of the validity of different standpoints in relation to fashion is that no agreement on the definition of fashion has been reached among academic circles, as stated by M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (2016, p. 7). Even terms such as “fashion,” “dress,” and “clothing” are not clearly established with a specific level of canonic authority (Entwistle 2015, pp. 40–41). As such, it is by no means surprising to see different arguments about the genesis of fashion. The current stumbling block with respect to the disciplinary dilemma of fashion studies as well as the definition of fashion is due in great part to the fact that different researchers with different academic backgrounds take different stances about the way in which fashion is conceptualized. Those who ground their reasoning mainly on the “disciplines of modernity,” such as sociology, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, associate fashion with the temporal frame of modernity (Ibid.,

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pp. 43–48). On the other hand, those who abide by the principles and practices of anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology are inclined to gravitate toward the revisionist mode by incorporating or subordinating fashion into systems of dress. Abby Lillethun, Linda Welters, and Joanne B. Eicher all agree that anthropologists prefer the term “dress,” as its meaning is broader than that of “fashion.” (Lillethun et al. 2012, p. 79). Welters and Lillethun deem fashion as “a subset of dress”14 while being “changing styles of dress and appearance” (Welters and Lillethun 2018, p. xxv). Eicher holds that dress is a “larger” term than “fashion” (2016, p. 204). Karen Tranberg Hansen considers the term “dress” as “constructive and inclusive.”15 M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik view dress as “central to fashion.” (Jansen and Craik 2016, Introduction, p. 8). Some anthropologists and academics who subscribe to the anthropologist perspective on fashion position fashion as part of dress systems. (Hereafter they are referred to as “fashion anthropologists”).16 One obvious failure of the anthropologist approach in fashion studies is that its definition of fashion cannot account for many other areas of life in which fashion is in operation, such as the manner of preparing food, recreational activities, music, and academia, just to mention but a few. The foible of the fashion anthropologist approach rests on the formulation of the scope of fashion that is circumscribed within a dress system or defined in relation to dress, which, in fact, has a strong connection with culturalism that works as an ideology for many anthropologists, if not all. Eicher in “Anthropology of Dress” (2000) argues that four features of anthropology—holism, culture, field work, and women’s involvement—have helped forward the study of dress. According to Tim Ingold, whom Eicher cited in the same article, intrinsic to the anthropological perspective is a commitment to the holist viewpoint that “it should be possible—at least in principle—to establish the interconnections between the biological, social, historical and cultural dimensions of human life that are otherwise parcelled up among different disciplines for separate study” (Ingold 2005[1994], “General Introduction,” p. xv). While such a totalization of our knowledge of the conditions of human life is already embedded in the concept of culture, as phrases like “the total body of tradition” or “the complex whole” are typically used in describing

 As stated in Lillethun, Abby, Linda Welters, and Joanne B. Eicher. “(Re)Defining Fashion,” Dress, (2012), vol. 38: 75–97, 79. 15  Karen Tranberg Hansen “Anthropology and Dress and Fashion,” 14

https://www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/products/berg-fashion-library/article/bibliographical-guides/anthropology-of-dress-and-fashion#b-9781474280655-BG004-112 (accessed May 9, 2019). 16  I used the term fashion anthropologists on the basis of the introduction of the “sub-discipline of fashion anthropology” Jansen and Craik have put forward, who write: “In a search for an all-inclusive, non-Eurocentric definition and analytical framework for fashion, the emerging sub-discipline of fashion anthropology offers some important tools.” (M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik, “Introduction,” 7).

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what culture implies,17 some anthropologists oversimplify or homogenize disparate things by exorbitantly exercising culturalism as a “scientific” ideology. Daniel Touro Linger opines that many anthropologists have expressed concerns regarding culturalism, as anthropologists tend to incorporate so much in their research (2005, pp. 1–2). It is another anthropologist’s observation on the utilization of concepts like culture and holism that greatly helps us come to grips with some underlying problems that run across the aforementioned fashion anthropologist perspective on fashion and its relation to dress as well as a culturalist research approach in anthropology. In Epistemology, Fieldwork, and Anthropology (2015), Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan acknowledges that a holistic viewpoint is often imputed to anthropology among the social sciences (p. 159), and that culture is an important concept in all the social sciences; it is particularly indispensable to ethnology (Ibid., p.  17). According to him, culture as a concept that “describe[s] a set of significantly shared representations and/or behaviors by a specific unit of social actors in a given context” has its indubitable value in the social sciences (Ibid.). Yet, he also asserts that culturalism as a form of essentialism with its homogenization approach has become a scientific ideology, especially among anthropologists (Ibid.). The main thrust of his argument is not that the concept of culture is to be tossed away wholesale along with culturalism, but that overgeneralization or homogenization in the name of culture and the careless use of the concept of culture should be cautiously checked, as they lead to the creation of incorrect and preconditioned knowledge (Ibid., pp. 17–19). In the view of Olivier de Sardan, generalization, homogenization, and oversimplication made through the fashion anthropologist approach, most pronounced in such arguments as fashion is part of dress systems, deserves sharp scrutiny. Consider Sarah Fee’s remark in her article “Anthropology and Materiality” (2013): “Rather than dwell on definitions (of fashion), however, formerly divided disciplines and ‘camps’ are building bridges through inclusive works on dress” (p.  308).18 Her comment plainly instances how the excess of generalization or homogenization is committed by fashion anthropologists’ propensity toward inclusive and holistic approaches and interpretation, such that particularities vanish at the expense of universals. Culturalism and totalism, instead of culture and holism, are pervasive among many fashion anthropologists, as identified in such an argument—dress, which is a 17

 For example, Edward Burnett Tylor states: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1871), 1.

Robert F. Murphy also writes: “Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation.” Robert F. Murphy, Cultural and Social Anthropology: An Overture, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1986), 14. 18  The words in parentheses are my own addition.

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shared commonality among human beings, is universal across all time and space, and fashion is part of dress systems; therefore, fashion is to be regarded as universal. Differences and disparities often disappear with the fashion anthropologist holistic approach to search for universal features of culture. The following is another example of a universalist claim by fashion anthropologists. Jansen and Craik state that “As such, fashion can be conceptualized as a universal phenomenon with a full range of local variations, in the same way that political or economic systems are universal systems with local variations” (2016, “Introduction,” p.  8). Throughout history, human beings have been under the influence of different aspects of a certain political or economic system at a varying degree. This is hard to dispute. Nonetheless, the social, political, and economic conditions under which free choices are acceptable are not just given. In fact, they are the result of the development of the enfranchisement from political and religious suppression and control, economic advancement, conception of individual rights, and strenuous confrontations at different levels of society. Our nature, our body, and bodily impulse are endowed, but the propitious external environment in which one is free to exercise one’s choice or creativity at one’s own discretion has not been universal. From the perspective of intellectual history and the history of ideas, the concept of individual is neither generic nor universal. Larry Siedentop writes in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014)19: We have become victims of our own success. For we are in danger of taking this primacy of the individual as something ‘obvious’ or ‘inevitable’, something guaranteed by things outside ourselves rather than by historical convictions and struggles. Of course, every human has his or her own body and mind. But does this establish that human equality is decreed by nature rather than culture? Nature, in the form of genetic endowment, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. (p. 8)

Siedentop also acknowledges that modernity is a unique historical time period characterized by a social model in which the individual is the basic unit of society (Ibid., p. 337). According to him, the liberation of both the individual from feudal social hierarchies and the human mind from ecclesiastical beliefs signals the beginning of modernity (Ibid., p. 8), and the concept of the individual was developed in connection with the advent of states by the time when the word “individual” made its first appearance in historical dictionaries written in English or French (Ibid., p.  347). Just as the modern concept of the individual, which exists vis-à-vis the concept of society, was invented as a social construct contingent upon sociopolitical specificity of the modern times, so was fashion. This is not to suggest that fashion is confined to Western societies or Western modernity. Fashion has become an important part of everyday life and its influence has become far-reaching across the globe during late capitalism. Nonetheless, this does not automatically negate the fact that Western modernity is the cradle of fashion. As a matter of fact, the development of the modern concept of the individual is strong evidence that fashion is inseparable from  Siedentop’s central argument in this book is that modern Western liberalism has its origin in Christian thought and moral assumptions and the concept of the individual was an outcome of the development of Western Christian values.

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modernity, as the concept of the individual that stands dialectically in opposition to the collective or society is pivotal to the ontological construction of fashion. This argument hinges upon Georg Simmel’s observation on fashion; that is, fashion a social form embodies pairs of antagonistic tendencies found in society. Although not always equal and fair, the dialectical mediation between antithetical opposites that can be summed up as the reciprocity between individual and collective is the epitome of fashion. Not only does fashion reveal the way in which the individual interacts with the collective as a social form, but it is also related to the objective representation of its form, while serving as an indispensable part of subjective culture whose starting point is the individual. While indicating Georg Simmel and Edward Sapir, in particular, Welters and Lillethun contend that social Darwinism and imperialism influenced the development of fashion theory prior to the late twentieth century, consolidating the notion that the mode of Western dress and dress practices was superior to that of primitives (2018, p. 34). They also opined that under the influence of the dominant theory and ideology with their prejudice against non-Western people and peoples, fashion became linked essentially with the West (Ibid.). Many fashion anthropologists regard Simmel as the one that was most influential in the conceptualization of fashion as it is now, as a canonic idol that has to be challenged or deracinated.20 They often blame him as a rudimentary source of provincial definition of fashion inspired by Euro-ethnocentrism. However, a careful probe into Simmel’s stance in the midst of the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline reveals a different story. According to Uta Gerhardt, Simmel’s key logic of society, reciprocity that is associated with social interaction was strikingly incompatible with the haughty elitism that was predominant in Imperial Germany, as well as with the sociology of his time, when the newly established discipline not only deemed race as a crucial part of investigation of society, but also espoused race as that that which could help buttress Western civilization (1998, “Introduction,” pp. x–xi). Don Martindale also comments that Simmel was one of the few early formalists who looked for a distinctive definition of sociology while in the process of institutionalizing and professionalizing sociology by leaving behind the imperialistic claims of the predisciplinary founders of sociology (2010, p. 279). This retrospective evaluation of Simmel as an academic maverick is affirmed by a remark from his contemporary, Dean Hampe of Heidelberg, in 1908, who stated, “One cannot categorize Simmel among the general intellectual currents of the time.”21 American sociologist Donald N. Levine, who is  Among others, see Sandra Niessen, “Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy,” M.  Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds), Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2016).

20

“In the middle of the last century, Simmel (1957) pointed out that fashion was found in the West and not in non-Western contexts. Scholars continue to reiterate his claim whether directly or indirectly.” (209) 21  As cited in Donald N. Levine. “Introduction,” On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xii.

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also a prominent figure in Ethiopian Studies, summarizes that Simmel’s intellectual output, temperament, philosophical conviction, and academic stance during his time all disclose that he was an innovator, stranger, and nonconformist, rather than a sycophant of the mainstream academic trends of his time (1971, “Introduction,” xii). And yet, it is absolutely incorrect to argue that Simmel was not influenced by the theories of the nineteenth century. Intellectuals in his time were influenced by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whether directly or indirectly; or they responded to the doctrine of each in one way or another, whether negatively or positively. Although Simmel’s early sociological writings dealt with social ­ Darwinism, his later writings have no vestige of Spencerian legacy (Jaworski 1995, p. 396).22 Contrary to fashion anthropologists’ argument, it is inappropriate to label Simmel ethnocentric. As a matter of fact, his mature work was viewed as a solution to offset the influence of Darwin’s natural selection and Spencer’s social evolutionism at the turn of the century. Gary Dean Jaworski expounds that Simmel’s later writings were promoted on purpose by Small Albion, who founded the first independent Department of Sociology in the United States as a remedy to advance Spencer at a time when Spencerian Doctrine was pervasive in the society of early American sociology (Ibid., pp.  394–395). Under the editorship of Small, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) translated and published Simmel’s nine papers from 1896 to 1910, which were the outcome of Small and his colleagues’ conscious effort to uphold Simmel’s formal approach to sociology (Ibid.). It was during this period that Simmel’s article “Fashion” appeared in a New York journal, the International Monthly (renamed the International Quarterly later) (Ibid., p. 394). Small viewed Simmel’s sociology as an instrument by which not only to lay a methodological and philosophical foundation of sociology, but also to fight against Spencerian generalizations and provincial inductions (Ibid., pp. 394–395). Jaworski also points out that the concept of reciprocity between superordinate and subordinate put forward by Simmel inspired American sociologists such as Robert E. Park to further explore the issues related to racial conflicts, as well as provided theoretical underpinnings for working against racial paternalism during the Progressive Era (Ibid., p. 406). Any fair evaluation of Simmel’s exposé of fashion and its relationship to modern society requires a thorough understanding of his logic of sociology. Patterns or forms of society are key to Simmel’s analysis of society, in which various social relations or social forms such as superordination, subordination, exchange, competition, and cooperation are at interplay, while the constant dialectical mediations between antithetical forces, such as the dominant and the dominated, are at work. For Simmel, society is “the sum of all the individuals concerned in reciprocal relations” in the broad sense, while society is also the “interaction itself which constitutes the bond of association” in a narrow sense (Simmel 1998, p. 1). In other words,

 Also see Turner, Jonathan H., Leonard Beeghley, and Charles H.  Powers. The Emergence of Sociological Theory, 7th edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012), 252–253.

22

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separated from its contents, society can be distilled to be a web of forms of human relations and reciprocity that results from human interaction. Simmel’s formal analysis of society is not just “pure,” but also humanist, because even under the unequal power relations, what is still integral to society is reciprocal relations between human beings and human interaction. As Gerhardt rightly indicates, reciprocity found in human interaction is that which makes Simmel’s sociology “thoughtful humanism,” distancing himself from other contemporary sociologists (1998 “Introduction,” p. xi). Simmel’s sociological and philosophical devotion to such concepts as individuality, individual freedom, subjective culture, subjective ­individual experience, all points to the fact that his intellectual contribution was part of the humanist movement, which has its locality in modernity. What is outstanding in Simmel’s conceptualization of social interaction is the primacy of the individual in the midst of the development of modern society, where the mass has increasing dominance over the individual. Although now discredited or devalued by some scholars, especially by fashion anthropologists, Simmel is the first sociologist and philosopher that identified the most cardinal characteristics of fashion in his essay “Fashion” (1904), making fashion as an enticing subject matter of academic discussions. He is considered to be one of the most referenced authorities in terms of theoretical aspects of fashion, for and against the exposition of which further debate of fashion has been made to date. Since the publication of his seminal essay on fashion, over the course of the development of fashion discourse hereof, misinterpretations or misunderstandings of Simmel’s philosophically charged analysis of fashion have mushroomed. However, rarely have they been addressed, leaving the acme of Simmel’s elucidations on fashion underappreciated by many contemporary fashion scholars. What follows is not intended as a comprehensive investigation into criticism directed at Simmel’s exposition of fashion. Instead, I shall show how important it is to grapple with the dualistic tendencies that are found in human nature as well as in the form of social phenomena, so as to rectify some of the most troublesome misapprehensions of Simmel’s illumination on fashion. As per Simmel, fashion is a social phenomenon that is characterized by the antithetical forces between individual and collective, between individual differentiation and social equalization, between differentiation and union, between imitation and demarcation, and between particular and universal, all of which are dialectical opposites that typify the tensions between the individual and mass/society as well as innate human nature. This is of great importance when discerning what should involve the proper inquisition into the polarities found in fashion discourse that are imputed to Simmel’s flaw by some fashion anthropologists. For instance, M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik argue, “[T]there is an urgent need to problematize persisting dichotomies like traditional versus fashionable, tradition versus modernity, local versus global and the West vs. the Rest in fashion studies” (2016, “Introduction,” p. 2). Among the dichotomies, fashion anthropologists often single out the divide between the West and the Rest as the most formidable and persistent obstacle to be removed in fashion discourse. Sandra Niessen holds that a “non-dichotomous” discussion between the West and the Rest in fashion studies starts with the appreciation of the “systems of dress anchored in all cultures around the world (body decoration

1.3  On the Defining Characteristics of Fashion

21

is a human universal)” (2016, p. 212). Jansen and Craik also argue that through field research both fashion as part of culture and its linkage to the whole can be identified (2016, “Introduction,” p. 8). One can clearly see that fashion anthropologists’ allied endeavor is now geared toward another ideology in view of Olivier de Sardan. Their perspective on fashion as part of culture(s) unveils that anthropology’s effort to move forward from its own pedigree of imperialist ideology of the past as a facilitator of the divide between the West and the Rest has found its way to unreserved endorsement of culturalism. The guilt of the past has led some anthropologists to homogenize disparate entities or qualities into systems of totality. It has to be noted that it is classical anthropology that essentialized the divide between traditional and modern and that between the West and the Rest. Culturalism places everything under the rubric of culture by appropriating such heterogeneous components as economic and political relations and social interaction into construction of culture(s). Cultural relativism or multiculturalism, which anthropology views as its distinctive vantage point, only serve as an aid to support anthropologist culturalism. However, one is advised to recall that if there is a duality that is significantly conspicuous and noteworthy in Simmel’s rendering on fashion, that is what represents the dichotomy between each individual actor and society/mass. I shall now introduce one more example which demonstrates the importance of having a clear understanding of the key features of fashion, especially the antithetical opposites that are at play in and through fashion, when aiming to further fashion discourse beyond the normative confines of fashion studies. In “A Taste For Fashion,” Marguerite La Caze writes, “I distinguish fashion understood as invention for its own sake followed by slavish imitation with a true fashion, which like art involves both taste and ‘genius’ as understood by Kant” (2011, pp. 119–200). She goes on to say that her focus is on “fashion in dress or clothes” (Ibid., p.  200). Clearly she fails to grasp not only that the dialectical mediation between such antagonistic forces as imitation and differentiation is the indispensable constituent of fashion, but also that fashion is not bound with systems of dress or clothes. Imitation is just a one-sided aspect of fashion. As Simmel has deciphered, without the duality of such dialectical opposites as imitation and differentiation, a fashion cannot exist. In the same article, La Caze links fashion with the Kantian notion of the beautiful and discusses fashion as something similar to a work of art, or something that helps a human being to create him- or herself as a work of art (Ibid., p. 211), rather than as an object or phenomenon that we, ordinary people, desire in everyday life as something we can use, wear, consume, purchase, practice, or follow. As she puts it, “Yet, at least arguably, fashion can be judged as beautiful without being ‘agreeable’ to us and so is connected to pure judgments of taste. That red Valentino ball gown that I see in the shop window in Venice is certainly beautiful but not agreeable, as I have no desire to own it or wear it” (Ibid., p. 209). However, such an argument that “a true fashion” is equivalent to a work of art as in Kantian aesthetics is fallacious. Some sartorial fashions can be considered to be a piece of fine art and/or construed as beautiful, just like many and varied outputs in the creative fields such as buildings, necklaces, and automobiles, to name a few. Nevertheless, even without in-­ depth knowledge of Kant’s aesthetic judgments of taste, annexing the essence of

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fashion with pure artistic beauty is improper to our common sense in that fashion is deeply intertwined with our desire, most notably desire to be differentiated, distinctive and outstanding, while no less than to be uniform, mingled with others, and part of mainstream culture, activity, or thinking. Although Kant’s reflective judgment of beauty has no predicative relevance to fashion, his analysis on aesthetic judgments and their characteristics helps us see how “the fashionable” is analytically different from the beautiful as well from the good and the agreeable. In his discussion on aesthetics, Kant deals with feelings (Gefühle) of pleasure and displeasure, not as a cognitive judgment as proposed by Alexander Baumgarten, for whom aesthetics is concerned with rational cognitions or rules of taste for beauty.23 By aesthetics Kant means subjective feeling of the (re) presentation of an object, as opposed to the qualities of objects that are presented to the subject (Kant 1987, “Introduction,” p. 28). Kant expounds that what triggers an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful is sensation (Ibid., p. 63) although the judgments of taste about beauty itself belongs to the cognitive power (Ibid., “Preface,” p. 6). In the “Analytic of the Beautiful” of the Critique of Judgment (1987), Kant discriminates judgments of beauty from those of the good and the agreeable. The agreeable and the good are mere interests or likings (Ibid., p. 45). The former is associated with sensory stimuli while the latter is based on concepts and purposes. The aesthetic judgment of the beautiful is different from that of the mere personal feeling of the agreeable and that of the value-laden feeling of the good. There are two significant characteristics of aesthetic judgments of taste about the beautiful that are noteworthy in our search for the distinctive traits of the beautiful in comparison to those that are in fashion. First, unlike the agreeable and the good, the beautiful is free of all interest (Ibid., p. 53). The beautiful is a disinterested liking (Ibid., p. 52); therefore it is devoid of desire. Second, a judgment of taste of beauty is nothing but a claim to subjective universality (Ibid., p.  64). Regarding the subjective universal validity found in the judgement of beauty, Kant explains that when one says something is beautiful, he or she is making a universal claim for everyone, as if this person “demands” an agreement of others about his or her liking (Ibid., pp. 55–56). This subjective universality is aesthetic as opposed to logical (as shown in the good) and public as opposed to private (as shown in the agreeable). Grounded on this analysis, Kant then postulates that the universal communicability about beauty among people is based not on concepts per se, but on our mental status (Ibid., p. 62). He further expounds that the key to our mental faculties or cognitive powers that are in charge of this aesthetic and communicable cognition of beauty is the “free play” between imagination and understanding because “we need imagination to combine the manifold of intuition, and understanding to provide the unity of the concept uniting the [component] presentations” (Ibid.). Aesthetic judgments are governed by cognitive power (Ibid., “Preface,” p. 6). And yet, Kant’s illumination on beauty also guides us in apprehending that an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful is

23  Refer to Christian Helmut Wenzel. “Introduction,” An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).

References

23

prompted by sensation. On the other hand, that which gives rise to a phenomenon of fashion is desire. Whereas the feeling that something is beautiful is given in (Kantian) sensibility by or through the presentation of objects, the feeling that something is in fashion among people stems from our desire to be part of the collective while being an individuated subject. That which is hypostatized by way of a judgment of beauty is universal communicability, which works at the level of feeling of pleasure and displeasure. However, that which is hypostasized by virtue of a judgement that something is in fashion among people is the tacit communication between the individual and the collective, which is in operation at the level of human desire. The relay between the individual and the collective that is identified via the cognition of fashion phenomena helps us confirm not only the existence of such an entity that is summed up as the collective, but also its positive aspects—not as aggregated particulars but as a reciprocal counterpart standing vis-à-vis its dialectical opposite, the individual.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press. ———. 2005a. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London/ New York: Verso. ———. 2005b. Why Still Philosophy. In Critical Models, Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, 5–17. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. An Introduction to Dialectics, ed. Christoph Ziermann and trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Apple, Rima D. and Joyce Coleman. 2003. Turbulence, 1961–1985. In The Challenge of Constantly Changing Times: From Home Economics to Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-­ Madison 1903–2003. Madison: Parallel Press. Barnard, Malcolm. 2002. Fashion as Communication. London/New York: Routledge. Benjamin W. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J Osborne. London: New Left Books. ———. 1996. On the Program of the Coming Philosophy. In Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913– 1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott and ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cohen, G.A. 1983. The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom. Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (1): 3–33. Dunning, Eric, and Jason Hughes. 2013. Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology: Knowledge, Interdependence, Power, Process. London: Bloomsbury. Eicher, Joanne B. 2000. The Anthropology of Dress. Dress 27: 59–70. ———. 2016. Editing Fashion Studies: Reflections on Methodology and Interdisciplinarity in The Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. In Fashion Studies: Research, Methods, Sites and Practices, ed. H. Jenss. New York: Bloomsbury. Elias, Norbert. 1982. Scientific Establishments. In Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, ed. N. Elias, R. Whitley, and H.G. Martins, 1–69. Dordrecht: Reidel. Elias, Megan J. 2008. Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Flügel, John Carl. 1969. The Psychology of Clothes. New York: International Universities Press. Ingold, Tim. 2005 (1994). General Introduction. In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity Culture and Social Life, ed. Tim Ingold. New York: Routledge. Jansen, M.  Angela, and Jennifer Craik. 2016. Introduction. In Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion, ed. M.  Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Jaworski, Gary Dean. 1995, Spring. Simmel in Early American Sociology: Translation as Social Action. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 8 (3). Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. La Caze, Marguerite. 2011. A Taste for Fashion. In Fashion Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style, ed. J. Wolfendale and J. Kennett. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1951. In Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Levine, Donald N. 1971. Introduction. In On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lillethun, Abby, Linda Welters, and Joanne B.  Eicher. 2012. (Re)Defining Fashion. Dress 38: 75–97. Linger, Daniel Touro. 2005. Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Martindale, Don. 2010. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), reprinted by Routledge. Niessen, Sandra. 2016. Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy. In Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion, ed. M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Richter, Gerhard, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W.  Adorno, trans. Gerhard Richter, Monatshefte 94(1), Rereading Adorno (Spring), 10–23; originally published in Der Spiegel 23(19) (5 May 1969): 204–209. Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1998. Superiority of Subordinated as Subject Matter of Sociology German Sociology, ed. Uta Gerhardt. German Sociology: T.W.  Adorno, M.  Horkheimer, G.  Simmel, M. Weber, and Others (Germany Library No. 61). New York: Continuum. Taylor, Lou. 1998, November. Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 2 (4): 337–358. ———. 2013. Fashion and Dress History: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. In The Fashion Studies Handbook, ed. Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Regina Root, Sandy Black, Helen Thomas, and Agnès Rocamora, 23–43. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Tynan, Jane. 2010. Women’s Leadership in Fashion Design. In Gender and Women’s Leadership: A Reference Handbook, ed. Karen O’Connor, vol. 1, 933–940. Los Angeles: Sage. Welters, Linda, and Abby Lillethun. 2018. Fashion History: A Global View. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chapter 2

What Immanuel Kant Would Say About Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit of the Self by Way of Fashion

With the exception of a few thinkers, fashion theory had not been considered a serious field for academic research interests until the end of the twentieth century. It is also only in recent decades that fashion has become incorporated as a topic of philosophical undertaking. Fashion: A Philosophy (2006), by Lars Svendsen, stands as one of these recent developments in the study of fashion. Not only does it introduce discourses on fashion by such philosophers as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, but it also articulates some pitfalls associated with the meanings of fashion as interpreted by contemporary scholars. According to Svendsen, there are two radically different perspectives on fashion. One is that fashion is considered to be essentially no different than clothing, while the other is that fashion is a kind of “mechanism, logic or ideology” of which the area of clothing shares a part (Svendsen 2006, p. 12). Those who are aligned with the former perspective include Anne Hollander, who views fashion as the entire range of appealing clothes, and Elisabeth Wilson, who defines fashion as dress, the essential characteristic of which is ceaseless stylistic change (Ibid., p. 13). With regard to these viewpoints, Svendsen raises a question: “[I]s it [fashion] the clothes themselves or a quality they have that constitutes ‘fashion?’” (Ibid).1 Neither is he satisfied with Roland Barthes’s view that clothes provide the material basis of fashion, while fashion is a cultural system in which meanings are generated (Ibid.). For Svendsen, it is unconvincing to argue either that fashion is linked unequivocally with clothes as well as with a quality (i.e., change) or that clothes function as the material basis upon which cultural meanings come into being (Ibid.). Discontented, Svendsen tries to investigate fashion as a concept and find its meaning as a philosophical project. However, the concluding chapter reveals that he has searched for the implications of fashion, only to find out that fashion has limited meaning in our life. In my introduction I wrote that what had to be at the center of a philosophical investigation of fashion was the meaning of fashion. I have attempted to uncover this meaning by

 The word fashion in square brackets is my addition.

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2  What Immanuel Kant Would Say About Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit… s­ tudying the diffusion patterns of fashion, its logic and temporality, its relationship to body and language, its status as a commodity and as art and not least, as an ideal for the construction of the self. The conclusion of all these studies can hardly be anything other than to say that fashion is a highly diverse phenomenon that pretends to have meaning, but in reality has meaning to only a very limited extent. (Ibid., p. 157).

Indeed, the conundrum in the conceptualization of fashion comes from its complex character. This is well illustrated in Svendsen’s comments about the “provisional definition” of fashion, which works only if it operates as a social system that has to do with something new, as well as his comments about the inconceivability of how such an interpretation of fashion could be related to “the socially distinctive and the ‘new’ aspects of fashion” (Ibid., p. 14). As Svendsen points out, fashion is a concept. Nonetheless, it is also a phenomenon with which clothing appears to be conjoined by and large, thus rendering fashion perplexing to analyze. The impossibility of figuring out the true core of fashion is due to the fact that the two parts are so tightly interlaced that we cannot recognize each thread of a completely disparate nature in the same manner. Hence, the first step in coming to grips with the epistemology of fashion is to split off fashion into a concept and a phenomenon so as to look into the attributes of each domain. It is with the application of Kantian schematism, I argue, that fashion is to be posited as both a concept and a phenomenon. When we are asked to conjure up fashion, most of us think of different styles of clothing, accessories, hair, or nails. These items of fashion are virtually the same as those that belong to dress, which Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins define as “an assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements displayed by a person in communicating with other human beings” (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1992a, p. 15). They have also clarified the meaning of other terms such as clothing, costume, and apparel in juxtaposition to dress; by doing so they illuminate why terms other than dress do not fit the descriptions of all possible bodily supplements and modifications. This definition of dress, widely adopted by both dress historians and fashion theorists, greatly helps establish the boundary of the phenomenal aspects of fashion around the body, which is dress itself. Body modifications include tattoos, tight-lacing, hair dye, or piercing, while body supplements comprise body enclosures, handheld objects, shoes, makeup, perfume, or even the smell of a variety of hygiene products. According to Eicher and Roach-Higgins, even the blind can share some element of appreciation of dress through their tactile, auditory, and olfactory senses, though it is not possible for the blind to sense anything through the semaphore of dress (Eicher and Roach-Higgins, 1992b, p.  3). In addition to the radius of all the dress articles possible, the account of dress made by Eicher and Roach-Higgins suggests that dress can be identified by way of the synthesis of imagination through all sensations, to borrow Kant’s terms, and is not just restricted to the visual sense. Coupled with the sphere of the body, fashion as a material reality is the same as dress, and they both pertain to things we arrange through the medium of the body. However, the two are conceived of differently. People in the modern era do not feel that dress and fashion are intrinsically identical. So what makes us cognize them differently? Why do the same objects for which we have exactly the same synthesis

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of presentation lead us toward differing perceptions? What makes us sure that this is an item of fashion or that is a piece of dress? One way to get out of this quandary is to analyze the quality of fashion, which is newness. This element of fashion has been repeatedly indicated by sociologists, philosophers, and semioticians. However, it is Walter Benjamin whose explications of the concept of fashion are most prominent. The “eternal recurrence of the new” (Benjamin 2003, p. 179) and the “tireless purveyor [of newness]” (Benjamin 1999, p. 22) spelled out by Benjamin are probably among the most cited depictions of fashion by contemporary fashion theorists. On account of this characteristic, fashion, unlike dress, cannot be cognized simply through the synthesis of presentations of manifold images, since the key element of fashion, being current, new, or novel, cannot be fathomed, in Kantian terms, without consideration of a transcendental time determination. Put another way, only in the spatiotemporal sequence does the concept of newness stand; which is to say, the perception of something new is not possible without reason’s apperception of the comparison between one thing before and another thing after in the temporal sequence. This unraveling is hinged upon Kant’s schematism, according to which human beings have two distinctive cognitive systems: by intuitions and by concepts. In the former, cognitions are achieved by the sensory impressions via our five senses, which are therefore a posteriori or dependent on impressions, while in the latter, we make a judgment with the aid of a priori intuitions—time and space— which are absolutely independent of all sensory impressions. If we apply these to dress and fashion, we can say the following: Those things that are categorized as objects of dress are cognized by a posteriori intuitions, as we comprehend the characteristics of a dress item by seeing, touching, or smelling it in order to discern the color or the feel, or to determine whether it has been washed, and so on. Even the sounds, or rustle, of different fabrics in motion are distinguishable, and create different impressions.2 On the other hand, those things that are in the realm of fashion are discerned through a priori intuitions, for it is with our apprehension of time and space that we can judge whether an object is new or current or out of date. What implications does this difference between the a priori and a posteriori entail in grappling with fashion? First, it not only offers a yardstick by which to differentiate fashion, which is an outcome of a priori cognition, in a rational mode from dress, whose knowledge is formed by way of a posteriori experience; it also provides a thread of reasoning by means of which fashion can be raised to the level of metaphysics. Second, the fact that the concept of fashion is deduced by a priori reasoning is the premise on which it can be maintained that the incessant pursuit of fashion is directly linked to the seeking of the self, about which Kant’s transcendental idealism can substantiate the modus operandi. The discussion of the first issue is, indeed, a rekindling of the famous debate between rationalism and empiricism in the early modern period of philosophy. The claim of rationalists is that our concepts and knowledge are all shaped through

2  See Donald Clay Johnson and Helen Bradley Foster, eds. Dress Sense: Emotional and Sensory Experiences of the Body and Clothes (Oxford, UK; New York: Berg, 2007).

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r­easoning, while for empiricists, sense experience is their ultimate basis. Against both arguments, Kant proposes that both understanding and sensibility are indispensable in order to cognize the sensible world.3 By Kant’s account, while an empirical object is cognized not just with the understanding but also with the synthesis produced by the imagination, from the manifold images of its (re)presentations given to us by means of our sensibility, the transformation from the analytic unity to the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition as such is made not by general logic but by transcendental logic.4 This informs us of why philosophers, while in search  See the following remark made by Kant:

3

The capacity (a receptivity) to acquire presentations as a result of the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Hence by means of sensibility objects are given to us, and it alone supplies us with intuitions. Through understanding, on the other hand, objects are thought, and from it arise concepts. But all thought must, by means of certain characteristics, refer ultimately to intuitions, whether it does so straightforwardly (directe) or circuitously (indirecte), and hence it must, in us [human beings], refer ultimately to sensibility, because no object can be given to us in any other manner than through sensibility. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996a], A20, B34) Hereafter CPR. Citations are noted below with their identifying in-text letter code. Running counter to the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, for example, Kant himself writes: “To posit sensibility merely in the indistinctness of representations, and intellectuality by comparison in the distinctness of representations, and thereby in a merely formal (logical) distinction of consciousness instead of a real (psychological) one, which concerns not merely the form but also the content of thought, was a great error of the Leibniz-Wolffian school. Their error was, namely, to posit sensibility in a lack (of clarity in our partial ideas), and consequently in indistinctness, and to posit the character of ideas of understanding in distinctness; whereas in fact sensibility is something very positive and an indispensable addition to ideas of understanding, in order to bring forth a cognition …. Sensibility is a subject’s faculty of representation, in so far as it is affected.” (Immanuel Kant. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 29.) 4  See Kant’s description on this matter: Bringing various presentations under a concept (a task dealt with by general logic) is done analytically. But bringing, not presentations but the pure synthesis of presentations, to concepts is what transcendental logic teaches. The first [thing] that we must be given a priori in order to cognize any object is the manifold of pure intuition. The second [thing] is the synthesis of this manifold by the imagination. But this synthesis does not yet yield cognition. The third [thing we need] in order to cognize an object that we encounter is the concepts which give unity to this pure synthesis and which consist solely in the presentation of this necessary synthetic unity. And these concepts rest on the understanding. The same function that gives unity to the various presentations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various presentations in an intuition. This unity—speaking generally—is called pure concept of understanding. Hence the same understanding—and indeed through the same acts whereby it brought about, in concepts, the logical form of a judgment by means of analytic unity—also brings into its presentations a transcendental content, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition as such; and because of this, these presentations are called pure concepts of understanding applying a priori to

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of the concept of fashion, find it challenging to strip the phenomenal part of fashion from the conceptual part, let alone to arrive at the concept of fashion, viz., newness. In fact, the conception of fashion can be arrived at through transcendental logic, not just because the conceptualization of fashion is made by a synthetic unity that has developed from the analytic unity, but also because our spatiotemporal cognition is essential to the ontology as well as to the epistemology of fashion.5 It should be pointed out however that the ontology of fashion cannot antecede the epistemology of fashion. To wit, it is our synthetic a priori cognition that makes viable newness, the concept of fashion, since it is not self-contained but comes into being only with our synthetic a priori cognitive faculty. This is why Kant emphasizes that it is through our faculty of cognition itself, rather than with “a reference of our cognition to things,” that the transcendental is in operation.6 Thus, to grapple with the concept of fashion is nothing but to take in our cognitive process in light of Kantian metaphysics. It is noteworthy that the polemic between rationalists and empiricists, at least in regard to the epistemology of knowledge, can be reduced to the question of whether there are synthetic a priori propositions.7 In respond to this, Kant argues that at issue is not whether there is a synthetic a priori proposition but how this is possible (Kant 2001, p. 18). Indeed, fashion can objects. Bringing such a transcendental content into these presentations is something that general logic cannot accomplish. (CPR, A79, B105) 5  For more clarifications, see Kant’s explanation of Transcendental Logic in CPR, A56, 57. We must not call any a priori cognition transcendental, but must call transcendental (i.e., concerning the a priori possibility or the a priori use of cognition) only that a priori cognition whereby we cognize that—and how—certain presentations (intuitions or concepts) are applied, or are possible, simply a priori. Hence neither space nor any a priori geometric determination of it is a transcendental presentation. Rather, we may call transcendental only the cognition that these presentations are not at all of empirical origin, and the possibility whereby they can nonetheless refer a priori to objects of experience. Similarly, the use of space regarding objects in general would also be transcendental. But if the use of space is limited to objects of the senses only, then it is called empirical. The distinction between the transcendental and the empirical belongs, therefore, only to the critique of cognitions, and does not concern the reference of these cognitions to their object. 6  See Kant’s own description of the transcendental in Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 2nd ed., ed. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 34. My idealism concerns not the existence of things (the doubting of which, however, constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense), since it never came into my head to doubt it; but it concerns the sensuous representation of things, to which space and time especially belong. Regarding space and time and, consequently, regarding all appearances in general, I have only shown that they are neither things (but are mere modes of representation) nor are they determinations belonging to things in themselves. But the word “transcendental,” which for me never means a reference of our cognition to things, but only to our faculty of cognition, was meant to obviate this misconception. 7  See more clarifications on four possible classes of knowledge: analytic a priori, synthetic a priori, analytic a posteriori, and synthetic a posteriori in Georges Dicker, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15–16.

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explicate how a synthetic a priori proposition is possible; fashion itself evidences how synthetic a priori cognition leads us to move away from the analytic unity to the synthetic unity, attesting to the correlation between the two, thereby bringing to light the operation of Kantian metaphysics. A thorough investigation into the relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal of fashion can unmask the peculiar nature of fashion, which cannot sustain itself without synthetic a priori cognition. To reiterate, Kant’s schematism, with its divide between a priori and a posteriori as well as his distinction between analytic and synthetic, helps us disentangle the phenomenal and the conceptual of fashion theoretically: while the former is elicited by an analytic a posteriori judgment and the latter by a synthetic a priori judgment, they are interrelated. This not only uncovers the essence of fashion as a binary concept, but it also brings fashion into the domain of discussion about noumena and phenomena—the realm which we cannot know with our sense impressions and the world of which we can make sense only through sensation. This whole line of thought is possible only because fashion would not be that which we call it were it not for the key element of fashion—newness. Even before Benjamin articulated this, Kant also made a brief remark about fashion in relation to novelty: “Accordingly, it is novelty that makes fashion popular, and to be inventive in all sorts of external forms, even if they often degenerate into something fantastic and somewhat hideous, belongs to the style of courtiers, especially ladies.” (Kant 2006, p. 143)

If consistent, as we believe we are, we never stop experimenting with different styles of fashion, as we have done over the course of modern history. This holds unless we are in a situation where a coercive power or modality restricts freedom of new fashions, commanding us to be the same. Indeed, this condition of incessant human production of fashions throws light on the dilemma between noumena and phenomena, in which countless phenomena of fashions are created to exhibit newness, the idiosyncrasy of fashion as a noumenon, but they can never reach out to that noumenon in toto. That is to say, no fashion stays “fashionable” beyond a certain time limit because once our eyes have become accustomed to it, it is no longer new. Once something that is deemed a fashion lasts a longer life span than it should, it enters into the sphere of custom or “classic,” as for example have blue jeans and jazz. This is the paradox of fashion that acutely discloses the cardinal relation between noumena and phenomena. This relation can never be compromised, as manifested by the endless appearance of new fashions in an attempt to fit in with fashion’s noumenon. Not only does the never-ending invention of fashions of different kinds reveal the relation between noumena and phenomena, but it also substantiates the validity of fashion as both a noumenon and a phenomenon. As far as the noumenal aspect of fashion is concerned, fashion suffices to satisfy the requirement of the positive and negative meanings of a noumenon posited by Kant; that is, fashion as a concept of newness is “an object of a nonsensible intuition,” while it is “not an object of our sensible intuition” (CPR, 1996, B307, B308). Fashion as a noumenon, in the positive meaning of the term, cannot be cognized through the five senses because the newness of a fashion of any kind is not only an

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a priori concept but also is a product of the imagination. On the contrary, as fashion is “not an object of our sensible intuition” in the negative meaning of its noumenon, it needs a priori intuitions, time and space, in order to be conceived, for what we now touch, smell, hear, or see is not in the least new unless there is a time relation between before and now or between past and present from the perspective of now. Certainly, among many simulacra of newness, fashion is the noumenon par excellence in the modern era while, at the same time, it is a phenomenon that perpetually simulates its noumenon. Just like the pure categories, the noumenon, newness itself that is brought out by a priori intuitions, cannot, when separated from all sensibility, prove anything about transcendental use on its own. However, the transcendental logic in newness can be validated by means of a something  =  fashion, that is, a transcendental object as such under the concept of fashion, whose “eternal recurrence” of newness sheds light on what Immanuel Kant says of the characteristics of noumena—in particular of the impossibility of the understanding of noumena through our sensibility, as well as of the certainty of the existence of noumena via our intellectual cognitive faculty. It is owing to the fact that fashion is both a phenomenon and a noumenon which makes it feasible for us to perceive the mechanism of the transcendental logic. Accordingly, fashion is of great significance not only in puzzling out the fundamental of the unattainability of noumena, but also in untangling the contentions among scholars about whether noumena are completely unknowable by the human mind. Namely, we can get the picture of the mechanism of newness by means of fashion, in spite of the fact that nothing can ever reach the state of newness as a constant value. Or, put another way, we can detect the process of the formation of newness in which one thing once called new is replaced by another for the time being, a procedure in operation dialectically within the setting of linear time; yet, as of now, we can in no way know what is to be the next newness. Ontologically speaking, therefore, there is no newness in the empirical world, as nothing remains new under the dynamics of flowing time. In an epistemological sense, however, something new exists forever insofar as our nous is at work in cooperation with the forms of intuition, time and space. As a consequence, the analysis of the workings of newness gives us a hint as to how to clarify the distinction between the noumenon and the thing-in-itself, as following. While neither is an object of our sensible intuition, newness as a noumenon can be specified as the thinking of something new as such—“something in which I abstract from all form of sensible intuition” (CPR, 1996, A252). On the other hand, the thing-in-itself in the sphere of newness is simply unknowable, for nothing subsumed under the concept of newness is ever new. Something may be entitled to be called new for now, but in the blink of an eye, literally speaking, it is no longer new. Furthermore, something new in the future has yet to become knowable, while something new in the past is already meaningless from the perspective of now. Put in a nutshell, newness, the noumenon (intelligibilia)8 of the concept of fashion, is an intellectual intuition

 One can identify this correlation between noumenon and intelligibilia by Kant in CPR, A249.

8

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about the genesis of newness, whereas the thing-in-itself in newness is impossible to get a firm grip on, as it is independent of the forms of intuition, time and space.9 The observation about the concept of fashion that has been made so far helps to rebut the arguments (1) against the existence of noumena and things-in-themselves and (2) for the indistinguishableness or semblance between the two terms. The distrust in Kantian development of these concepts is expressed, for instance, by H. J. Paton: “In their empirical use, concepts are applied to sensible objects, which may be described as appearances, or more technically, phenomena. In their transcendental use, concepts are applied—or such, at least, is the intention—to things as they are in themselves and as they can be grasped by understanding without the aid of sense. Such objects are called ‘noumena,’ that is, understandable or intelligible (and not sensible) objects. Thus, the opposition between phenomena and noumena corresponds to the opposition between the empirical and the transcendental use of concepts. We have now seen that there is no transcendental use of concepts. It is therefore natural enough to conclude that there are no such things as noumena, and even that there are no things-in-themselves.” (Paton 2007 [1936], p. 439).

Paton categorically asserts that no transcendental use of concepts has been found and, therefore, there are neither noumena nor things-in-themselves. To the contrary, as I have discussed fashion is that which vindicates Kantian transcendental use, thus not only testifying to the existence of noumena but, even further, making clear the distinction between noumena and things-in-themselves. The philosophization about fashion reveals how the unyielding appearance of a transcendental object as such subsumed under the concept of fashion makes it possible for the noumenon, newness, to be grasped by our reason, although the thing-in-itself in newness continues to abide in the land of the unknowable. This clears up Paton’s other concern about Kant: “Kant adds that the transcendental object is ‘only the representation of appearances under the concept of an object in general, a concept which is determinable through the manifold of appearances.’ I do not know what this means, unless the transcendental object is being identified with the act of thinking or the unity of apperception. I do not think this is very intelligible in itself; but if this is the meaning, it can apply only to the transcendental object in its second sense.” (Ibid., pp. 443–44)

Of course, a something  =  fashion, i.e., a transcendental object as such, does not provide anything from which we acquire a concept. Yet, the unique character of fashion, which is the ceaseless appearance of a something = fashion, occasions the opportunity for our apperception to grasp its concept—in fact, its noumenon—by

9  In this respect, it is not incorrect to say, as Sebastian Gardner puts forward, that noumenon is an epistemological concept and the thing in itself is a bare ontological concept: while the former is the concept of an object of a certain mode of cognition; the latter is the concept of an object apart from categories and spatiotemporal intuitions. See Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 130.

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means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in time as an a priori condition.10 In order to decipher this, it is necessary to diagnose what kinds of judgments are employed when conceiving the concept of newness. It is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the knowledge of newness is achieved by a synthetic judgment. No predicate shall ever be found in newness, for the very fact that a predicate of any kind is already affirmed to belong to newness absolutely nullifies the ontic of newness. Put another way, any quality in newness that has been already acknowledged is not new anymore for now, as it belies the raison d’être of newness. However, the question as to whether the concept of newness is arrived at by either a priori judgment or a posteriori judgment cannot be easily resolved. In point of fact, neither alone accounts for the appearance of newness. Only with both a priori judgment and a posteriori judgment joined together can the concept of newness constitute its existence. This is because the cognition surrounding newness is not pure, as Kant elucidates: “Every change has its cause is an a priori proposition; yet it is not pure, because change is a concept that can be obtained only from experience” (CPR, 1996, B3). While newness, the concept of fashion, requires both a priori and a posteriori judgments in league with each other to conceptualize, to say that newness is synthetic a priori knowledge is not fallacious. I mean, this exposition is not incorrect but incomplete, since not all a priori cognitions are pure. This has confounded some Kant scholars. Let me first introduce Kant’s own explication on the relation between cognition and experience: “There can be no doubt that all our cognition begins with experience. For what else might rouse our cognitive power to its operation if objects stirring our senses did not do so? In part these objects by themselves bring about presentations. In part they set in motion our understanding’s activity, by which it compares these presentations, connects or separates them, and thus processes the raw material of sense impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience.” (Ibid., A1)

Notwithstanding, Kant also holds that not all our cognition “arises from experience,” although it “starts with experience” (Ibid.) In this regard, it can be said that a priori cognitions occur absolutely independently of all experience. (Ibid.). Kant, nevertheless, adds that “we call a priori cognitions pure if nothing empirical whatsoever is mixed in with them” (Ibid., B3), implying that not all a priori cognitions  Compared to the concept to newness, for example, the intuition of a house goes through a different process, that is, the synthetic unity of the manifold in space which is the category of the synthesis of the homogeneous in an intuition as such, i.e., the category of magnitude. See Kant’s own description:

10

Hence, e.g., when I turn the empirical intuition of a house into a perception by apprehending the intuition’s manifold, then in this apprehension I use as a basis the necessary unity of space and of outer sensible intuition as such; and I draw, as it were, the house’s shape in conformity with this synthetic unity of the manifold in space. But this same unity, if I abstract from the form of space, resides in the understanding, and is the category of the synthesis of the homogeneous in an intuition as such, i.e., the category of magnitude. Hence the synthesis of apprehension, i.e., perception, must conform through to that category. (CPR, B162, B163)

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are pure. Some may find this baffling, but it has to be stressed that sense impressions are mere inputs, while our cognitive power is a necessary, universal condition of our a priori cognition (Ibid., B4). Further clarifications call for an examination into the relation between a priori and the transcendental. “If from your experiential concept of a body you gradually omit everything that is empirical in a body—the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the impenetrability—there yet remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has now entirely vanished), and this space you cannot omit [from the concept]. Similarly, if from your empirical concept of any object whatever, corporeal or incorporeal, you omit all properties that experience has taught you, you still cannot take away from the concept the property through which you think the object either as a substance or as attaching to a substance (even though this concept of substance is more determinate than that of an object as such). Hence you must, won over by the necessity with which this concept of substance forces itself upon you, admit that this concept resides a priori in your power.” (Ibid., B6)

Indeed, the “property through which you think the object either as a substance or as attaching to a substance” is the remnant of a transcendental object as such. What I am trying to bring to light is this: while functioning as a correlative of the unity of apperception of fashion and as the presentation of appearances under the concept of fashion, a something = fashion, i.e., a transcendental object as such subsumed under the concept of fashion makes it feasible for us to grasp the concept of fashion—that is, newness—as well as to comprehend the composite relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal of fashion. Again, this is not to say that a transcendental object as such of any kind points to any concept. It is the distinct nature of fashion as both a phenomenon and a noumenon, with the eternal recurrence of the appearance of its phenomenal toward its noumenal, that assists us to look into the transcendental logic.11 This is why both the phenomenal and the conceptual of fashion are not to be dispensed with in getting a grip on the mechanism of newness in association with fashion. Assuredly, the phenomenal do not lead us to directly conceptualize fashion, but they “rouse our cognitive power to its operation,” to borrow Kant’s expression (CPR, 1996, A1). To recast, it is not the pure, abstract thought about newness but the continuous appearance of a something  =  newness as a form of fashion that prompts us to formulate the concept of newness. In the view of Kant, therefore, the fact that our reason knows a priori with apodictic certainty that there will be something new as a form of fashion, comprises the necessary part of the proposition that newness, the concept of fashion, belongs to the realm of metaphysics. Kant utters that “Metaphysics, as a natural disposition of reason, is actual; but if considered by itself alone (as the analytical solution of the third principal question 11

 Regarding transcendental logic, Kant says the following: We shall expect, then, that there may perhaps be concepts referring a priori to objects. Not being pure or sensible intuitions, but being merely acts of pure thoughts, they would be concepts, but such concepts as originate neither empirically nor aesthetically. In this expectation, the, we frame in advance the idea of a science of pure understanding and of rational cognition, whereby we think objects completely a priori. Such a science would determine the origin, the range, and the objective validity of such rational cognitions. It would have to be called transcendental logic. (CPR, B82)

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showed), it is dialectical and illusory” (Kant 2001, p. 99). In order for metaphysics to claim to be a science, Kant goes on to say that a critique of reason must itself demonstrate the mechanism of a priori concepts, especially the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori, while identifying the roles of sensibility, understanding, and reason, together with a complete table of the categories (Ibid.). As Kant himself has already declared, we do not need to ask whether synthetic knowledge a priori is possible, in that the existence of pure mathematics and pure physics confirms that pure a priori synthetic cognitions are “actual and given.”12 Instead, Kant proposes that we find out how synthetic knowledge a priori is possible (Ibid.). As some shrewd readers may have figured out, it is newness, the concept of fashion, that can decrypt how it is possible. Newness, the concept of fashion, is far from pure, while being a synthetic cognition a priori, which makes fashion that which proves itself as the evidence of synthetic cognitions a priori from experience, illustrating how a synthetic cognition a priori is possible with an a priori relation to objects divulged, while being in essence a synthetic cognition. The cognition surrounding newness, which can by no means avoid spatiotemporal intuitions, is pure under no circumstances. As Kant states, “In terms of time, therefore, no cognition in us precedes experience, and all our cognition begins with experience” (CPR, 1996, A1). Added to this, the fact that human beings cannot help awaiting a priori something new affirms that synthetic cognitions a priori are not just possible but actual. Otherwise, the temporality of human history to date finds no justification of being seen as successive without making it a point that moving forward with something new is evidence for this succession. Who would claim that there will be nothing new in the form of fashion in the time called modernity? Properly speaking, however, the topic of newness in conjunction with fashion is part of metaphysics that is confined to the modern era, although the pure, abstract concept of newness is universal. This throws light on the fact that fashion and modernity have strong ontological relations to each other. So far I have unfolded the attributes of fashion in light of metaphysics. But few would believe that fashion remains in the world of metaphysics. Then, what has this to do with our everyday life? How do metaphysical explications about fashion relate to human beings? Surely, the metaphysical analysis of the connection between newness and fashion exposes how the pursuit of fashion is no more than that of the self according to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Therefore, Svendsen is right: fashion is all about the pursuance of identity.13 Nonetheless, he is also wrong: fashion itself does not dissolve identity, but it is time that is in vicissitude that is the cause of the 12

 See Kant’s own description of this in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 17.

But it happens, fortunately, that though we cannot assume metaphysics to be an actual science, we can say with confidence that certain pure a priori synthetic cognitions are actual and given, namely, pure mathematics and pure physics; for both contain propositions which are everywhere recognized as apodictically certain, partly by mere reason, partly by universal agreement from experience, and yet as independent of experience. 13  See Lars Svendsen’s conclusion, especially p. 157 in Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion, 2006).

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feeling of our weakening identity. Let me explain how pairing fashion with time is related to the self’s unending quest for itself. From the point of view of Kantian logic, as I have analyzed, the tie between the cognition of things and their concept in the sphere of fashion is conceived synthetically as well as a priori. This gives rise to my other thesis that the concept of newness comes into being contingent upon the “existence of my thinking nature,” to use Kant’s expression (CPR, 1996, A384). This is grounded on Kant’s argument not just that how one is sure that it is one’s self to cognize objects through presentations is, indeed, an existential question about the self (Ibid., B154–B156), but that it is the form of time that provides a clue to resolving the uncertainty of the self, as Kant further contends: “I exist as an intelligence” that is subject to a condition in which temporal relations are the key determinative (Ibid., B157–B159). It is of immense significance to comprehend fashion in tandem with newness because thought’s activities regarding something new are, in effect, a legitimate act of cognizing oneself. In order to keep up its identity, ontologically speaking, fashion requires all the branches of the cogito proposed by Deleuze:14: that is, “I conceive” a new fashion, “I judge” the fashion, “I remember” the previous fashion, “I imagine” a new fashion, and “I perceive” the relation between the past fashion and a new one. By no means is it possible for fashion in the embryo to be conceived without the power of imagination, which is the driving force in the production of something new. The inception of a new fashion cannot dispense with remembrance and judgment, as well; for something new is not conceivable unless there is a faculty of thought that remembers the past or current examples on which judgments are made, in order to create a novelty in comparison to the ones that are already in the mind. Our perception of the connection between bygones and newness is a high-level activity of thought, because it leads us to question the ontology in difference as well as the time disparity between them. Hence, all these subdivisions of thought, as a set of temporal conditions indispensable for the genesis of fashion, attest not only to the temporal changes in thought in relation to fashion but also to the capacity of thought to capture the flow of time, within which the I is able to cognize my unity of apperception and self-consciousness. Some may maintain that almost everything is conceived, judged, remembered, imagined, and/or perceived; however, these divisions of thought as a full collection of provisos are not necessarily fundamental to its identity, which is utterly dependent on temporal relations. Undoubtedly, the focal point of Kant’s argument about subjectivity stems from his proposition that time is the form of an inward intuition and the formal a priori condition of all appearances (CPR, 1996, A34, B50–B51), while space is the form of an outward intuition (Ibid., A23–25, B37–40). Therefore, time as a subjective condition of our intuition and of experience is the determinant of the self, as Kant puts it: “By means of inner sense the mind intuits itself, of its inner state. Although inner sense provides no intuition of the soul itself as an object, yet there is a determinate form under which alone [as condition] we can intuit the soul’s inner state. [That form is time.] Thus

 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 138.

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everything belonging to our inner determinations is presented in relations of time. Time cannot be intuited outwardly, any more than space can be intuited as something within us.” (Ibid., A23)

In consequence, in view of Kant’s transcendental idealism, thought’s activities in relation to fashion under a different temporal modality are the process by which thought cognizes the dominant role that the self plays, as well as the (re)presentations of objects. Conversely, something new as a form of fashion is discernible only through a correct appraisal of the transition of time by the thinking subject, I, not just as a simple receptive apperception but as an independent subject. Yet, Kant makes it clear that the cognition of the self through inner experience allows us to perceive us as we appear to ourselves only, not as we are in ourselves (Kant 2006, p. 30), which is, in actual fact, congruous with Kant’s transcendental idealism, whose central thesis is that it is impossible for the human being to comprehend things-in-themselves. “In the self-cognition of the human being through inner experience he does not make what he has perceived in himself, for this depends on impressions (the subject matter of representations) that he receives. Therefore he is so far enduring, that is, he has a representation of himself as he is affected by himself, which according to its form depends merely on the subjective property of his nature, which should not be interpreted as belonging to the object, even though he still also has the right to attribute it to the object (here his own person), but with the qualification that he can only recognize himself as an object through this representation in experience as he appears to himself, not as he, the observed, in himself.” (Ibid.)

Then is our endeavor to bring to the surface the mode of operation of self-­ cognition a dead-end? In reality, Kant does not disappoint us by presenting a cue about how to perceive us as we are in ourselves. He holds that the cognition of ourselves as we are in ourselves is nothing but the consciousness of our freedom, which is a consciousness of “pure spontaneity,” in other words, of the rule of our actions and omission (Ibid., pp. 30–32). He continues to say that self-­consciousness, that is, the consciousness of freedom, is identifiable only through the “highest practical reason” (Ibid., p. 32). Even with this stumbling block, Kant’s expounding on self-consciousness does not tarnish at all the significance of fashion as a means of seeking after the self. Rather, it explains why we cannot help stopping searching for the self with recourse to fashion. The cognition of ourselves as we appear to us by way of fashion is temporary, as nothing that is linked to our inner determinations can avoid its relation to time. Indeed, any effort to find out about the self is destined to be transitory according to the logic of Kant. In this sense, the descriptions of modernity, “transient,” “fleeting,” and “contingent,” by Charles Baudelaire (1981, p. 403), are not just a poetic aesthetization of time but an apropos apprehension of the time when individuals, i.e., the modern subjects, are put in a situation in which they must realize themselves on their own. Unlike in previous eras, during which aristocratic, religious, and traditional values were cherished, modernity opens up a stage on which individuals perform their roles without a premade choreography from the outside, where they must play impromptu while at the same time communicating with the collective. Fashion is that which serves as a medium for displaying one’s identity while also demonstrating one’s association with the outer world. The

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interminable appearance of fashion in the modern world evinces the specificity of modernity, as well as our ongoing effort to pursue self-cognition that cannot be kept separate from the temporal relations about which Kant provides a solid metaphysical foundation. Thus, the awareness of time during modernity is no more accidental than is the affinity between fashion and modernity. Nevertheless, as one can imagine, the enigma of how we can sense ourselves as we are in ourselves is far from easy to crack. Only with a good, unimpaired understanding of freedom that moves away from the categorical imperative in Kant’s moral philosophy can we solve the riddle.15 Once the deep-rooted liaison between freedom and reason is unknotted, we can see why fashion is still an indispensable part of the self pursuing itself—not just as it appears to itself but also as it is in itself.

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1981. The Painter of Modern Life. In Selected Writings on Art and Artist, trans P. E. Charvet. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. Central Park. In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Eicher, Joanne B., and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins. 1992a. Definition and Classification of Dress: Implications for Analysis of Gender roles. In Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, ed. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher, 8–28. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1992b. Dress and Identity. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10 (4): 1–8. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W.S. Pluhar and introduction by P. Kitcher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. ———. 2001. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 2nd ed. trans. P.  Carus and ed. J.  W. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. ———. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paton, H.J. 2007 (1936). Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Vol. 2. London/New York: Allen & Unwin/Macmillan. Svendsen, L. 2006. Fashion: A philosophy, trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion.

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 For further discussion, see Chap. 3. “Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique.”

Chapter 3

Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique

Fashion is as much a repression of the individual as it is an expression of individuality. Although self-contradictory, this should not sound nonsensical to those who are conversant with Hegelian dialectic: “by Dialectic is meant the indwelling tendency outwards by which the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen in its true light, and shown to be the negation of them” (Hegel 1974, p. 95). With the help of the insights of Georg Simmel, the internal antinomies of fashion become more comprehensible. The antithetical forces between imitation and differentiation in fashion, unfolded by Simmel in The Philosophy of Fashion (1904), are dialectical (Frisby and Featherstone, “Introduction to the texts,” 1997, p. 14; Kaiser 2001, p. 94). Just as dialectical as the dynamic of imitation and differentiation is another task fashion performs in modern societies as a domain in which individuals demonstrate their concession to limiting their freedom, thereby contributing to consolidating societal freedom. As Simmel writes in passing: “The frequent change of fashion represents a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect forms one of the essential complements of the increased social and political freedom” (Simmel 1957, p. 556). If fashion still remains perplexing to us, it is because the conflict between freedom and conformity expressed by way of fashion cannot be construed with ease, as Theodor W.  Adorno puts it regarding the complexity of the concept of freedom, which is antinomian itself: “The difficulties, the theoretical difficulties connected with the concept of freedom ultimately represent something like an interiorization or sublimation of that very real conflict between the doctrines of freedom and conformity in bourgeois society itself” (Adorno 2006, p. 212). Adorno also suggests that this mediation between freedom and conformity takes place in the principle of individuation, for which the concept of spontaneity works as a unity of mutually exclusive components (Ibid., p. 217). Most helpful in getting a grasp on fashion and its relation to freedom is his account of spontaneous impulse, the unreasonable territory of freedom, as opposed to the traditional definition of freedom in philosophy; that is, freedom, free behavior, is tantamount to behavior in tandem with reason, as regarded by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant (Ibid., p. 213). This provides a ­philosophical © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 E. J. Kang, A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_3

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thread of analysis about fashion and its role in the formation of freedom and unfreedom, because fashion is thought of as a psychological domain1 in which, out of free impulse or spontaneous modes of behavior, individuals choose from that which has no intrinsic difference at all. However, even spontaneity is not a simple, straightforward psychological impulse. As pointed out by Adorno, for example, Kant’s concept of spontaneity, which is equivalent to the concept of apprehension in intuition in “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding,” is not only an active, thinking behavior by which a unity of consciousness comes to the surface, but also an unconscious, involuntary activity (Ibid., pp. 214–215). To put it differently, spontaneous impulse is both somatic and mental at once: “in all probability these two aspects cannot be separated out entirely” because, “when we act on impulse, we regress to a phase in which the separation between outer and inner is not as clearcut. …” (Ibid., p. 235). In fact, this duality is also found in fashion, a locus where somatic reflex and careful thought meet with an action in which consciousness comes into being. Before I embark on a probe into fashion in terms of freedom, I shall discuss why philosophical thought experimentation is not successful in accounting either for the interconnection between consciousness and the will or for the dialectic between freedom and unfreedom. It is also Adorno who brings it to our attention that experimenta crucis made in philosophy in attempts to apply the concepts of freedom or unfreedom have failed to provide a valid argument about the relations among free will, consciousness and action (Ibid., p. 222). To illustrate, one of the most famous experimenta crucis, Buridan’s ass, the creature equidistantly placed between two indistinguishable piles of hay, both equally tempting, would die of hunger. This demonstrates the inadequacy of the application of the concept of freedom as well as a lack of cogency, as do other similar thought experiments (Ibid., pp. 222–229). The most obvious fault in such philosophical thought experiments is that they equate reason with the will, as rendered by the poor ass’s inability to decide which way to go in order to satisfy its needs owing to its reasoning based on the equally enticing haystacks. Another problem is that an abstract discussion about freedom and unfreedom introduced by unrealistic, hypothetical situations does not tell us anything about the concept of consciousness, without which the will does not exist (Ibid., p. 230). Besides, thought experimentations do not take into consideration the rift between consciousness and action (Ibid., pp. 235–237). All these issues, as a matter of fact, amount to the question of impulse according to Adorno’s line of thought for three reasons: first, the will is the same as impulse as far as freedom is concerned;2 1  Here “psychological” actually means “meta-psychological” as one can see from the development of Adorno’s argument. He first uses the term “psychological” before introducing what he calls “meta-psychological.” This transformation is found in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. (2006, pp. 190–238), described as meta-psychological (ibid., p. 220), extra-mental (Ibid., p. 220), or prior to the thinking (Ibid., 216). Adorno argues that this “additional” domain is where the ideas of freedom and unfreedom within the subject are shaped, for it is the place for the “prehistory of individuation as such” (Ibid., p. 213). 2  Refer especially to the lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (2006).

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second, only in real actions is impulse or the will found; and last, a spontaneous action, which is evidence of freedom, is brought about by the joining of impulse and consciousness (Ibid., pp. 235–240). Summing up, key to penetrating the concept of freedom from the perspective of Adorno is impulse as well as reason. That is to say, whereas the Kantian doctrine of freedom is grounded in a realm where reason exercises its power, since freedom, enlightenment rationality par excellence, is the “only possible defining feature of humanity” as opposed to animality (Ibid., p.  178), Adorno calls upon us to include the impulsive nature in human beings in discussions of the concept of freedom, arguing that reason and impulse must be mutually interdependent in order for freedom to make its appearance (Ibid., p.  238). As spelled out by Adorno, human beings are “simultaneously both free and unfree” (Ibid., p. 218); in other words, the antinomian relation between reason and nature is that which makes the concept of freedom dialectical. Indeed, human behaviors in everyday life are hardly straightforward. It is difficult to say that some are rational or logical all the time while others are completely spontaneous. In fact, when we consider the countless human decisions and actions, few are based purely on impulse or purely on rationality, independent of each other. As such, it is not amiss to say that there is no clear-cut division between the two in the mundane choices human beings make in life. Admittedly, there are some areas in which a continuous, focused effort has to be made during the decision-making process, and yet these are far from “personal” business, as they are regulated or affected by some sort of determination, morality, or social mores. This is what Kant dubs the categorical imperative: categorical, as it is unconditionally exercised and objectively necessary; imperative, as the human subject ought to comply with an imperative—a practical rule of reason (Kant 1996, p. 13). Kant argues that obligation is a necessary part of a free action (Ibid., p. 15), and free choice is determined by pure reason (Ibid., p.  13). The choice determined by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus) is animal choice (arbitrium brutum), whereas human choice is not determined by impulse, notwithstanding that impulse can affect it (Ibid., pp. 13–14). In short, Kant’s doctrine of freedom is a pure, rational concept; freedom of choice is independent of sensible impulse (Ibid.). In contrast to this, Adorno contends that impulse is as essential as reason in the execution of freedom. The following remarks by Kant and Adorno concerning the relation between the will and freedom further help us see the disparity between their thoughts. Kant says, “The will itself, strictly speaking, has no determining ground; insofar as it can determine choice, it is instead practical reason itself” (Ibid., p. 13). However, Adorno writes, “I have told you that the impulse of which I have been speaking is the same as the will and that its existence is the strongest and most immediate proof that there is such a thing as freedom” (Adorno 2006, p. 235). As to how blind nature is absolutely crucial for the constitution of freedom, Adorno himself anticipates that his readers find this puzzling, as it is full of contradictions.3 The dialectical twist found  Regarding this topic, Adorno expresses his concern as follows:

3

I can imagine that many of you who have not been trained or are disinclined to think dialectically will want to object at this point. You will want to tell me that I am appealing to an

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in the constitution of freedom, from the perspective of Adorno, is intertwined not only with the fact that reactions emanating from reflexive and blind nature are not absolutely alien to the ego, something which is indispensable in order for us to feel that we are autonomous, but also with the fact that the phantasm of freedom is a combination of reason and nature (Ibid., p. 235). Adorno’s main argument regarding the topic of freedom rests on his criticism of Kant, in particular, who claims that reason determines all principles that cause us to act and proposes the concept of categorical imperative, the motivation of human action, in connection with his moral philosophy. In opposition to Kant’s idea of freedom, in which reason is nothing but the ability to think in strict conformity with laws, stands Adorno’s argument that our consciousness and will are not the same (Ibid., p. 231). What this entails is of greatest significance indeed, because it is the point of departure for regarding freedom not as being determined by reason alone. This is seen not only in the development of freedom individuals feel about themselves, but also in the philosophy of history.4 To put it differently, the disparateness between consciousness and will is no less essential a component of the topic of freedom in the philosophy of history than it is in the personal or subjective domain of freedom. It is the connection between freedom and the bourgeoisie that can provide a hint about how this is so. According to Adorno, freedom became a philosophical quest with the emergence of the bourgeoisie. This is to say that the bourgeois mode of freedom facilitates the liberation of human beings so as to move beyond the world of the Kantian categorical imperative. In order to demonstrate the schism between premodern obligation and human consciousness or rationality, Adorno uses the case of Hamlet. His dilemma illustrates how the complexity of human behavior unfolds, and how the philosophical development of freedom has been enmeshed with the degree or the kind of freedom individual humans actually exercise. As expounded on by Adorno, what Hamlet is situated in is not just personal distress or a dilemma but also the gap between inner and outer in the philosophy of history (Ibid., p. 234). To be more precise, as per Adorno, the rupture between consciousness and action or will and between inner and outer as a totality is the philosophy of history, particularly of history between the premodern and the modern (Ibid., p. 231).What Hamlet delineates is “two epochs” that “stand on a knife’s edge,” but no matter how indecisive he is while entrapped between the two, the prince of Denmark puts into practice his moral and political ideas, in the end, with

element that is supposed to be absolutely crucial for the constitution of freedom; and at the same time, if I trace the genesis, the origins, of this element back to its ultimate roots, I find myself back at something that has been determined by blind nature. It is my belief that this objection, which I have raised on your behalf, brings us to a point that is of crucial importance for philosophical thought as such. . . . you need to free yourselves completely and utterly from the idea that everything that has ever existed is able to preserve itself in a form identical with what it once was. (Ibid., p. 236) 4  For more explanation by Adorno on this topic, see Lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965.

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the help of what Adorno calls the “additional factor” (das Hinzutretende)—the irrational factor—by which the protagonist perforce takes an action in order to fulfill them, thereby “breaking the spell of thinking.”5 As to how the additional factor makes its appearance, Adorno says, “it was only through the participation of consciousness in actions that were originally blind and reflexive in nature that this additional factor that I regard as a constitutive element of the will came into being” (Ibid., pp. 235–236). For him, this “additional factor,” the integral part of the constitution of will and freedom, is nothing but an element of spontaneous action or impulse, which is both somatic and mental (Ibid., p.  235). Thus, the moment in which impulse makes us feel at home, in other words, feel autonomous, is, according to him, when “we feel we have been released from the spiritual prison of mere consciousness and this impulse enables us to enter, to take a leap—call it what you will—into the realm of objects that is normally barred to us by our rationality” (Ibid., p. 237). However, this does not mean that human autonomy is arrived at only by impulse, as Adorno also points out; human nature is neither suppressed by reason nor blinded by impulse (Ibid.). Yet, reason alone cannot make us feel autonomous either, in that there is a discontinuity between reason and the will, too (Ibid., p. 256). Concerned with objectivity (of logical reason), not with the will itself or other wants, “reason has its origin in the suppression of impulse and impulse of the will,” says Adorno (Ibid., pp. 256–257). Based on the analysis by Adorno, all in all, the relation between reason and impulse is antithetical, which, however, is a necessary prerequisite to the constitution of freedom and to our feeling of being autonomous, for it is the chasm between reason and impulse that makes it possible for the human subject to find some latitude outside the ambit of the rational thought process. In other words, neither reason nor impulse alone can make us feel free, but the dialectical relation between reason and impulse is the condition under which we pursue freedom and exercise autonomy. The dialectical truth in freedom that stems from the union between reason and impulse in human behaviors is the underpinning of Adorno’s argument against the traditional definition of freedom in philosophy, as established by Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, according to whom freedom is freedom of the rational subject. Now that the correlation between spontaneity and rationality in the formation of freedom has been revealed, we have moved one step forward in grasping why fashion is something which proffers a theoretical model for revealing the mechanism of freedom and unfreedom in modern times. Unlike experimenta crucis concerning the concept of freedom or unfreedom, whose abstraction by no means gives a concrete account of our spontaneous actions, fashion brings to light how real action is related to our feeling—we are free and our actions seem to be identical with us as subject— which occurs only where our actions are mediated or induced by our consciousness. The polarity between reason and impulse is a critical part of human behaviors or decisions. And yet, not to be overlooked is the fact that they are not in equilibrium 5  See Lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, especially, 234–238.

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at all times. Unlike Buridan’s ass dying of hunger in a dilemma over equivalent of piles of hay, human beings can leave off the equipoise owing to what Adorno calls the additional factor. The story of the wretched donkey offers a clue not only about some important element of human behaviors and decisions but also about the key logic of fashion. Let us look at this in terms of our everyday morning ritual. We pick certain garments out of our closet each day, no matter how limited or abundant the wardrobe is. While in this routine, what is it that leads us to make a decision, when faced with options, say, between a two-button jacket and a three-button jacket, between a yellow dress and a green dress, or between a plaid shirt and a striped shirt? Of course, there are some special days or occasions that require specific outfits or dress code, such as interviews, weddings, business meetings, and so on. Even the weather can be an important factor to consider in our daily decisions regarding dress styles. In spite of the restrictive conditions by which our decisions are influenced, there are a lot more days or moments when we are left free to choose between two or among multiple options in the realm of fashion. Even under strict restrictions or rules of special occasions, there still remains a chance that one may make a choice. Suppose you have a funeral to attend in a couple of hours, and you have two equally functional, modest, comfortable, and morally or socially acceptable black dresses of current style to choose from. The two black dresses, which are logically effective or appropriate for the specific case, are nothing other than equally tempting haystacks for a donkey. You cannot maintain that you logically have chosen one over the other, for the reason that they have different designs with different skirt lengths, different fabrics, different necklines, and so forth, as long as they both suffice for the conventions of a funeral. As you already know in your heart, whatever has made you pick out one instead of the other has its origin in your wants, needs, or desires, which are definitely heterogeneous from rational thought. You have made the decision, maybe because you thought you would look charming or attractive in your choice while still meeting the social or moral requirements of a place where condolences and grief are expected. You may have had some other issues or concerns, but whatever reason you come up with, the two dresses you had to choose from are no different to you than the two piles of hay are to Buridan’s ass. Having been accused of its frivolity, vanity, caprice, or whatever linked with somatic impulse, fashion cannot be suddenly claimed to be an object of rational consideration. In other words, items of fashion to be selected are objects of impulsive decisions, for they do not have categorical imperativeness in which “ought” is a necessary part of one’s decisions. The circumstance of a funeral, under which the most important criteria, that is, the decorum of a funeral, is easy to identify as the single most critical factor in the decision-making process, helps us see why the other variables are not necessarily categorical or imperative. Herein lies the pith of the logic of fashion. Namely, “I,” in the domain of fashion, find myself unable to provide any reasonable explanations or vindications as to why one fashion is better than another. All “I” can explain is that “I” do like to choose one over the other simply because “I” want to. It is almost impossible to explain why today “I” want to wear a white shirt instead of an off-white shirt or a cardigan instead of a pullover, or go for dark blue instead of black, and then the next day “I” want the opposite. This

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caprice, or whatever you want to call, is related to our feeling of being autonomous, which also has to do with the progress of human freedom, as freedom in modern times is hard to dissociate from our personal, subjective wants, needs, or desires, compared to the Kantian objective, rational freedom. The message given by Adorno, who expatiates on the subject of freedom, is that our feeling of being autonomous, which originates from bodily impulse, is as important as what rational thought process alone can bring with it. Skeptical about the kind of freedom with which fashion is related, Svendsen, however, argues that freedom achieved by most spontaneous or impulsive choices in the domain of fashion does not make any substantive difference in real life (Svendsen 2006, p. 156), just as Adorno and Walter Benjamin have criticized the ceaseless appearance of the newest thing, which for them is nothing but eternal sameness and does not change anything substantial.6 Nevertheless, Svendsen also admits that freedom arrived at with choices available to be selected and possibilities to be exercised spontaneously is absolutely an indispensable part of our feeling of being a free subject.7 Our reflexive, spontaneous, and impulsive decisions or 6  Both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno share negative views on the eternal sameness that is linked with the modern era.

Modernity, the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that “the same thing happens over and over” .… but rather that the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is newest never alters— that this “newest” remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation. To determine the totality of traits which define this “modernity” is to represent hell.” ˂G, 17˃ (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 842–843). The intertwining of eternal sameness and the new in the exchange relation manifests itself in the imagos of progress in bourgeois industrialism. What seems paradoxical is that these imagos grow old and that anything new should ever make its appearance at all, given that technology ensures that the eternal sameness of the exchange principle is intensified to the point where repetition prevails throughout the sphere of production. (Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 19641965, 171). What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture. (Theodore W.  Adorno “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In Theodore W.  Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited with an introduction by M. Bernstein, 98–106 [London and New York: Routledge, 2005], 100). 7  The following is Svendsen’s account. Pluralism in fashion does not necessarily make us any freer. …For Lipovetsky, fashion represents the opposite of tyranny: fashion promotes freedom rather than coercion. …The objection can of course be raised to Lipovetsky that even if the freedom to choose between brand x and brand y, between two, three, four buttons on a suit, or between two lengths of skirt, is undeniably a form of freedom, it is one based on a choice that does not constitute any real difference. Despite this, we apparently allow ourselves to be convinced that these actually are important differences. Our consumption, at least, would seem to indicate we allow ourselves to be so. (Svendsen, Fashion: A philosophy, 156).

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b­ ehaviors in relation to fashion, granted as being nonessential to rationality, belong to a sphere in which the self’s quest for autonomy is unmistakably witnessed, since such decisions or behaviors are often blamed for their irrational, narcissistic or egoistic motivations as having roots in our desire to be ourselves. Hence, it is far from a coincidence that the projection of ego-enhancement or self-esteem is one of the main tactics of advertisements, not just for fashion items but also for consumer goods, including cosmetics and hygiene products of all sorts in our time. “Because you’re worth it,”8 L’Oréal’s decades-long catchphrase, with occasional minor revisions, is among the most well-known. This kind of mantra, found mostly in the language or images of fashion-related campaigns, is geared to appeal to the ego’s sense of uniqueness rather than to rationality based on the advertising campaigns’ objective quality.9 The point I am trying to make about the tie-in between fashion and ego-orientation is that fashion discloses how reflexive impulse relates to the subject’s desire for autonomy. The link between impulse and the self’s pursuance of autonomy spliced by the ego-principle is in no sense trivial, considering that modern conditions have reached a point at which thought, another name for reason, has been reified as autonomous, as indicated by Max Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, p. 19). This reification of thought in turn leads to a regression away from freedom, for it casts a shadow of some element of unfreedom, that is, the dependence over reason’s own autonomy encroaching on the territory of the self.10 Here comes the justification of fashion as an arena in which the individual as subject finds leeway to exercise his or her freedom. To elaborate, in the sphere of fashion the individual feels that he or she has options to choose from in the most spontaneous manner possible: either to follow a fashion or to disregard it; however, ego is absent in neither of these cases. If the individual opts out of a popular fashion trend, this act demonstrates his or her will not to abide by the rules of the collective. It is not difficult to identify such an act as the ego’s desire to be distinct from the majority. On the other hand, the adoption of an item or phenomenon of fashion, which entails the individual’s subjugation to the laws of the collective, also displays his or her autonomy, the power of self-determination to choose to comply with a fashion. This is so not just because adhering to the order of the collective by means of fashion is a temporary choice, something that can be easily revoked in any moment, but because the freedom to choose to be part of or out of the collective decision provides the individual with tremendous freedom, while making him or her feel autonomous. The domain of fashion is considered to be the most spontaneous and least rational, so that it does

8  This catchphrase has survived since 1973. See Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey, and Thomas Lawton, Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-digit Growth (2007: 132–33). 9  It is not surprising nowadays to find such irrational decisions in fashion. Under the logic of fashion, bags made of synthetic fiber can be much more expensive and more sought after than those of genuine leather; for example, a nylon Prada bag is far more expensive than a leather bag of an obscure brand name. 10  See chapter 26. “Kant’s Theory of Free will” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (2006).

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not risk being subjected to the judgment of others. These all point to the fact that decisions made and behaviors performed with respect to fashion in either way, that is, following it or not following it, are manifestations of the autonomy of the subject, although the degree to which each case brings about the feeling of self-government may be different. Indeed, in modern societies no one is ever free of such experiences. No one is also, strictly speaking, ever consistent with his or her decisions about fashion, for there must be some areas in which the person does or does not share some common interests with the collective, such as, food, clothing, music, literature, art, you name it. The more whimsical or impromptu, the more autonomous the ego feels about itself. That is because it is “in matters of taste” that “we depend upon fashion,” as Simmel writes (2004, p. 96), and the decisions and behaviors as regards taste are deemed personal. By this is meant that the process in which the individual makes choices under the law of fashion is part of individuation, about which Adorno expounds in detail. I argue, hence, that fashion as a mechanism in which the individual makes decisions about whether or not to jump on the bandwagon in the most reflexive mode is, in fact, in the forefront of the self’s egoistic effort, while counterbalancing the retrogression away from freedom, the retreat caused by reason’s triumph in modern times. If the self’s seeking autonomy by means of fashion is taken for granted, it is because we are accustomed to the spontaneity of the somatic impulse, which is always at work in fashion, even without the slightest feeling of need to ask for assistance from reason. If rational thought is demanded, it is no longer the business of fashion, for fashion is essentially about a subjective and somatic value, rather than about an objective and rational one. Recalling Simmel’s remark, “we depend on fashion” in countless domains, such as food, clothing, music, literature, art, and so on, in which personal taste is in operation. To people living in modern times, fashion means something much more encompassing and broader than body modifications and supplements to the body. Fashion in modern times is not just about body-related objects or issues. I have tried to make explicit the mechanism or nature of fashion within the vestimentary sphere of fashion because the “law” of fashion is most noticeable in the domain of clothing, or body modifications and/or supplements to the body, since it is visually identifiable and the most dominant area of fashion. However, this does not mean that fashion consists solely of body-related objects or anything worn or held by the body. Though hard to define the ramifications of fashion conclusively, they can be summed up: fashion is where impulse or spontaneity has a preponderance over reason, in comparison to other areas of life, and where newness is endlessly sought, but this pursuit of something new is absolutely distinct from such primal characteristics as the ornamentation found in the animal kingdom, as it goes through social mediation between the individual and the collective. The most peculiar criterion of this mediation is “nowtime” (Jeztzeit).11 This is to say that fashion does not pertain to just any  According to Walter Benjamin, via “nowtime” the moment of political turbulence becomes intensified while transcending the linear construct of temporality. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261.

11

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changes but specifically to those that are achieved by the adjustment between the individual and the collective, with the mutual understanding of being current of the time, which makes the changes fashion brings about of political importance. All things considered, it can be said that no one is nonchalant when it comes to fashion, or irrelevant to fashion in modern times, not only because the boundaries of fashion are wide enough to allow almost everybody to experiment with their wants, needs, and desires in its realms, but also because human beings are in no way completely either rational or impulsive at all times. Fashion, while an arena where impulse can outweigh reason, as its matters are regarded as personal, subjective, and somatic, in contrast to the world of the Kantian categorical imperative, is also a domain in which the individual subject is related to the collective, which further helps clarify why fashion is impossible for us to get away from in modern societies. In point of fact, what I have just described is two most critical dialectical features of fashion. Dialectically speaking, human beings are not only both impulsive and rational but also individuals and, at the same time, parts of the collective. However, the argument that fashion is the area where impulse is the key motivation behind actions does not mean that the fashion choices human beings make are triggered by impulse only. This is so, not because the statement about fashion is inconsistent, but because human behaviors are a mixture of reason and impulse, which, although mutually exclusive, are interdependent on each other. Though it may sound even more baffling, the gap between reason and impulse is what makes the constitution of freedom viable, as Adorno points out, since these dialectical traits in freedom offer room for the human subject to exercise his or her own autonomy as he or she wishes, released from the logical chain of causality. The fact that behaviors, decisions, or both by human beings do not “simply glide along the surface of the chain of cause and effect,” to quote Adorno (2006, p. 228), offers a hint about the mechanism in which our impulse plays a decisive role in prompting our actions, through the process of which we feel autonomous; nonetheless, this is not to say that reason has nothing to do with autonomy. Not to be passed over without due regard is the fact that fashion is inclined to individual freedom, which makes fashion incomparable to anything else that is formative in the dialectical progress of history, for the concept of freedom has no meaning without individual freedom. But this does not mean that the parameter of fashion revolves around individual freedom only. The antinomian relations between the individual and the collective in freedom do resonate in fashion. The dialectical trait tells us that the concept of the individual does not exist without the collective, social or whole, as there is no concept of left without that of right, to quote Simmel (2004, p. 299). Even further, as per Adorno, the chasm between the individual and the society is a required component of the emancipation of the individual, because without this scissure the idea of a condition worthy of human beings—that is, freedom—would not come to life (Adorno 2006, p. 208). Therefore, we may sum up as follows: Individual freedom writ large is not tantamount to freedom of all humanity, and herein lies the role of fashion in mediating the conflicting interests between the individual and the collective in the domain of taste on the one hand and facilitating individual freedom while assisting in the progression of history toward freedom on the other.

References

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Finkelstein, S., H. Charles, and L. Thomas. 2007. Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-Digit Growth. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional. Frisby, D., and M. Featherstone. 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings., ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone, 1–28. London: Sage. Hegel, G. W. F. 1974. Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederick G. Weiss. New York: Harper & Row. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer Max, and Theodor W.  Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1957, May. Fashion. The American Journal of Sociology 62(6):541–558. ———. 2004. The Philosophy of Money, Third Enlarged Version, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg. London: Routledge. Susan, Kaiser. 2001. Minding Appearances: Styles, Truth and Subjectivity. In Body Dressing, ed. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson. Oxford/New York: Berg. Svendsen, L. 2006. Fashion: A philosophy, trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion.

Chapter 4

In Search of Unintentional Truth

In “On Perception” (“Über die Wahrnehmung”), Benjamin proposes that a distinction between experience (Erfahrung) and knowledge (Erkenntnis) be made in order to discover truth (1996a, pp. 93–95). For him, perception (Wahrnehmung), as used in the title of the article, means nothing other than truth reached by means of experience.1 Here in the same treatise, Benjamin scrutinizes Kant’s transcendental idealism, in which there is a “discontinuity” between knowledge and experience—strictly speaking, of pure knowledge and experience, as the former is brought about by the Kantian system of categories and the latter by the senses (Ibid. pp. 93–94). According to Benjamin, the conceptualization or the metaphysics of nature that originates from sensibility is different from that which originates from the Kantian categories, so much so that Kant circumvented a “unified epistemological center” in which the continuity of knowledge and experience takes place (Ibid.). With the transcendental aesthetic that poses the danger of putting the transcendental idealism of experience into a speculative idealism, Benjamin also reveals a foible of Kant’s transcendental idealism, the hallmark of which is a necessary a priori condition of possible experience, in that the existence of speculative knowledge that can be reached by a process of deduction undermines the status of the “highest determinants of knowledge” based on the system of categories (Ibid., pp. 93–96). Kant’s idealism is centered on the supremacy of reason, which, independent of experience, knows everything a priori with apodictic certainty. The implication Benjamin has made from his elucidation of the shortcomings of Kantian idealism is this: truth does not come from knowledge of experience but from raw experience, especially if it is shaped in a way that is absolutely detached from the involvement of human beings. It is the concept of unintentional truth2 conceived by Benjamin, and also by Adorno, that can help us fathom Benjamin’s purpose of drawing a distinction between the immediate and 1  The linguistic similarity between the words perception and true in German (the German word wahr in Wahrnehmung stands for “true”) may present us with an inkling of this. 2  Refer to Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.  Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 77–81.

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natural concept of experience and the concept of experience in the context of knowledge. The following remark made by Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928) mirrors well what he thinks of truth that is not premeditated by knowledge: Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones. The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention. (Benjamin 1977, pp. 35–36)

Even though both Benjamin and Adorno are convinced of the concept of unintentional truth, for Adorno, what it entails in relation to experience is suited to the privileged individual subject that could capture the moment of intellectual experience, while for Benjamin truth is not limited to a few exclusive elites. As pointed out by Susan Buck-Morss, Adorno is adamantly opposed to the idea of a collective subject, holding onto the concept of the individual (1977, p. 82). For Adorno, the thinking subject vis-à-vis the object, as compared to Lukács’s proletariat subject whose class consciousness gives rise to its identity, is characterized by a thrust of nonidentity, void of a political experience (Ibid., pp.  82–85). Whereas Adorno is stubbornly resistant to a philosophical experience (Ibid., pp.  84–85), Benjamin’s theory of experience pertains to the relation between cultural productions and political revolution in the sense that they are the outcome of the collective consciousness he espouses. But this demands clarification about different approaches in hermeneutics; as one can see, it is a matter of interpretation. To illustrate, according to Buck-­ Morss, while Wilhelm Dilthey contends that the task of hermeneutics is to reclaim the subjective meaning behind cultural objects, Adorno aims to search for what messages they transmit rather than their creators’ conscious intent (Ibid., p.  78). Buck-Morss has reduced this as follows: “For Dilthey, it was the artist which hermeneutics tries to understand; for Adorno it was the artwork” (Ibid., p. 79).3 Though in agreement with hermeneutics on the assertion that cultural phenomena are expressions of life, Benjamin is closer to the beliefs of Adorno; however, the object of his hermeneutics is not just works of art but almost everything, including commodities of all kinds found in our life. He is interested in grappling with the aura of commodity products in modern times, unlike Adorno, whose elitist philosophy, revolving especially around individual subjectivity, is tangent to sociopolitical interplay.4 As might have been glimpsed, this has a strong bearing on Benjamin’s theory of experience. He believes that there is truth in objective reality regardless of the creator’s intention and without the relay between the subject and the object. Instead of being 3  Cf. According to F. R. Ankersmit, Adorno was influenced by Gadamer’s idea in Truth and Method. See F.  R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 20. 4  Refer to Buck-Morss’s analysis of the weakness of Adorno’s position regarding the topic of subjectivity in The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.  Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (84) and her explanation about the concept of “aura” Benjamin uses when describing some mystic qualities in commodity goods in the same book (78).

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identified with the subject, he asserts, it is the image that is transmitting the truth in natural objects or in vulgar experience. Just as image, for Benjamin, is indispensable to the revelation of truth, so is his concept of the dialectical image. Thus, it can be reasoned out that how images can be dialectical is virtually the same question as how truth can be attained by means of the dialectic. That being said, we are on the verge of leaving the territory of Kantian epistemology, which finds a basis for knowledge from apodictic certainty. This is exactly why Benjamin calls attention to a revision as regards the Kantian concept of knowledge in “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy (1918) (Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie) (Benjamin 1996b, p.  102). He critiques that Kant’s conception of knowledge is valid insofar as knowledge is obtained from the interconnection between subject and object, such that the relation between knowledge and experience to human empirical consciousness is restrained under this condition (Ibid., p. 103). Besides, in the Kantian system our imagination, the source of all sorts of syntheses, made out of understanding and sensibility, is bound to our individual living egos that have intentio, such that our knowledge falls into nothing other than subjectively constructed cognition. Having dissented, Benjamin suggests redressing the Kantian concept of knowledge, which, he believes, is directly related to the emendation of the concept of experience as well (Ibid., p. 106). It has to be emphasized that efforts toward a future philosophy should be made in the context of pre-Kantian epistemology rather than of Marxist materialist revision.5 In fact, it traces as far back as to Plato, as Benjamin has intimated in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928): Knowledge is possession. Its very object is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of—even if in a transcendental sense—in the consciousness…. But the opposite holds good of truth. For knowledge, method is a way of acquiring its object—even by creating it in the consciousness; for truth it is self-representation, and is therefore immanent in it as form. Unlike the methodology of knowledge, this form does not derive from a coherence established in the consciousness, but from an essence. Again and again, the statement that the object of knowledge is not identical with the truth will prove itself to be one of the profoundest intentions of philosophy in its original form, the Platonic theory of ideas. (1977, pp. 29–30)

To be specific, the incongruity6 between empirically conceivable objects that appear to be beautiful and an object that is what beauty is, as laid down in Plato’s theory of Ideas or Forms, is the bedrock of Benjamin’s argument that the Platonic view of the relationship between truth and beauty is not to be dispensed with in coming to grips with the definition of truth itself (Benjamin 1977, p. 30). Benjamin notes that in The Symposium Plato renders truth in the realm of Ideas as the intrinsic content of beauty

5  See Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, 78) and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, “Hanging Over the Abyss: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Experience in Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin” Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism. Eds. Munk R. Dordrecht (Netherlands: Springer, 2005, 161–192.), 182. 6  Richard Kraut (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/, August 2017) notes that almost all of Plato’s major works are, in some way, related to or resting on this distinction.

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and avers truth to be beautiful (Ibid.). He also holds that the postulation that truth is beautiful must be interpreted within the frame of reference of erotic desire (Ibid., p. 31), since eroticism permeates The Symposium.7 This is to say that “truth is not so much beautiful in itself as for whoever seeks it,” just as “a person is beautiful in the eyes of his lover, but not in himself” (Ibid., p. 31). In spite of that, this essence of truth by no means diminishes the beauty of truth, as Benjamin describes it: “Eros follows it in its flight, but as its lover, not as its pursuer; so that for the sake of its outward appearance, beauty will always flee: in dread before the intellect, in fear before the lover” (Ibid.). Whoever has been in love should understand the moment of beauty whose content is truth—being in love itself. Far from being a mere metaphor, the relation between truth and beauty in light of Platonic Ideas, according to Benjamin, does not just illuminate the difference between truth and the object of knowledge but also explains why cognition of things that are in the realms of Ideas has long lost its validity as scientific truth (Ibid., pp. 31–32). Again, this has to do with Benjamin’s epistemology, which dissociates truth from knowledge: the latter is possession while the former reveals itself through representation (Ibid., pp. 29–30). The domain where truth resides, therefore, is immanent while impossible to prove through scientific deduction. It is the contrast between the apodictic and the dialectic expounded in the Posterior Analytics and the Topics in Organon by Aristotle that will further assist us in discerning the world of truth as compared to that of scientific deduction. Reworking the Platonic antithesis between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (epistêmê), Aristotle puts forward the two types of methods for dealing with knowledge: one is dialectic and the other is apodictic.8 Knowledge achieved by means of the former is not demonstrable, as it is not so much a science as an art, which, therefore, fails to affirm whether it is valid; whereas knowledge achieved by means of the latter inevitably proves to be true, for it is “demonstrative knowledge” with syllogisms as its form.9 Consequently, apodictic knowledge has taken on the status of a quasi-science in that it holds its validity through demonstration.10 Although Aristotle

7  Concerning the relation between eroticism and Plato’s Symposium, also see the introduction by Christopher Gill in Plato, The Symposium, ed. and trans. Christopher Gill (New York: Penguin, 1999), x–xv. 8  For the relation between Plato’s view and Aristotle’s on the theory of knowledge, see Robert Adamson, The Development of Greek Philosophy, ed. W. R. Sorley and R. P. Hardie (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1908), 177; and Terence Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), §76, Dialectic and Justification and §77, Criticisms of Dialectic, 7–8 and 137–141. According to Irwin, for both Plato and Aristotle, dialectic is essentially related to the Socratic method of conversation, while the latter, influenced by the former, develops dialectic as a concrete method of reaching knowledge, compared to the apodictic. 9  For a detailed explanation of Aristotle’s proposition of apodictic and analytic, see the chapter titled “Theory of Knowledge,” in Adamson’s The Development of Greek Philosophy, 170–198. 10  Here, by science I mean the modern sense of science whose logic is deduced by demonstration and/or testable formulas and experimentations. However, it should also be pointed out that the connotation of Aristotle’s scientific knowledge resonates in the modern use of the term science as well.

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proclaims that knowledge in the domain of dialectic cannot establish its credibility owing to its indemonstrability,11 he makes it clear that not all knowledge is apodictic. Others however assent with respect to knowledge, for (they assert) that it is only through demonstration, but that nothing prevents there being a demonstration of all things, for demonstration may be effected in a circle, and (things be proved) from each other. We on the contrary assert, that neither is all science demonstrative, but that the science of things immediate is indemonstrable. And this evidently necessary, for if it is requisite to know things prior, and from which demonstration subsists, but some time or other there is a stand made at things immediate, these must of necessity be indemonstrable. This therefore we thus assert, and we say that there is not only science, but also a certain principle of science, by which we know terms (Aristotle, 1901: 251).12

As a matter of fact, in order to penetrate Aristotle’s system of knowledge, one should have some understanding of the term epistêmê, for it is in no way unequivocal; it can be translated into science or knowledge, as well as into other things.13 Thus, Aristotle’s remark “What is known by apodictic science, meaning by ‘apodictic’ the

See concerns regarding this issue by Robin Smith in “Aristotle’s Logic,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Feb 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/aristotle-logic/ The subject of the Posterior Analytics is epistêmê. This is one of several Greek words that can reasonably be translated “knowledge”, but Aristotle is concerned only with knowledge of a certain type (as will be explained below). There is a long tradition of translating epistêmê in this technical sense as science, and I shall follow that tradition here. However, readers should not be misled by the use of that word. In particular, Aristotle’s theory of science cannot be considered a counterpart to modern philosophy of science, at least not without substantial qualifications. 11  See Aristotle, The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle: With the Introduction of Porphyry, Literally Translated, with Notes, Syllogistic Examples, Analysis, and Introduction, vol. 2 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1901b), 681. Chap. XI.—I. The dialectic problem is a theorem, (i.e., a proposition whose truth is to be inquired into,) tending either to choice and avoidance, or to truth and knowledge, either per se, or as co-operative with something else of this kind, about which the multitude either hold an opinion in neither way, or in a way contrary to the wise, or the wise to the multitude, or each of these to themselves. 12  Octavius Freire Owen in the notes writes that perhaps the word terms that appears in the last sentence quoted in the main text is close in meaning to axioms. See Aristotle, The Organon, or Logical Treatises, vol. 1, 251. 13  The term epistêmê can also be translated into craft and disciplines. See Terence Irwin, “Aristotle,” in A Companion to Epistemology, vol. 4, 2nd ed., ed. J.  Dancy, E.  Sosa, and S. and M.  Steup (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 240. Moreover, “epistêmê” may refer either (a) to a body of truths known, or (b) to the state of someone who knows them: hence in sense (a) mathematics or astronomy counts as an epistêmê (so that “Science” is the proper translation), and in sense (b) someone who knows such a science counts as having epistêmê (so that “knowledge” is the proper translation). The primary example of an epistêmê (in sense (a)) is a demonstrative science, but it is not the only example. Aristotle does not confine his use of term “epistêmê” to demonstrative science: craft and disciplines that lack a rigorous demonstrative structure are also cases of epistêmê.

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knowledge that we possess by having demonstration (apodeixis) of it”14 is tautological. Not only does the term apodictic pertain to demonstration but also science is demonstrative knowledge.15 In other words, what constitutes knowledge as science is the apodictic certainty that is to be affirmed by demonstration. This elucidates that there is a close affinity between science and knowledge that is embedded in Western philosophy and is linguistic in origin, and this unfolds to reveal why knowledge achieved by any method other than demonstration has been under suspicion in the Western belief system. However scientifically true, demonstration is not an absolute touchstone by which all knowledge can be judged, as it works as a syllogism or series of syllogisms based on first principles.16 In the simplest syllogistic demonstration, A is B; B is C; therefore, A is C, one can see the logic in which the conclusion is reached by deduction with the first two principles—A is B and B is C. This is to say, the apodictic knowledge, A is C, is true inasmuch as the first principles exist. And yet, it is impossible to demonstrate how A is B and how B is C.17 Taken for granted, first principles include axioms, the most fundamental, antecedent ­convictions in scientific or apodictic knowledge.18 For example, the third axiom  As stated in W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume 6: Aristotle, An Encounter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 171. For consistency, the word apodeictic is replaced by the word apodictic. 15  Also refer to the following explanation about epistêmê by Richard Parry: 14

While epistêmê is generally rendered as knowledge, in this context, where it is used in its precise sense, it is sometimes translated as scientific knowledge. However, one must not confuse this usage with our contemporary understanding of science, which includes experimentation. Conducting experiments to confirm hypotheses is a much later development. Rather, translating epistêmê as scientific knowledge is a way of emphasizing its certainty…. More precisely, scientific knowledge comprises demonstration, starting from first principles; the latter must also be known, although they are not known by demonstration (1139b15-30). The full account of epistêmê in the strict sense is found in Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle says that we think we know something without qualification (epistasthai… haplôs) when we think we know (gignôskein) the cause by which the thing is, that it is the cause of the thing, and that this cannot be otherwise (71b10-15). As though to emphasize the necessity of what is known, he most frequently uses geometry as an example of epistêmê. (Richard Parry, “Episteme and Techne,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [June 2014 Edition], ed. Edward N.  Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ episteme-techne/) 16  See the following explanation on the primary principle in Aristotle, The Organon, or Logical Treatises, vol. 2. 664. All knowledge rests upon antecedent conviction, and as the general principle which is the basis of all demonstrative reasoning is better known in itself and in its nature, so the particulars from which induction proceeds, are better known to us. This antecedent knowledge is the major proposition of syllogism, the conclusion being the application of the general to the particular, whence the syllogism is the form of all proper science, nor, though strongly attacked by Ramus, has the latter critic ever subsisted a better inferential method. 17  Aristotle says, “I call ‘first principles’ in each genus those facts which cannot be proved.” See Aristotle. Posterior Analytics and Topica, vol. 2, trans. H Tredennick and E Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1938), 69. 18  Refer to Terence Irwin. Aristotle’s First Principle (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 173.

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posited by Euclid in Elements, “If equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equals,” indemonstrable but self-evident,19 is among the common notions of general logic.20 It is not unfounded to maintain that, hence, what makes a proposition truthful is not just that it is demonstrable but also that the primary principles, which cannot be deduced from any other, are there as a foundation of its inference or deduction. Nonetheless, the conditions of first principles by Aristotle reveal that they have limitations, by which I mean externally rather than internally. First principles must be universal and constant, which is to say that the application has to be made within the same genus and also that something which changes over time does not fit with first principles.21 However, no one can possibly deny the fact that not all knowledge is to be universally applied over time or across all space, or that a certain kind of principle or law works well in one domain while not in another. This discontinuity in scientific method while in search of [true] knowledge is that which makes philoso-

 Euclid. The First and Second Books of Euclid Explained to Beginners, with a preface by C. P. Mason (London: Pardon and Son, 1872), 7. Euclid remarks:

19

The reasonings of geometry are based upon certain primary truths with respect to magnitudes and lines, which are self-evident, and do not admit of being demonstrated by the application of truths of a simpler kind. These primary propositions are called axioms. 20  Also refer to Aristotle’s own explanation in The Organon Or Logical Treatises Of Aristotle, vol. 1, 319. Besides, the principles of demonstration are definitions, of which it has been shown before, there will not be demonstrations, since either principles will be demonstrable, and principles of principles, and this would proceed to infinity, or the first (principles) will be indemonstrable definitions. Euclid (The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, vol. 1, 120–121) states: Aristotle uses as an alternative term for axioms “common (things),” or “common opinions,” as in the following passages. “That, when equals are taken from equals, the remainders are equal is (a) common (principle) in the case of all quantities, … according to Aristotle and the geometers, axioms and common notion are the same thing. 21  Refer to Aristotle (Posterior Analytics and Topica, vol. 2, 61): There are three factors in a demonstration: (1) The conclusion which is required to be proved, i.e., the application of an essential attribute to some genus; (2) the axioms, on which the proof is based; (3) the underlying genus, whose modifications or essential attributes are disclosed by the demonstration. Also see Aristotle (The Organon: Or Logical Treatises of Aristotle: With the Introduction of Porphyry, vol. 1, 266–267): CHAP. X.—Of the Definition and Division of Principles. I call those principles in each genus, the existence of which it is impossible to demonstrate. What then the first things, and such as result from these signify, is assumed, but as to principles, we must assume that they are, but demonstrate the rest, as what unity is, or what the straight and a triangle are; it is necessary however to assume that unity and magnitude exist, but to demonstrate the other things.

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phers like Benjamin heed the difference between truth and scientific knowledge. As Benjamin says, “The demand for flawless coherence in scientific deduction is not made in order that truth shall be represented in its unity and singularity. The more scrupulously the theory of scientific knowledge investigates the various disciplines, the more unmistakably their methodological inconsistency is revealed” (Benjamin 1977, p. 33). For him, knowledge is “a way of acquiring its object,” whereas truth is self-representation; knowledge has to have a coherence set in the consciousness through method (i.e., deduction), whereas truth is “immanent in it as form” (Ibid., pp. 29–30).22 In line with this is another argument by Benjamin that representation has to be the real methodology of the philosophical treatise, while the representation of ideas is to be the object of its investigation (Ibid., p. 29). Consequently, the task of philosophy is, for Benjamin, to situate the philosopher somewhere between the artist and the scientist. On the one hand, with a sketch of images of the world of ideas, the artist does his or her part in producing representations; on the other hand, the scientist formulates concepts by eliminating the merely empirical world (Ibid., p. 32). Such is found in Plato’s theory of Ideas, Leibniz’s monadology, and Hegel’s dialectic, according to Benjamin, for they attempt to search for the essence of the world instead of empirical reality, mapping out the “order of ideas” (Ibid).23 Each feat of these great philosophers has its own merit in the revelation of truth. Yet, the dialectic is probably one that Benjamin found most appropriate in the representation of ideas as a method of philosophical projects in conjunction with images. As he puts it: “The representation of an idea can under no circumstances be considered successful unless the whole range of possible extremes it contains has been virtually explored” (Ibid., p. 47).

22

 Benjamin’s view is similar to Hegel’s objective idealism.

In fact, the true situation is that the things of which we have immediate knowledge are mere appearances, not only for us, but also in-themselves, and that the proper determination of these things, which are in this sense “finite,” consists in having the ground of their being not within themselves but in the universal divine Idea. This interpretation must also be called idealism, but, as distinct from the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy, it is absolute idealism. (G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, Trans. Geraets T, Suchting W, and Harris H. [Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishers, 1991], 88–89). 23  The more intensely the respective thinkers strove to outline the image of reality, the more were they bound to develop a conceptual order which, for the later interpreter, would be seen as serving that original depiction of the world of ideas which was really intended. (Ibid.) Also refer to the following comment by Benjamin: All essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but, especially, from each other…. Every idea is a sun and is related to other ideas just as suns are related to each other. The harmonious relationship between essences is what constitutes truth. (Ibid., 37)

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A careful probe into the nature of Hegel’s dialectic can identify the Benjaminian conception of an order of ideas, immanent and necessary at once, as a universal science of ideas. The very starting point from which we should make out the relation between Hegel and Benjamin is Hegel’s own comments on the origin of the dialectic. Hegel ascribes the inception of dialectic not to Socrates but to Plato (Hegel 1991, p. 129), although he is aware that Zeno is also known to have first introduced it (Ibid., p. 324; n. 110). Not so much simply disregarding the tradition in dialectic as attempting to recapture the meaning of the Platonic dialectic, which looks for “science of truth” rather than a “science of scientific knowledge,” the indication of Plato as the inventor of dialectic unveils the philosophical objective of the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel holds that, unlike Socrates, whose dialectical thinking in his dialogue is subjective, Plato is the first to treat the dialectic in a “scientific” manner, for example, by deducing the Many from the One while at the same time postulating that it is the Many that determines itself as the One in the Parmenides (Ibid., p. 129). It is quite certain that, by associating the dialectic with Plato rather than with Socrates or with Zeno, Hegel aims his dialectic to take on a scientific significance just like Plato, as he maintains that the dialectic is the “soul of all genuinely scientific cognition” (Ibid). One should not assume that the meaning of the word scientific is confined to the meaning that we customarily give it now24; rather it should be interpreted as another descriptive word for what Benjamin calls the order of ideas, as science here signifies the whole process by which cognition takes place. In this respect, Hegel’s description of the Platonic dialectic as something that shows the “general finitude of all fixed determinations of understanding” (Ibid.) shares some semblance with the dialectic of his own, as rendered by Hegel: The dialectic, on the contrary, is the immanent transcending, in which the one-sidedness and restrictedness of the determinations of the understanding displays itself as what it is, i.e., as their negation. That is what everything finite is: its own sublation. Hence, the dialectical constitutes the moving soul of scientific progression, and it is the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science, just as all genuine, nonexternal elevation above the finite is to be found in this principle. (Ibid., p. 128)

Indisputably, what Hegel is trying to appeal to is a kind of universal science by which “all genuine, nonexternal elevation above the finite is to be found,” which is imminently coherent and necessary. Plato is identified by Hegel as the first to view the dialectic as a universal science; yet, it is Hegel who gives a modern reinstatement to it with the concept of sublation (Aufhebung), which simultaneously entails “preservation” and “negation” (Buck-Morss 1977, p. 94), as compared to the common notions developed from the axioms and theorems of Euclidean geometry. It must be underscored that the Hegelian dialectic is not something that consists of a binary system along with the world of apodictic in which the primary principles provide an absolute guideline to assess whether a proposition is true or not, as

24

 See note 10 and note 13.

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Aristotle expounds. For Hegel, nothing can avoid the logic of dialectic,25 as everything undergoes the “dialectical movement of thinking” (Hegel 1991, p. 92), again akin to the Platonic dialectic, which is more holistic than heuristic. To quote Plato in The Republic: Dialectic must assemble the disciplines they learn in isolation in their previous education, so that they see as a whole (sunopsin) the connexions between disciplines, and in the nature of what there is…. And this is the most important test of whether someone’s nature is apt for dialectic or not, since the person who can see things as a whole (sunoptikos) is a dialectician, and the one who cannot is not. (537c1–7; 12)26

The Platonic justification is based on the “synoptic” method reaching a supreme science above different disciplines while transcending beliefs of the opposite sides, thereby telling us “how things really are,” as Terence Irwin rightly observes (1988, p.  139). Though both Plato and Aristotle do not completely move beyond the Socratic method of conversation (Ibid., pp. 7–8),27 for the former, the dialectic is the “primary method of philosophical inquiry” (Ibid., p. 7), and its conclusions are “scientific knowledge of first principles” (Ibid., p. 139). However, Aristotle disagrees with Plato on the grounds that the Platonic dialectic cannot claim to be objective although it can achieve coherence (Ibid.) and divides the line between the world of the apodictic and the world of the dialectic. Although Aristotle endeavors to obtain objective knowledge with the help of scientific deduction, it is impossible for him to avoid the existence of the realm in which apodictic certainty can by no means prove truth. Added to this, as Irwin puts it, the fact that Aristotelian sciences, which have their own principles, cannot prove themselves to be objectively true, because first principles as the source of justification are not demonstrable but self-evident with no external justification, seriously undermines the condition Aristotle himself sets regarding scientific knowledge, that is, demonstration.28 This Aristotelian dilemma discloses that scientific knowledge, whose fundamental substantiation is absolutely dependent on demonstrability, has no foundation to turn to in the end. This is unquestionably parallel to Benjamin’s skepticism about scientific knowledge, not just because its reasoning is inconsistent, but because the logic of Aristotelian

  This thought is replete throughout Hegel’s philosophy. See, for example, Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze (1991), p. 92 and p. 130. 26  The text provided here is from Irwin’s Aristotle’s First Principles, Chapter 7, § 76, p. 138. 27  Refer to the following remark by Irwin. 25

Plato does explicitly what he does implicitly in the earlier dialogues, using the Socratic method to argue for positive philosophical positions; he regards dialectic as the primary method of philosophical inquiry. Aristotle as well as Plato, dialectic remains closely connected with the Socratic conversation…. But Aristotle retains Plato’s belief that dialectic is also a method for reaching positive conclusions; this is why he claims that it has a road towards first principles. (Top. 101b3–4) 28  Terence Irwin also thinks that this is among the weaknesses of Aristotle. See Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles, 10; see also Irwin’s explanation about Aristotelian scientific knowledge in the same book (131).

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s­ ciences is impossible to sustain without the epistemic priori, nous,29 by which the knower must grasp self-evident principles as true and cognitively prior.30 In the last section of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle writes: … it must be intention [nous] that apprehends the first principles. This is evident not only from the foregoing considerations but also because the starting-point of demonstration is not itself demonstration, and so the starting-point of scientific knowledge is not itself scientific knowledge. Therefore, since we possess no other infallible faculty besides scientific knowledge, the source from which such knowledge starts must be intention [nous]. Thus it will be the primary source of scientific knowledge that apprehends the first principles, while scientific knowledge as a whole is similarly related to the whole world of facts. (1938, p. 261)31

Considered as an a priori faculty by Kant, which precedes all a posteriori experiences, nous, from the perspective of Benjamin, is never neutral or independent from human intention. Aristotle’s supreme principle, that is, nous, which requires the right experience and training to recognize first principles, is no more appropriate than is Adorno’s elitist theory of subjectivity. The Hegelian dialectic is intrinsically in congruence with Benjamin’s philosophical interest, which centers on a universal science in which no definite soul whatsoever represents absolute subjectivity. In the dialectical consciousness of the self, there is no such thing as a unity of transcendental consciousness of all empirical content to which Kant subscribes. This is linked with another significant feature in the Hegelian dialectic, that is, the discredit of reason’s “unconditionedness.” According to the Hegelian dialectic, pure being becomes pure nothing and vice versa by passing over into each other; therefore, the idea of “static” thought executed by reason proposed by Kant is rebutted. Hegel criticizes the dogmatic metaphysics of Kant, which he calls a subjective idealism that “has nothing to do with the content, and has before it only the abstract forms of subjectivity and objectivity” (Hegel 1991, p. 89). Against the idea of lifting reason as the “faculty of the unconditioned,” he states: Kant did, of course, interpret reason as the faculty of the unconditioned; but his exclusive reduction of reason to abstract identity directly involves the renunciation of its unconditionedness, so that reason is in fact nothing but empty understanding. Reason is unconditioned only because it is not externally determined by a content that is alien to it; on the contrary; it determines itself, and is therefore at home with itself in its content. For Kant, however, the activity of reason expressly consists only in systematizing the material furnished by perception, through the application of the categories, i.e., it consists in bringing that material into an external order, and hence its principle is merely that of noncontradiction. (Ibid., p. 100)

Hegel’s standpoint, running counter to Kant’s idealism in which reason is thought of as a faculty that is unrestricted by outer conditions, is in the same vein of

 Aristotle writes that first principles are grasped by nous (Posterior Analytics II 19, 100b5–17); here nous is translated into intuition. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics and Topica, 261. 30  See Irwin’s discussion on this topic in §73–75 in Aristotle’s First Principles. 31  Here the word nous in square brackets is my addition. 29

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Benjamin’s proposition of “unintentional” truth that lies in “naked” experience. Sure enough, the account of some issues surrounding the dialectic made so far unearths why Benjamin frequently resorts to it as a means of epistemological search for disinterested truth.32 For him, the dialectic is where truth, as distinct from scientific knowledge, can be grounded; yet, as mentioned earlier, it is images33 that make it possible for unintentional truth to embody itself as something that is visually identifiable in empirical reality. Hence, it can be boiled down to this: the dialectical image is nothing but a medium via which unpremeditated truth comes into sight with the dialectical relations in it overtly displayed. Now that the pith of the dialectical image has been uncovered, we can scrutinize the implications of the link between the dialectical image and fashion with full clarity. In order to identify the nexus, one should come to grips with the essential attributes of Benjamin’s concept of dialectical image, all of which converge at a single point, namely, the objective revelation of truth, or the presentation of truth via the objective world. As per Benjamin, a dialectical image discloses truth by encapsulating the “now of a particular recognizability,” at which time truth bursts like a lightening flash (Benjamin 1999, pp.  462–463).34 As previously touched upon, for Benjamin, truths come into sight only in the representation of phenomena. However, what the dialectical image reveals is not a truth that has no temporal specificity or that pertains to “homogenous, empty time” (Benjamin 2003, p. 395), but one that is combined with nowtime (Jetztzeit), the critical point in which truth bursts into view, visually displaying the time differential (Zeitdifferential), which is a temporal field in which the dialectical polarization between what has been and what is now is hypostatized. The dialectical image is his epistemological method by which ideas such as truth make their appearance. The truth a dialectical image bears upon is bound with nowtime. Fashion, by nature, is compatible with nowtime, in that what

 For example, see Benjamin’s approach in expounding the concept of origin (Ursprung) in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels):

32

Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. (Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45) 33  Cf. According to Michael Inwood, it is Hegel’s view that “an image can be presented before intelligence in the absence of a corresponding intuition.” See Michael Inwood’s commentary on the note §454 in A Commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 486. 34 .…. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.)…. [N3,1]

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fashion expresses is a far cry from anything other than one that is current, contemporary with time. Being abreast of the times is its raison d’être. It is due to its intrinsic quality, being synchronistic with time, that fashion is illustrated as a most appropriate paragon of dialectical image. Although Benjamin proposes that one make an effort to demonstrate how fashion discloses the workings of dialectical image,35 little investigation has been made into the pairing. Even more frustrating is the fact that some studies on fashion as a dialectical image are misleading. To illustrate, the following rendition by Caroline Evans has apparent errors: The exploration of fashion as a ‘dialectical image’ is the central crux of my argument, for it is intended to serve not only as an interpretive tool but also to offer a meta-narrative of the operations of fashion today through the process of historically referencing it. The way in which the fashion object mutated into image in the last ten years of the twentieth century gives us an insight into how the industry works, and the focus on image does not occlude ‘the real’ so much as recontextualise what ‘the real’ is in digital culture. Although I do not discuss them in depth, the industrial base of fashion and its relation to ‘the real’ underpin my analysis of the form and ‘content’ of contemporary design. (Evans 2013, p. 83)

First and foremost, the concept of the dialectical image formulated by Benjamin is concerned essentially with the true, rather than with the real. As has been expatiated in a detailed manner, truth, especially an unintentional truth, is the keynote of Benjamin’s epistemological stance. Next, the attempt to create a comprehensive explanation or grand narrative of historical experience or knowledge in conjunction with the dialectal image is in discord with a Benjaminian approach toward historical intelligibility, as it does not help unveil any “raw,” “naked” truth of any given historical moment. Last, the ultimate and primary role of the dialectical image is not so much to make a historical reference as to “flash” the political truth of a given time and place. Here by political truth I mean that the message conveyed via a dialectical image is that which is arrived at by the tacit communication between the individual and the collective regarding a state of affairs which is hardly irrelevant to “what has been.”36

35

 See, e.g., Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 867.

On the dialectical image. In its lies time. Already with Hegel, time enters into dialectic. But the Hegelian dialectic knows time solely as the properly historical, if not psychological, time of thinking. The time differential   in which alone the dialectical image is real is still unknown to him. Attempt to show this with regard to fashion. Real time enters the dialectical image not in natural magnitude—let alone psychologically—but in its smallest gestalt. All in all, the temporal momentum < das Zeitmoment > in the dialectical image can be determined only through confrontation with another concept. This concept is the “now of recognizability”  < Q°,21> 36  Take note of Benjamin’s remark as to the characteristics of his notion of dialectical image. …. And this dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of all present action to the test. Or rather, it serves to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been (the authentic figure of which is fashion). To approach, in this way, “what has been” means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political categories. fashion [K2,3] (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 392).

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Fashion as a dialectical image has a political significance, for it is an outcome of the reconciliation between the individual and the collective. The “visual” message transferred by fashion as a dialectical image is analogous to truth, in particular, an unintentional truth, since no objects or phenomena can constitute themselves as fashion without the negotiation between the individual and the collective. The mediation between the individual and the collective, the quintessential element of fashion as a dialectical image, assures that the visual message that is imparted through an item of fashion is self-determining, without being tainted with the intention of a few powerful individuals. Initiations aiming to lead public opinion can be made by individuals; however, unless followed or agreed upon by the collective, no objects or phenomena can become entitled to belong to fashion. Benjamin also suggests that fashion is a most befitting and genuine dialectical image, the main function of which is to “ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been” (Benjamin 1999, p. 392). The temporal duration Benjamin is referring to is not the psychological, personal memories that are confined to each individual, but the time span with which a collective consciousness of a substantive and distinctive kind is closely associated. For Benjamin, nowtime is the moment of collective awakening, a dialectical synthesis of collective consciousness taking place when the transformation of collective consciousness from the stage of dream to that of waking is under way. Benjamin opines: “Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of wakening would be identical with the ‘now of recognizability,’ in which things put on their true—surrealist—face. [N3a, 3]” (Ibid., pp.  463–464). This abstruse remark by Benjamin is not easy to penetrate. But with the scrutiny of the dialectical mediation between the individual and the collective that is identified through fashion as a dialectical image, one can unmask the connection between collective awakening and the “now of recognizability.” Fashion as a dialectical image not only visually manifests how collective consciousness is at work in modern societies, which is why fashion is often regarded as an expression of zeitgeist, but also helps us fathom the dialectical process of consciousness in which the sleeping collective is awakened. What fashion as a dialectical image embodies is a collective awareness of the confrontation between what has been and what is now. Even when fashion cites a distant past, this past is not any time that has passed, but “a past charged with now-time” (Benjamin 2003, p. 395).37

 With a “dialectical leap” from the present to the past, a revolution took place in history as well as in fashion history, according to Benjamin:

37

“The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.” (“On the Concept of History,” 2003, 395).

References

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The kernel of truth that is revealed through fashion is neither independent or ­isolated, nor eternal or timeless, as a fashion is a representation of the present day in the vicinity of what has been. This collective recognition of the present in relation to what has been itself is an unintentional and objective truth, in which the mediation between the individual and the collective plays an important role, resulting in dialectically processed consequences. It has to be pointed out that Benjamin’s conception about the relation between truth and representation, which culminates with his concept of dialectical image, is not dissonant with Plato’s theory of Ideas, Leibniz’s monadology, and Hegel’s dialectic, in which independent units that stand as a pair of such absolute opposites as ideas and phenomena, or reason and reality, interact with each other. As Benjamin writes: “As the salvation of phenomena by means of ideas takes place, so too does the representation of ideas through the medium of empirical reality” (1977, p. 34). One should be able to see how fashion as a dialectical image is to be redeemed from the realm of phenomena, once conceived as a dialectical image. Indeed, the discussion concerning the relation between fashion and the dialectical image leads us to grasp the two most momentous features of fashion as a theoretical thrust of modernity. Fashion can reason out the theory of regressive Marxist social relations caused by commodity fetishism, for it is a concrete embodiment of the ever-evolving, dialectical relation between the individual and the collective. Moreover, viewed as a dialectical image, fashion can be thought of as a positive reification of objects to the extent that they serve as the point of departure from which to see some truths, which is hardly dissimilar to what Benjamin views as the Platonic redemption in which empirical reality is salvaged to be on a par with Ideas.

References Aristotle. 1901. The Organon: Or Logical Treatises of Aristotle: With the Introduction of Porphyry. Vol. 1, trans. Octavius Freire Owen. London: G. Bell and Sons. ———. 1938. Posterior Analytics and Topica. Vol. 2, translated by H. Tredennick and E. Forster. Cambridge: Harvard University Press/London: William Heinemann. Benjamin W. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J Osborne. London: New Left Books. ———. 1996a. On Perception. In Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott and ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.  Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1996b. On the Program of the Coming Philosophy. In Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913– 1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott and ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

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Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.  Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press. Evans, Caroline. 2013. Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities. In Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. S.  Bruzzi and P.  Gibson. London/New York: Routledge. Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. Geraets T, Suchting W, and Harris H. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishers. Irwin, Terence. 1988. Aristotle’s First Principle. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.

Chapter 5

Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung), and Fashion

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx holds that things outside consciousness, that is, labor, work, and production, are not only the chief determinacy of the existence of human beings but also the real force behind social relations (1977, Preface, p.  20).1 Here Marx indicates that social relations shaped by the mode of production in material life constitute one’s consciousness, directly disclaiming Hegel’s thesis that consciousness arrived at by going through different stages by means of sublation (Aufhebung) within self-consciousness is that which makes up the self. However, Hegel’s dialectical thought process is more social and political than indicated in Marx’s analysis. Walter Benjamin’s theory of experience (Erfahrung) not only sheds light on how collective consciousness operates in modern times, but also reinforces the cogency of the Hegelian universal consciousness, the beginning of which is the individual’s thought-play. The communication between the individual and the collective, which has strong reference to Hegelian universal consciousness as well as to Benjaminian experience, can be identified with fashion in the form of a dialectical image. This statement is grounded on the fact that fashion is a socially formulated cultural product that manifests the relay between the individual and the collective, coupled with an awareness of being contemporaneous and that fashion as a dialectical image displays the relationship between what has been and what is now, a relationship which reveals the dialectical movement over time. In order to validate the whole argument, I will first dwell on Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic. This will help elucidate how qua subject and qua object in self-consciousness sublate each other until the spirit or the mind makes 1  “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Karl Marx, Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 20.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 E. J. Kang, A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_5

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its existence identical with its essence, so that otherness to each other dissipates (Hegel 2003, pp. 133–134).2 It will also demonstrate how subject-object relations move beyond the individual’s thought process. Indeed, a careful scrutiny of the master-slave dialectic will proffer a glimmer of what I am trying to get across with regard to topics such as subject-object relations and, even further, freedom—the modern concept that requires a sort of relativity in which one has significance in relation to something other than oneself. According to Hegel, the master, “qua notion of self-consciousness,” and the bondsman, a “consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood,” exist in a relationship of mutual otherness (Hegel 2003, p. 108). And yet, the former is not viable without the latter, despite the fact that the former is the independent consciousness while the latter is the dependent one (Ibid., pp. 108–109). This is to say, the master holds the bondsman in subjugation, yet the former cannot exist without the latter, just as the latter cannot without the former, making each aware that it is “one-sided and unequal” (Ibid.). The incompleteness of each side on its own accounts for why they are in need of recognition from each other. As Hegel puts it: “it [self-consciousness] exists only as something recognized” (“es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes”).3 The master, no matter how mighty he is, needs the slave, not just to satisfy his desire but also to sustain his existence. It has to be highlighted that the struggle for recognition and the fear of the master as a pair are the key elements that help the master-slave dialectic break away from the confines of self-consciousness, in that through them not  Hegel writes:

2

I am I in the sense that the I which is object for me is sole and only object, is all reality and all that is present. … In the present instance, the object-ego is object which is consciously known to exclude the existence of any other whatsoever. Self-consciousness, however, is not merely from its own point of view (für sich), but also in its very self (an sich) all reality, primarily by the fact that it becomes this reality, or rather demonstrates itself to be such. It demonstrates itself to be this by the way in which first in the course of the dialectic movement of “meaning” (Meinen), perceiving, and understanding, otherness disappears as implicitly real (an sich); and then in the movement through the independence of consciousness in Lordship and Servitude, through the idea of freedom, sceptical detachment, and the struggle for absolute liberation on the part of the self-divided consciousness, otherness, in so far as it is only subjectively for self-consciousness, vanishes for the latter itself. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 133–134. Here Hegel not only gives a detailed account of the vanishing moment at which otherness in selfconsciousness disappears but also introduces concrete examples in which this passing-away process takes place. The three circumstances Hegel exemplifies are by no means disparate. 3  This is a translation by Howard P. Kainz of G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: Selections, trans. with notes by H. P. Kainz (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), 50. “178. Self-consciousness exists in-and-for-itself while (and because) it exists in-and-foritself for-another; that is, it exists only as something recognized [es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes].” Here the words in square brackets are my addition.

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only self-consciousness but also universal consciousness are formulated, as Hegel annunciates: “In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see, on their phenomenal side, the emergence of man’s social life and the commencement of political union” (Hegel 2008, p. 56). The spirit or the mind, which is deemed as being kept within the bounds of self-consciousness or consciousness by Marx, is, for Hegel, a source of synchrony or accord indispensable to the constitution of a society and politics as well as to the inception of states (Ibid., pp. 56–57). It should be noted that the struggle for recognition is decisive for the survival of the master, who in turn keeps the bondsman alive so as to receive recognition from him; while the fear of the master causes the bondsman to learn to disown his “individualist self-will,” whereby the individual, conscious of the two sides of the master and the bondsman, comes to procure “‘the beginning of wisdom’―the passage to universal consciousness” (Ibid., p. 57). Thereupon, it can be said that the struggle for recognition is that which triggers the individual, egoistic selfhood to yield to universal and objective values, since the life of the bondsman who gives upon his will, which has its origin in the ego, is saved for the sake of his or her recognition of the master. The formation of universal consciousness also clarifies why Hegel says, “the ‘I’ that is ‘We,’ the ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel 1977, p. 110),4 for what we think of as “We” is no more than “I,” whose self-consciousness or consciousness believes that “I” and the others within “We” are on the same page. The question is: how can we be sure that “you,” “I,” and others are in accordance with one another? Hegel attributes reason to that which makes self-consciousness not only universal but also objective (Hegel 2008, p. 58). Human beings do communicate by means of human capacity within consciousness to penetrate the homogenous thought among us, and fashion is one visible indication that substantiates Hegel’s exposition of universal consciousness.5 Fashion as a dialectical image, as illuminated by Walter Benjamin, evinces some communication between the “I” and others while revealing unintentional truth for us to see.6 Thus, it can be said that, Benjamin’s concept of experience (Erfahrung) that touches on the relay between “I” and others, is comparable to Hegel’s notion of universal consciousness. Next, I will discuss the dialectical relation between wants/needs/desires and means/labor, which has to do with another dialectical concatenation between freedom and unfreedom. According to the Hegelian line of thought, the dialectical relation between means and wants or between the master and the bondsman operates in universal consciousness as well as in self-consciousness. In the shaping of universal

4  Also see J. B. Baillie’s translation: “Ego that is ‘we’, a plurality of Egos, and ‘we’ that is a single Ego.” (G.  W. F.  Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. trans. J.  B. Baillie [Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003], 104). 5  For further discussion of Hegel’s argument that reason is associated with the framing of universal consciousness within self-consciousness or consciousness, see Chap. 10. “Fashion History in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.” 6  For further discussion regarding the link between fashion and the dialectical image as well as the communications between the individual and the collective, see Eun Jung Kang, 2014. “The Dialectical Image: The Redemption of Fashion,” in Fashion Theory 18: 3, 341–360.

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consciousness, common wants are satisfied with a permanent means being created, in the process of which the unequal othernesses, that is, the master and the b­ ondsman, or the independent and the dependent, are cemented together (Hegel 2008, p. 56). It is Hegel’s concept of recognition again that fills the hiatus between wants/ needs/desires and means/labor, whose intersection is, in fact, the locus in which freedom comes to be on the rise. Although both Hegel and Marx have postulated their dialectical relation,7 it is the former who captures the dialectical evolution of their dialectical relations in a positive manner.8 According to Hegel, mutual dependence, that is, others as a means to satisfy “my” wants and “me” as a means to satisfy others’ wants, and the desire for equality with others are both socially constructed. Not only do our wants and means become concrete while going through socialization―the reciprocation between “me” and others, but they also keep on multiplying, owing to a spirit of equality that has to do with our desire to be unique and at the same time imitate others. It is clear that, for Hegel, the dialectical relation between wants and means evolves hand in hand with the spread of the “feel” of equality, for which the interplay between emulation and individuality is decisive. Following Hegel, Georg Simmel provides a strong empirical model that manifests these dialectical oppositions. For those who are familiar with Simmel’s philosophy of fashion, the association of fashion with the dialectical relation between emulation and individuality and between union and separation is hardly an outlandish one. On the basis of Simmel’s observations on fashion, it can be said that fashion is apposite to clarifying Hegel’s notion of the social element, for following a fashion trend is closely linked with the positive pursuit of equality accompanied by emulation and individuality, thereby expanding the magnitude of wants and means. This is the cardinal point of my argument that fashion is indispensable to modernity, mediating not only between freedom and unfreedom but also between wants and means. These antithetical opposites are interconnected while constituting the antinomies of modernity, since fulfilling wants while obtaining means is directly related to a person’s feeling of freedom in modern societies.

7  The conceptual foundation of the dialectical nexus between wants and means in the context of production versus consumption is set forth in Marx’s Grundrisse.

Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed…. (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition. Consumption creates the motive for production; it also creates the object which is active in production as its determinant aim…. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption. (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [Rough Draft], trans. Martin Nicolaus [London: Penguin Books, 1993], 91–92) 8  See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §192 and §193.

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These dialectical relations between wants/needs/desires and means/labor, also help us grasp the shortcomings found in Marx’s dialectical materialism. In his discussion of the distinction between “Spirit” and “Mass,” Marx acclaims Bruno Bauer for his discovery that the definition of the mass as “spiritness” reveals a trace of the “Christian-Germanic dogma of the antithesis between Spirit and Matter, between God and the world” (Marx and Engels 1975, p. 85). This is also found in Hegel’s science, says Marx, according to whom Hegel’s conception of an Abstract or Absolute Spirit, which is the cause of a “speculative and esoteric history,” makes mankind end up as “a mere mass that bears the Spirit with a varying degree of consciousness or unconsciousness,” while making the history of mankind into the “history of the Abstract Spirit of mankind”; therefore “a spirit” becomes “far removed from the real man” (Ibid.). This observation is made owing to the fact that Marx, as opposed to Hegel, who explicates the dialectical mediation between subjective and objective in the formation of self-consciousness, conceives that the object of consciousness is self-consciousness or objectified self-consciousness and that the different kinds of alienation are different kinds of consciousness and self-consciousness (Marx 2000, pp.  104–118). The disbelief in duality within self-consciousness or consciousness leads Marx to develop his concept of alienation differently from that of Hegel, who holds that each opposite by its alienation from the other is to be “at home with itself in its otherness as such” (Hegel 2003, p. 464) by way of negation of negation. It has to be noted that, for the latter, alienation is a necessary part of cognitive experience by which consciousness apprehends itself. As a matter of fact, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel’s magnum opus, is a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” according to its working title, and analyzes how the spirit or the mind passes through different stages of consciousness. “‘Experience of consciousness’ does not mean primarily experiences that are in and about consciousness. Rather, this expression suggests that it is consciousness itself that undergoes these experiences,” Martin Heidegger observes aright (1994, p. 21). To wit, Hegel’s experience of consciousness tells us that only after mediation between qua subject and qua object within self-consciousness does “I” truly grasp who “I” is, which is the most significant strand of Hegelian dialectic in regard to self-­ consciousness. Not content with this dualism within self-consciousness, in which “I” and its object are mediated by each other, Marx raises objections against it, proclaiming that the objectified subject is the subject itself (Marx 2000, pp. 104–118). It is Marx’s account as to Hegel’s double mistake in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1844 that unambiguously imparts details of his view of Hegel’s formulation of the dialectical mediation in self-consciousness or consciousness. First, Marx diagnoses that the end result of thought processes by an Absolute and Abstract Spirit is absolute knowledge, and as such, Hegel’s science is nothing but idealism (Ibid., pp. 107–110). Next, Marx argues that such spheres as religion, the state, and civil life, as Hegel spells out, appear as thought entities; in other words, for Marx, what Hegel views as different types of alienation are different types of consciousness and self-consciousness that come into being “only in their conceptual

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[thought] form,” to borrow Marx’s expression (Ibid., pp. 108–111).9 In point of fact, Hegel’s two errors as enunciated by Marx are of one and the same kind, in that, for Marx, mediation by each antithetical opposite, that is, the dialectical interaction within the confines of thought, has nothing to do with things people perceive sensuously. Over and above this, twisting Hegel’s concept of objectification, Marx speaks out against Hegel on the grounds that it is his science of alienation itself that alienates human beings as well as actuality from abstract philosophical thinking (Marx 2000, pp. 85–95)10 and calls for the inclusion of a real entity or object, since “A non-objective being is a non-being.” (Ibid., 104–118, esp. 113). Marx, unlike Hegel, completely disregards the dialectically conjoined relations between wants/needs/desires and means/labor by concentrating on Arbeit to the extent that he forsakes the canon of the dialectic, that is, the correlation between dialectical opposites. The incompatibility between Hegel and Marx as to the concept of alienation also comes from Marx’s jaundiced accentuation of Arbeit, paying little or no regard to the interdependence between production and consumption and between means and wants, which is intimately interwoven with our desire for equality, whose requisite is nothing but the existence of relativity between oneself and others, between one’s own wants and means that are to be supplied by others. In the preface of the Phenomenology, Hegel presents two kinds of mistakes that reveal some possible misinterpretations of the dialectic made by philosophers and historians of philosophy. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. (Hegel 2003, preface, p. 2)

To Hegel, Marx would be the one who grapples with the organic development of the dialectic but fails to escape the lopsidedness of Arbeit, unable to discern the reci The word in square brackets is my addition.  The following is a different translation from Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 83:

9

10

It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are alienated and which they confront with their presumption of actuality. … The alienation thus forming the real interest and transcendence of this externalization is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject—that is, the opposition within thought itself between abstract thinking and sensuous actuality or actual sensibility… It is not that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly in opposition to himself, but that he objectifies himself by distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought—this is the essence of alienation as given and as to be transcended.

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procity between dialectical opposites. Inspired by Marx, Marxist philosophers such as Marcuse and Lukács also pay little or no attention to dialectical interplay between one pole, that is, wants, needs, and desires and the other, that is, means and labor, and in so doing even further distort Hegel’s dialectic. Misconstruing Hegel’s ­conceptualization of being at home or identical with itself at the stage of being-for-­ itself, Georg Lukács, for example, contends that the world is to be shaped by the proletariat and the proletariat’s labor as, respectively, the subject and the object of history, the grandiose implication of which, he claims, is to “stand Hegel on his feet” (Lukács 1972, pp. xxii–xxiii). 11 Lukács avers that bourgeois consciousness is false and that the proletariat is capable of obtaining a true class consciousness (Ibid., p. 76). His diagnosis is that the obstacle that makes the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie false is the class situation, while the limits of bourgeoisie class consciousness come from the objective limits of capitalist production (Ibid., 64).12 Simply put, only through labor is a true class consciousness achieved, with which the proletariat moves forward toward a revolution out of the stalemate of capitalism as an authentic subject of history. According to Lukács, until a true class consciousness has been achieved and until the crisis of capitalism has reached maturity, the proletariat suffers under inhumane conditions and reification (Ibid., p. 76). However, reification, whereby the human subject is brought into subordination through production and the production process (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 89) and which stands as a generalization or extension of Marx’s commodity fetishism, “an extreme 11

     What is important is that the alienation of man is a crucial problem of the age in which we live and is recognised as such by both bourgeois and proletarian thinkers, by commentators on both right and left. . . . As to the way in which the problem was actually dealt with, it is not hard to see today that it was treated in purely Hegelian terms. In particular its ultimate philosophical foundation is the identical subject-object that realizes itself in the historical progress. Of course, in Hegel it arises in a purely logical and philosophical form when the highest stage of absolute spirit is attained in philosophy by abolishing alienation and by the return of self-consciousness to itself, thus realising the identical subject-object. In History and Class Consciousness, however, this process is sociohistorical and it culminates when the proletariat reaches this stage in its class consciousness, thus becoming the identical subject-object of history. This does indeed appear to ‘stand Hegel on his feet’; …

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), xxii–xxiii. 12  Ibid., 64. Citing Marx, Georg Lukács says: “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.” And if this insight were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negation of the capitalist class. In this way the objective limits of capitalist production become the limits of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Also see the following remark made by Lukács: “Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself.” (Ibid., 54.)

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step in the process of objectification,”13 reveals the pitfalls of Marx as well as Marxist philosophers like Lukács. Reification implies that the human subject becomes an auxiliary to the process of capitalist production, whereas the object becomes reified as something that has the power to control human relations as the reification of a subjectivity in opposition to the labor worker. Marx, who pins the blame on Hegel for the reason that the thought process between subject and object within self-consciousness or consciousness has no significance for the real man and real history, commits a grave mistake by emphasizing only Arbeit, whose end result is, theoretically speaking, the subject being enslaved by the object. This is why, although Marxist philosophers such as Marcuse and Lukács are the ones that have further developed the concept of reification, Marx is barely free from the criticism against that concept. Chris Arthur contends that Kojève, followed by Marcuse and others, canonized Marx’s interpretation of Hegel’s view on labor.14 No matter how distant Marx’s original purport is from the dogmatized concept of reification by Marx’s followers, his fixation with Arbeit, that is, labor, work, and production, is that which sows the seed for the conceptualization of reification. However, contrary to the prediction of the Marxists, the domination of Arbeit over wants, needs, and desires is being overturned, or, at the very least, does not have the same potency as before, in an era in which consumption has become as important as production, and wants/needs/desires have become as valued as means/labor. Jean Baudrillard in The Consumer Society (1998 [1970]) already expatiated on this shift of the forces behind social changes from production to consumption. Today many scholars are debating the rise of prosumption, “the interrelated process of production and consumption,”

 For the difference between reification and commodity fetishism, I have resorted to Andrew Edgar: Edgar in an article titled, “Reification” writes:

13

Lukács’s theory of reification is a generalization of Marx’s theory of COMMODITY FETISHISM. For Marx, the process of exchanging the products of human labour on a commodity market leads to the social relationship between people appearing as a relationship between things (Marx, 1867, pp. 163–165). Lukács attempts to extend Marx’s economic analysis to the total life of society. He does this through reference to Weber’s analysis of the growth of rationality. Instrumental rationality is integral to the development of the capitalist economy, and further reflects the process of commodity exchange, in so far as it facilitates the equating of different objects. For Lukács, this equation works only by emphasizing the quantitative characteristics of the object at the expense of the qualitative. Lukács suggests that these qualitative aspects are the uniquely human properties of the object, and hence are systematically concealed by reification. . . . As such, reification is not uniquely situated in relation to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Rather it is argued that all social reality is constructed by social actors, and that reification is merely ‘an extreme step in the process of objectification’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 89). (“Reification,” in The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought, ed. William Outhwaite [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006], p. 564. 14  See Chris Arthur, “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” New Left Review I, 142 (1983): 67–75.

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and its ramifications in Western societies.15 It has to be noted that in terms of Hegelian dialectical movement the stage of prosumption is that of being-for-itself, as production and consumption are fused as an immediately sublated simple unity, which is destined to pass over into the next stage. To be sure, the dynamic between one pole, that is, wants, needs, and desires and the other, that is, means and labor, which correlates with that between consumption and production, is now being rearranged in accordance with the Hegelian dialectical process of change. As seen in the model of master-slave dialectic and the polarity between wants/ needs/desires and means/labor, which is deeply interwoven with the dialectical construct between consumption and production in modern society, Hegel’s subject-­ object mediation is hardly held in the boundary of self-consciousness or consciousness only, by contrast with Marx’s denunciation that the Hegelian dialectic is void of social or political significations. Hegel’s expounding about a universal consciousness that comes into existence within self-consciousness or consciousness reveals that the dialectical interactions between qua subject and qua object, the master and the bondsman, or the independent and the dependent within self-­ consciousness or consciousness are a necessary process from which social and political life is engendered. In fact, the communication, attained in the dialectical relations between “me” and “others” that is impossible to sever from the subject-­ object mediation within self-consciousness or consciousness, is what the philosophy of history looks for, since its main topics―what the constituents of history are and what history tells us, in particular about the trajectory of history―converge on the question of universal consciousness. Now that the kernel of the Hegelian subject-object relation has been divulged, the affinity between Hegelian universal consciousness and Benjaminian experience becomes easy to identify. Just like Hegelian universal consciousness, Benjaminian experience is deeply intertwined with the dialectical relay between subject and object and between the individual and the collective, passing beyond the limits of the individual’s thought process. However, contrary to the Marxists’ criticism about the fetishism associated with objects, Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, which embodies the “appearance” of experience, has a strong bearing on the object as such in material reality. While the Hegelian dialectical opposition entails the vis-­ a-­vis relation between consciousness of the self and consciousness of something other than oneself within itself as its very basis, the Benjaminian dialectical construct in the form of a dialectical image, which has to do with the revelation of “unintentional” truth, avoids, when it comes to interpretation, partaking in the consciousness of any thought entities. Furthermore, the dialectical image, as it pertains to the relation between what has been and what is now, visually manifests the Hegelian dialectical movement over time between subject and object, between thesis and antithesis, between the individual and the collective, while going through a series of sublations. This temporal stretch between what has been and what is now  For example, see George Ritzer, “The ‘New’ World of Prosumption: Evolution, ‘Return of the Same,’ or Revolution?,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, Issue 1, 1–17, March 2015, p. 1.

15

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is evidence of an antithetical relation that has a political significance (Benjamin 1999, pp. 391–392). Indeed, with the Hegelian theoretical backdrop behind the dialectical relation between wants/needs/desires and means/labor, which emanates from the subject-­ object duality in thought, and with the Benjaminian concept of experience, the tie between fashion and the modern subject finally finds a solid foundation. Relying on both Hegel and Benjamin, I argue that following a fashion, as in the form of vestimentary trend, or as a social or political event, is one way of recognition not only of the self but also of the collective consciousness, in a time when the modern subject, unlike its premodern predecessor, is left alone to find its position in society as well as to identify its own ontological meaning in life. The crux of fashion, the mediation between the individual and the collective, should be understood as part of a Hegelian undertaking, not just because fashion is a dialectical outcome between the individual and the collective, but also because following a fashion is an active search for the self and collective consciousness at once. Nothing bears better witness to these dialectical relations in modern life than fashion, for following a fashion is a time-­ conscious act performed hand in hand with contemporaries, bespeaking self-­ subjectivity and collective consciousness all at once.16 Thus, the history of fashion, just like history at large, can be reckoned as consecutive mediations between the individual and the collective over the course of time, the beginning of which is the dialectical interaction between subject and object within self-consciousness or consciousness. In other words, to find out how the history of fashion during the modern era is connected to the mediation between subject and object is tantamount to an inquisition into the process of the Hegelian formation of history. To those who are not quite sure of this link between history and the subject-object mediation, Theodor W. Adorno’s musings on the constituents of history should prove helpful. He states that the transition from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit signifies a new instatement of the relation between subject and object, on the basis of which history is to be seen as an organic entity fashioned by the reciprocal mediation between them (Adorno 2001, pp.  163–165). The uncompromising polarity between subject and object and between form and content espoused by Kant is shattered by Hegel, who proposes the concept of mediation between them. With the evolution of this mediation, history becomes identified as a succession of organic entities (Ibid.). Indeed, Benjamin’s theory of experience affirms the Hegelian dialectical interaction between subject and object and between the individual and the collective, while Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image attests to the dialectical relay between the individual and the collective and between what has been and what is now, visually through inanimate, materialist objects, the most notable example of which is fashion.

 For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 7. “Dialectic of Fashion History in Modern Times.”

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References

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2003. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ———. 2008. Philosophy of Mind: Translated from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace. New York: Cosimo Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Kenneth Maly and Parvis Emad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kang, Eun Jung. 2014. The Dialectical Image: The Redemption of Fashion. Fashion Theory 18 (3): 341–360. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975. Collected Works, 1844–45, vol. 4. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1977. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ———. 2000. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Dravid McLellan, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 6

Formal Changes in Fashion and Hegelian Dialectic

Alfred Louis Kroeber discovered that changes in fashion have a certain basic pattern as well as regularity. He based this finding on the quantitative analyses of the dimensions of such variables as the length and the width of skirts, and the depth of décolletage featured in fashion magazines and journals; his first study in 1919 considered issues from 1844 to 1919, and his second study with Jane Richardson from 1787 to 1936. In his 1919 article, he unveiled that there was a recurring rhythm in the width of women’s skirts over a century, with a corresponding oscillation in skirt length over about a third of the duration (Kroeber 1919, pp. 257–258). In his 1940 article, Kroeber also measured the basic dimensions of women’s dress over three centuries, seeking to understand the relation of changes in fashion styles to the development of civilization (Richardson and Kroeber 1940).1 Although it is impossible to fully understand the nature of fashion changes, he argues, the regularity in fashion change betokens “the principle of civilizational determinism,” but it “scores as against individualistic randomness,” implying that individual influence has had little effect on the evolution of culture or dress styles (Kroeber 1919, p.  261). Kroeber also acknowledges the regularity of the pulsation in the changes of the major proportions of dress over a period of time that often exceeds a human life span, while such details as trimmings, pleats, and ruffles alter rapidly (Ibid., p. 258). Agnes Brooks Young, another exponent of fashion cycle theory, conducting research on fashion magazines from 1760 to 1937, detected a series of “annual typicals” of the contour and shape of women’s skirts and came to a conclusion that fashion change is a continuous but slow process (Young 1937, p. 205). It is Young’s third conclusion that “fashion change in women’s dress always proceeds by the modification of what has previously prevailed, and never by abrupt departure from it. Each new fashion can be traced back to its predecessor, for it is always an outgrowth or an adaptation in which the lineal descent is clearly evident” (Ibid., p.  206). According to Young, 1  To Kroeber, civilization is interchangeable with culture. “Like many anthropologists, I use the word civilization almost synonymously with the word culture,” says Kroeber in Style and Civilizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 150.

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sartorial change over three centuries in terms of the silhouette of women’s skirts is essentially cyclical in the unvarying order of the bell, the back-fullness, and the tubular, and this repeats over time.2 The pioneering works by Kroeber and Young concerning the long-term changes in the dimensions of dress in relation to cycles of civilization/culture have inspired researchers from diverse academic disciplines such as economics, communications, and apparel and textiles.3 However, little advancement surrounding the topic of long-term fashion cycles has been made, other than the verifications of their existence; as Annette Lynch and Mitchell Strauss (2007) point out, ensuing research studies carried out after Kroeber and Young are limited to identifying long-term cyclic periodicities in fashion, with no substantial findings about the inherent causes of fashion cycles “beyond some educated speculation” (p. 139). Not only that, but there are also a good number of contemporary scholars who deem works by Kroeber and Young to be outdated. For example, Evelyn L. Brannon remarks, “The long-term cycles identified by Kroeber and Young and verified by other researchers are of little use to forecasters because the cultural institutions that created them no longer exist,” and contends that developments in culture, women’s upgraded sociopolitical standing, and improved mobility brought to an end long-term cycles in fashion (Brannon 2000, p. 108). It is by no means feasible to empirically judge at this moment whether long-range fashion cycles are operative in our time, as it requires diachronic and retrospective research with veritable data over a long period of time. Nevertheless, it is not unintelligible that the recurrence of the previous stylistic changes with a given set of models does not apply to our time anymore, since the contour of the skirt no longer changes in the order of the bell, the back-fullness, and the tubular every 30 years, nor do the ­variations in the width and length of skirts have the same regularity as in the previ Refer to Young’s periodization (Young 1937, p. 22).

2

Back-fullness, 1760 through 1795, or 36 years Tubular, 1796 through 1829, or 34 years Bell, 1830 through 1867, or 38 years Back-fullness, 1868 through 1899, or 32 years Tubular, 1900 through 1937, or 38 years so far 3  See Annette Lynch and Mitchell Strauss, “Fashion as Cycle” in Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Lynch and Strauss illustrate with three noteworthy studies: Dwight Robinson (1958) attributes the cause of the long-term fashion changes to novelty and identifies long-term pendulum swings in fashion trends from one extreme to another; John W. G. Lowe and Elizabeth D. Lowe (1982) affirm the earlier research done by Kroeber and Young, indicating women’s sexuality as the driving force behind the longterm changes in fashion design; and Nigel Barber (1999) associates socioeconomic changes, such as women’s economic independence and marital opportunities with long-term flows of fashion trend, upholding Lowe and Lowe’s earlier research in which the correlation between shifting erogenous zones (by Flügel) and fashion periodicities (by Kroeber) is already suggested. Also, refer to George B. Sproles’s research on the principles or theories of fashion changes, in which he affirms that there are two distinctive fashion cycles, that is, long-term fashion trends spanning decades and centuries, and short-lived fashion styles lasting from several months to years. George B. Sproles, “Analyzing Fashion Life Cycles: Principles and Perspectives,” Journal of Marketing 45, no. 4 (Autumn 1981) 116–124.

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ous three centuries. Yet, it has to be highlighted that what Kroeber and Young revealed, by resorting to quantitative analysis of the measurement of Western women’s evening dresses over three centuries, is an independent and superorganic movement distinct from individual influences.4 Quantitative data analyses by Kroeber and Young are the evidence that bespeaks the dialectical transformation in fashion history; that is, in the mode of dialectical succession, proceeding behind a forerunner while being followed by a successor (Young), fueled by sublation (Kroeber), just like Hegelian history itself. It is, in particular, Kroeber’s quantitative study on women’s evening dresses over centuries that attests to the interplay between quantitative and qualitative changes in cultural evolution over time, which illuminates the workings of Hegelian dialectical movement. The leap from a quantitative alteration to a qualitative shift is clarified by Hegel in one of five divisions of logic in The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1991). Addition. The identity of quality and quantity present in measure is only implicit at first, and not yet posited. This implies that each of the two determinations, whose unity is measure, also claims validity on its own account. In this way, on the one hand, quantitative determinations of what is there can be altered, without its quality being affected thereby, but, on the other, this indifferent increase and decrease also has a limit, the transgression of which alters the quality. Thus, for instance, the temperature of water is, up to a point, indifferent in relation to its liquid state; but there comes a point in the increasing or decreasing of the temperature of liquid water where this state of cohesion changes qualitatively, and the water is transformed into steam, on the one hand, the ice, on the other. When a quantitative alteration takes place it appears, to start with, to be something quite innocent; but something quite different lurks behind it, and this seemingly innocent alteration of the quantitative is like a ruse with which to catch the qualitative (1991, §108, p. 171).

The illustration of water becoming steam or ice depending on the increase or decrease in the temperature of liquid water allows us to comprehend the mechanism of sublation, at which point a quantitative alteration results in a qualitative change. Remarkably similar comments are made by Kroeber as well. Or, one might compare the inception of civilization to the end of the process of slowly heating water. The expansion of the liquid goes on a long time. Its alteration can be observed by the thermometer as well as in bulk, in its solvent power as well as in its internal agitation. But it remains water. Finally, however, the boiling point is attained. Steam is produced: the rate of enlargement of volume is increased a thousand fold; and in place of a glistening percolating fluid, a volatile gas diffuses invisibly. Neither the laws of physics nor those of chemistry are violated; nature is not set aside; but yet a saltation has taken place: the slow transitions that accumulated from zero to one hundred have been transcended in an instant, and a condition of substance with new properties and new possibilities of effect is in existence. Such, in some manner, must have been the result of the appearance of this new thing, civilization (Kroeber 1917, p. 210).

4  Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim first introduced the concept of the superorganic. Later, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Leslie White reexamined it. The concept of the superorganic denotes the predominance of culture over the power of individuals as against the “great man theory of history.” Paul A. Erickson and Liam Donat Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 99–100.

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Here one can see some comparable points of Hegel and Kroeber, as they both expound the implications of quantitative movement in relation to qualitative changes. Kroeber presents the process of development of a culture/civilization by using the concept of saltation, illustrating a qualitative leap from a quantitative domain of measure, which is not incongruous to Hegel’s concept of sublation. One thing noteworthy in his research with Jane Richardson is the fact that with only one of a pair of opposing extremes in measure did high variability always take place in the long-term morphological changes in dress fashions (Richardson and Kroeber and 1940, p. 148). The two periods of high variability of style are 1787–1835 (especially before 1820) and 1910–36—the Revolutionary Napoleonic era and the period immediately before, during, and after the First World War (Ibid., p. 149). It is hardly a coincidence that the most critical sociopolitical instability and the highest fashion agitation in modern history occurred at the same time, as both signify some dialectical movements over time, each in its own terms. Kroeber and Richardson maintain that although sociopolitical unrest might result in unsettled and varied styles, its influence on a certain form of extremity in dress, such as ultra-high or low waists, or short and tight skirts, is a matter of conjecture (Ibid., p. 147). Yet they further explain that sociocultural turbulence and agitation “dislocate” or “invert” an existing stylistic pattern (Ibid., p. 149). and suggest that “the changes effected” be examined only in view of the long-range basic pattern of dress (Ibid., pp. 147–148). This is no less than to claim, following a Hegelian line of thought, that the instability and upheaval during topsy-turvy periods in history are the agents of sublation for the transformation of the form of dress fashions, if not the direct cause of a specific style. No fundamental law by which the style of dress fashions has changed is spotted by Kroeber and Richardson. Nonetheless, what Kroeber and Richardson found is not just the mere fact that there is a parallel relationship between social, cultural, and political atmosphere and fashion changes, but strong evidence that the contours of formal evening dress have changed over some 332 years, according to the same underlying order by which generic history has evolved. Put differently, their quantitative research on dress fashions reveals that fashion history in modern times is a history in which generic forces affect humanity, and are not confined to cultural artifacts only. Herein lies the rationale for fashion history in modern times as an important area of investigation that provides us with insight into the dialectical movement in history. Fashion history in modern times has distinctive schematic patterns in terms of form, which can also be traced with a clear understanding of the mode of Hegelian dialectical movement of history. The point I am trying to address is not that fashion history repeats certain patterns or shapes periodically or that historic events simply impose certain fashion styles, but that the mode of change in dress fashions in modern times, by which one predominant fashion trend in terms of form passes over into another, displays the workings of sublation. Put the other way around, coming to grips with the morphological transformation of fashion history in modern times is one way to probe the mode of dialectical progression in history.

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Indeed, formal changes in fashion history exhibit concrete examples of dialectical movement by sublation in measure that is expounded by Hegel.5 Further, this effectively illustrates the distinctions between self-sublation (Selbst-Aufhebung) and sublation (Aufhebung), demonstrating not only how each different kind of sublation operates, but also how these two types of sublation are linked together, resulting in a series of morphological alterations of female evening dresses over centuries. Based on the findings by Kroeber and Richardson, one can trace dialectical movements from quantity to quality, as well as from one quality to another, that are manifested in the shape of dress fashions over the course of modern times. Water becoming steam or ice depending on temperature, as mentioned earlier, is one example of self-sublation, as the unity of quality and quantity is sublated by another in a one-step process.6 In light of Hegel’s exposition of dialectical development in the domain of measure, it can be said that all the long-term dimensional changes of female evening dresses in modern times made in a linear manner as a one-way process from one silhouette with distinction to another over some 332 years, the time period Richardson and Kroeber observed (1940, p.  111) are the results of self-­ sublation. However, the three-step developments as a set that occurred from 1787 to 1835 (especially before 1820) and 1910 to 1936, the periods when high variability and one of a pair of opposing extremes made their appearance together, display the mode of sublation in measure, which has a significant meaning in both fashion history and history at large. (I further clarify this argument in the next chapter.) Consider Kroeber and Richardson’s own words again: “high variability is not associated with any dimensional crest, but always with only one of a pair of opposing extremes” (Ibid., p.  149). To illustrate, the periods before and after the crinoline silhouette, with its largest circumference of up to six yards, which epitomizes the Victorian era, had no high variability in measure;7 on the other hand, those two critical revolutionary periods had a pair of two extreme forms of dress accompanied by high variability. It appears that variability of some significant scale indicates a

5  For the discussion of the topic of measure, see Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (1991), C. Measure, §§ 107–111, pp. 170—174. 6  See Hegel’s own remark about self-sublation in relation to measure and the measureless.

The measureless occurs initially when a measure, in virtue of its quantitative nature, goes beyond its qualitative determinacy. But since the new quantitative ratio, which is measureless with regard to the first, is just as qualitative, the measureless is also a measure; both of these transitions, from quality to quantity and vice versa, can once more be represented as infinite progress—as the self-sublation and restoration of measure in the measureless. [The Encyclopaedia Logic (1991) §109, p. 172] 7  For example, see the following remark by Alison Gernsheim as to the size of crinoline: Judging from this, in conjunction with photographs—not fashion drawings—the bottom hoop of even the largest crinoline was not more than 5 ½ to 6 yards in circumference. (Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, New  York: Dover, 1981 [1963], 48).

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period of adjustment before the stage of a newly established unity of two opposite extremes of form. If we see this through the lens of the “being-nothing-becoming” model, dubbed the first triad of Hegel’s logic by many Hegel scholars, any variability of statistical significance can be viewed as being measureless, even though it is a kind of measure. This condition of measurelessness points to a stage of nothing, because when significant viability in measure takes place virtually nothing concrete in terms of form is identified as a determinate being (e.g., a dominant trend or fashion in the sartorial domain), despite the fact that those forms effected by any viability can be measurable. In this sense, the status of the measureless is that of negativity in relation to its previous stage. The status of the measureless is sublated into another measure; it is through self-sublation that the unity between quality and quantity is reestablished while becoming a new being that takes on the status of a qualitative quantity. However, when two antithetical qualities, each of which is sublated quantity, are sublated by another quality by going through the process of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be between the previous two qualitative determinations, this is called sublation. It can be said that in fashion history, self-sublation takes place between quality and quantity in a single process, while sublation entails a tripartite movement, in which two opposite qualities are sublated by another one, and each step of which involves self-sublation, which is carried out over time by the departure from measure and the arrival to measure, creating a different ratio between quality and quantity. One might complain that the threefold pattern found in qualitative changes as shown in the drastic change over the critical time period in history, 1787–1835; that is, the change that took place from wide skirts supported by wide hoops to narrow, clinging high-waisted skirts, and again to skirts of moderate fullness, compared to the more exaggerated style from before the French Revolution, does not fit in the triadic model, “being-nothing-becoming,” since we are talking about changes made through mediations between qualities, not the unity between quantity and quality that accounts for self-sublation in measure. To be more specific, the narrow and clinging high-waisted skirts, the second (qualitative) style in the aforementioned threefold transition, cannot be construed as nothing, in that any quality that is conceived is already a being in Hegel’s system; even though empty, a quality of no qualitative value as its determination is a being;8 on the other hand, each transition from one silhouette to another is an outcome of self-sublation between quality and quantity. As exemplified in the foregoing discussion, it is hard to apply Hegel’s first triad to all different moments of sublation in every concept and every thing, even though he states, “It would not be difficult to demonstrate the unity of being and nothing in every example, in every actual thing or thought” (Hegel 2010, p. 61). Hegel asserts

8  See the following comments by Hegel in The Encyclopaedia Logic (1991): “Quality is, in general, the determinacy that is immediate, identical with being, as distinct from quantity …” (146, § 90). And, “the negation [of quality] is no longer abstract nothing, but as a being-there and as something, it is only a form of the something: it is as otherness” (147, § 91). Here the words in square brackets are my addition.

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that becoming, which is the moment in which the unity of being and nothing takes place, is the first truth in the logic and foundation for all further determinations (Ibid., p. 62). Does Hegel’s first triad betray his own argument? Prior to making any judgment, one should note that Hegel himself acknowledges that, while through the application of unification, abstract being and abstract nothing become a determinate being and a determinate nothing, the unity of being and nothing as the moment of becoming holds the pure abstractions of being and nothing within itself (Ibid.). In other words, for Hegel, a determinate being as “positive” and a determinate nothing as “negative” still contain being and nothing as their “abstract foundation” (Ibid., pp. 61–62). Indeed, the challenge one is faced with when trying to apply Hegel’s dialectical method to concepts and things around us, is twofold. For one thing, no one mechanical or formalist dialectical mode that is credited to Hegel can be applied to all the moments of every concept and thing around us. For another, the being-­ nothing-­becoming triad—the “textbook example,” which, according to Michael Forster, may serve as a prototype of Hegel’s dialectical method (Forster 1993, p. 133)—is an abstract and abstracted exposition, which requires a sort of adjustment in interpretation after leaving the stage of pure abstraction of being and nothing, so as to relate to the concrete, objective world. There are many examples that do not unfold in a three-step manner. For instance, Hegel’s explanation of “something” as quality illustrates double negations, double sublations, and the mediation of itself with itself in one concept. In the Doctrine of Being of The Science of Logic, known as his Greater Logic, he elucidates that the concept of something is quality, or qualitative being. In order to prove this, he sets forth its negative unity as a driving force behind the dialectical movement from the moment of distinction of something to its last moment of becoming (Hegel 2010, pp. 88–90). According to Hegel, in “something” two distinctions exist, that of reality and that of negation, and they sublate each other because of their own presence (Ibid., p. 88). What remains is the state of sublation of distinctions, which is the determination of existence [of the something] (Ibid.). As such, Hegel says, “Something is the first negation of negation, as simple existent self-reference,” because the something is the result of sublation of its own distinction of negation [of reality] (Ibid., p.  89). Owing to its indeterminate “in-itselfness,” the something determines itself as “existent-for-­ itself”; accordingly, he argues, the something again becomes the “mediation of itself with itself,” which is the second negation of negation, when the something is determined as “a simple identity” of some concept or things (Ibid.). He concludes that because this last mediation does not have concrete determinations, it is followed by its collapse into being as the simple unity; thus, something is not only an existent, but it is also becoming in itself, as it is no longer just being and nothing for its moments (Ibid., pp. 88–89). Hegel’s own elucidation of the thought process about the concept of something aptly illuminates the complexity of his dialectical method; it entails multiple levels of determinacy (Ibid., p.  738),9 which are none other than a series of negations

 The following is Hegel’s own explanation:

9

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(Ibid., p. 78)10 and any number of moments of mediation, which is the process of becoming,11 depending on a given subject matter of contemplation. It might be the manifold nature of Hegel’s dialectic that facilitated the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” tripartite, which had been rediscovered by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason12 and further developed by Fichte,13 giving it currency in academia for more than a century. Still, many authors use this model as a convenient tool to explain Hegel’s dialectic.14 Labeled a legend, the famous formula has been under scrutiny since Gustav

In true cognition, on the contrary, method is not only an aggregate of certain determinations, but the determinateness in-and-for-itself of the concept, and the concept is the middle term only because it equally has the significance of the objective; in the conclusion, therefore, the objective does not attain only an external determinateness by virtue of the method, but is posited rather in its identity with the subjective concept. [Hegel, The Science of Logic (2010), p. 738] 10  As Hegel puts it, “A determinateness, however, as will be found later on, is itself a negation; …” in Hegel, The Science of Logic (2010), p. 78. 11  G.  W. F.  Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.  B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 11. For mediating is nothing but self-identity working itself out through an active self-directed process; or, in other words, it is reflection into self, the aspect in which the ego is for itself, objective to itself. It is pure negativity, or, reduced to its utmost abstraction, the process of bare and simple becoming. 12  Refer to the Antinomy of Pure Reason in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1996a). Also see the following remark by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Mind (2003, 28): Now that the triplicity, adopted in the system of Kant−−a method rediscovered, to begin with, by instinctive insight, but left lifeless and uncomprehended—has been raised to its significance as an absolute method, true form is thereby set up in its true content, and the conception of science has come to light. 13  G.  W. F.  Hegel. Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.  S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York 1977a), 85. See Hegel’s comment as to the contribution made by Fichte. How the emptiness, the pure formalism of this principle is set forth in contrast to an empirical fullness, and how it grows into a system, we shall show in greater detail in [our discussion of] Fichte at whose hands the mutual integration of this empty unity and its antithetic opposite receives a more thorough and consistent development. 14  For example, see the following comments by different authors regarding the thesis-antithesissynthesis triad: Despite the complicity of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad in the vulgarization of Hegel’s thought, it remains the case that an exposition on, and then clarification of, the triad is a good place to start when exploring the dialectic. (Maxwell Kennel, Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing [Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013], 4). It is also certain that he himself is complicitous in the propagation of this [thesis-antithesis-synthesis] formula, and at least partly responsible for its vulgarization. It is certainly a useful teaching device as well as a convenient expository framework. (Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the “Phenomenology of Spirit” [London: Verso, 2010], 18.) The words in square brackets are my addition. Hegel is perhaps most renowned for the constant triadic structure of his logic, popularized without much textual basis as ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis.’ But whatever slogan one uses to characterize the triadic structures encountered throughout the logic, Hegel believes

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Mueller in his essay The Hegel Legend of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis (1958) unshrouded its glow.15 For example, Leonard F. Wheat (2012) states that the past 50 years saw a hostile attitude among scholars toward the vulgarized triad, repudiating its association with Hegel’s system; he highlights this change by citing Verene (2007), who makes the following statement: “No first-rate Hegel scholar speaks of Hegel having a dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis” (Wheat 2012, pp. 1–2). With his perusal of 246 authors on Hegel and Marx, and on the basis of Robert Stern’s survey of hundreds of authors who were consulted both directly and indirectly in his book Hegel and Phenomenology of Spirit (2002), Wheat (2012) also argues that no Hegel experts have demonstrated a substantive understanding of the thesis-­ antithesis-­synthesis triad (Ibid., pp. 1–4).16 It is hardly unexpected to see this result, inasmuch as the Fichtean formula is not compatible with Hegel’s dialectical method and the same triad by Fichte is analyzed from the perspective of Hegel’s system. It has to be pointed out that Hegel considers Fichte’s philosophy “the development of form in itself” and deems Fichte’s postulate as an advancement toward consistent unity, away from the Kantian mere subjectivity (Hegel 1995, p.  481). Hegel discredits Fichte’s deductive method for its inability to move forward to the next stage from absolute subjectivism on its own, in that for Fichte the ego is “the absolute principle” (Ibid.). Hegel views the Fichtean transition from thesis to antithesis as a progression made possible by “external reflection” and the next movement as synthesis of an “external” assembling of what is “externally” available (Hegel 2010, p. 72). In support of his polemic against Fichte’s formalism,17 Hegel suggests becoming to be an “immanent” synthesis of being and nothing (Ibid.). In order to this pattern arises necessarily from ‘the method’ of the logic. (Willem A. deVries, “Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Mind,” in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds. The Age of German Idealism. Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. VI [London & New York: Routledge, 1993], 238–239.) 15  Mueller argues that Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus introduced the process of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” as Hegel’s method. Gustav E.  Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-AntithesisSynthesis.’” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 3. (June 1958): 411–414, (pp. 413–414). See the following remark by Chalybäus.In this first methodical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, whereof the latter consists in a process or course of gradually closer self-determination, we have at once an example or type of all succeeding theses, and shall understand these the more readily, by referring to the above simple movement of thought. (Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, Historical Survey of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel: Designed as an Introduction to the Opinions of the Recent Schools. trans. Alfred Tulk [Andover: W. F. Draper and Brother, 1837/1854], 317). 16  Also see the following comment by Willem deVries. Numerous authors have attempted overviews of the progress of Hegel’s logic, and numerous claims have been made about the general course of the argumentation, but there is still no thoroughgoing commentary on Hegel’s logic to place beside the commentaries on other philosophical masters by scholars like Cornford, W. D. Ross, Vaihinger, or Kemp Smith. No one has been able systematically to reconstruct the flow of argumentation in the logic in a thoroughly coherent, detailed, and intelligible manner. (deVries, “Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Mind,” 242.) 17  See G. W. F. Hegel, “C. Fichtean Philosophy,” Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977a), esp. 154.

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grasp the essential attributes of immanent synthesis in Hegel, one should have some understanding of Hegel’s breakthrough in moving beyond the antinomies between the universal and the particular, the finite and the infinite, subject and object, and thought and being. Hegel in his essay Faith and Knowledge (1802) states that the objective of philosophy, influenced by the tradition of Locke and Hume, is to analyze the objective world from the perspective of the subject (Hegel 1977, p. 154). Here he argues that in dealing with this task, the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, whose shared principle is the “absoluteness of finitude,” are stuck with “the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity” (Ibid., p. 62), the antithetical opposites of necessary truth, which also account for irreducibility of the universal and the particular, and of the subject and predicate. Running counter to them, Hegel remarks, “Both subjectivity and objectivity are thoughts in any case; and indeed they are determinate thoughts, which have to prove themselves to be grounded in the thinking that is universal and self-determining” (Hegel 1991, §192, p.  267). This is because in Hegel’s system, the content of thought develops itself in the process of knowing, since the content’s own reflection is the primary cause of its determinate character (Hegel 2010, pp.  9–10). As such, Hegel’s immanent synthesis can be viewed as a third term that results not from external reflection, but naturally from the dialectical interaction between thought and its content. Even with this insight, and precisely because of it, it is hard to define the exact nature of the Hegelian dialectical method in a simpler manner. Without a doubt, no one could possibly come up with the perfect formula that fits all the wisdom of Hegel’s system, since Hegel himself failed to render one. Yet, it is a kind of necessary and intentional failure. The pith of Hegel’s dialectic is far from a fixed or institutionalized procedure. Formulation of any rigid schema for thought processes is by no means in accordance with the crux of dialectic Hegel sets forth, because it simply adds “additional reflection” to the course of the thought processes. But this does not mean that the thought/thinking in Hegel’s system does not have any form. The basic unit of thought’s movement is triplicity. For example, Hegel explicates that the process from unessential consciousness to a consciousness of its existence for itself, which illustrates the way pure thought becomes a concrete conceptualization of its object, is a threefold process (Hegel 2003, p. 122). As he puts it, The process through which the unessential consciousness strives to attain this oneness, is itself a triple process, in accordance with the threefold character of the relation which this consciousness takes up to its transcendent and remote reality embodied in specific form. In one it is a pure consciousness; at another time a particular individual who takes up towards actuality the attitude characteristic of desire and labour; and in the third place it is a consciousness of its self-existence, its existence for itself. We have now to see how these three modes of its being are found and are constituted in that general relation (Ibid.).

It has to be emphasized that Hegel opines that triplicity is “the germ of speculation” (Hegel 1977, pp.  79–80). Some commentators project an ambiguous or ­fallacious impression that Hegel depreciates triplicity, since he calls Kant’s tripartite

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method “a lifeless schema” or “a mere shadow.”18 For Hegel, Kant’s major shortcoming is leaving triplicity “lifeless and uncomprehended” (Hegel 2003, p. 28) and being unable to utilize its potency as a means to develop further, beyond the polarization of antinomies. Contrary to some erroneous interpretations, Hegel actually applauds Kant for viewing thinking not as a subject but as a form, which is triplicity (Hegel 1977, pp. 79–80). Although a three-step movement is a basic unit of formal pattern of Hegel’s own dialectical method as well, the form is hardly substantive in Hegel’s system unless coupled with the movement of content. Nevertheless, concerning the general structure of Hegel’s method, as a form with its key elements, it can be said that his method is essentially characterized, first, by the threefold mode of interaction, the beginning of which involves immediacy as start and mediation as consequence,19 and, second, by sublation, through which first two terms of the three-step process pass over into another. Any variation on a triple process, as in musical variations,20 simply indicates the movement and rhythm of the human thought process between consciousness, its knowledge, and its object. As such, it is by no means uncomplicated to trace the kernel of Hegelian logical procedure in thought processes, if one tries to count each step meticulously, because, depending on the object of consciousness, a wide range of variations of all different kinds can be identified. In Hegel’s dialectical thought process, for instance, more than one sublation or a combination of self-sublation and sublation may work together;

 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 28, as cited in Gustav E. Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis,” 411–412. See Mueller’s remark:

18

In all the twenty volumes of Hegel’s “complete works” he does not use this “triad” once; nor does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century. He refers to “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Mind, where he considers the possibility of this “triplicity” as a method or logic of philosophy. According to the Hegel-legend one would expect Hegel to recommend this “triplicity.” But, after saying that it was derived from Kant, he calls it a “lifeless schema,” “mere shadow” and concludes .…” 19  Hegel, The Science of Logic, 2010, 46. Here we only have to consider how the logical beginning appears. The two sides from which it can be taken have already been named, namely either by way of mediation as result, or immediately as beginning proper. Hegel (Ibid., 61) also writes, It would not be difficult to demonstrate the unity of being and nothing in every example, in every actual thing or thought. The same must be said of being and nothing as was said above of immediacy and mediation (which contain a reference to each other and hence negation), that nowhere on heaven or on earth is there anything which does not contain both being and nothing in itself. 20  Refer to Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the “Phenomenology of Spirit”(2010).

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mediation of itself and/or with itself can be involved; or distinctions of the content of thought even before being determined sometimes sublate each other. A case in point is the exposition of the concept of something by Hegel himself that was ­discussed earlier, which entails double negations, double sublations, and mediation of itself with itself. Besides, when one attempts to apply Hegel’s method to what it is not ordinarily deemed as anything within the domain of thought process, it becomes even more challenging to untangle the order of critical moments of development in the logical (dialectical) manner, as explained by Hegel. Situated in the predicament, the near impossibility of formulating a Hegelian schematic triad that is inclusive of all variations, I suggest modifying the thesis-antithesis-synthesis— which has long been accepted to be representative of the form of Hegel’s dialectical method by some who take it as none other than Hegelian as well as by others who find no alternative ideas to depict the form of Hegel’s thought process—into the thesis-­antithesis-­imminent synthesis. Not only because the most critical error in the Fichte’s formula, for Hegel, is the delineation of the third term as (external) synthesis, but also because imminent synthesis is Hegel’s own labeling of the third term (Hegel 2010, pp. 71–72),21 I argue, the revised triad is more appropriate to use when referring to the form of Hegel’s dialectical method. This way, one can, at the very least, express the acknowledgment of the distinctiveness or primacy of the form of Hegel’s dialectical method over the one that is originally attributed to Fichte. Certainly, even with this revision, not all the movements of concepts or actual things can be construed according to the framework of Hegel’s system. Albeit incomplete and insufficient, our rummage for the reified form on the part of the subject is to be curbed for the good of dialectic. Rather than making a useless effort into searching for or setting up any schematic formulae that can never be suitable for Hegel’s system, which Hegel himself, in fact, did not provide, we should direct our attention “entirely and unreservedly to the matter itself” by “simply looking on,” as Adorno advises in An Introduction to Dialectics (2017, p. 55). The following comment by Adorno offers a critical insight into how to carry out dialectical thinking in a Hegelian manner. That the triadic schema is not terribly important after all springs precisely from the fact that this schema is merely the subjectively abstracted process, a description of the subjective comportment with which we approach the matter itself, while this subjective comportment for its part is only one moment which Hegel then corrects through another which is 21

 Also see Michael Inwood’s interpretation about Hegel’s objections to formalist triplicity. Thus Hegel has two distinct objections to formalistic triplicity. First, the triad must emerge naturally from the terms themselves, not simply in the mind of the philosopher. Secondly, the triadic movement must be genuinely explanatory of the terms and not require additional analogies. (Michael Inwood, “Commentary on the note 51,” Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated with introduction and commentary by Michael Inwood [Oxford University Press, 2018], 359).

References

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described as a process of simply looking on. And this is the process of abandoning oneself entirely and unreservedly to the matter itself (Ibid., pp. 54–55).22

As per Adorno, [Hegelian] dialectic has two implications: it is both a method of thought/thinking and the matter itself (Ibid., pp.  1 and 9); “the movement of the concept,” which Adorno cites from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, bears the same twofold meaning (Ibid., p. 4). Put in other words, dialectical philosophy is a process fashioned by both a method of thought and the matter itself. What is most helpful in comprehending Hegelian dialectical development of history is that, according to Adorno, while in “the movement of the concept,” historical necessity and acumen in the matter itself are combined; thus, he maintains, “to grasp a thing should really mean to grasp the historical necessity of a thing in all its stages” (Ibid., p. 11). Here one can find significant justification for observing fashion history, in particular, the morphological changes in fashion history as an important object of “looking on,” in order not only to practice dialectical philosophy but also to get the picture of how dialectic operates along with the interplay between the individual and the collective, between subject and object, and between the universal and the particular. Adorno also expounds that authentic dialectic works by shedding light on the individual phenomenon, rather than by providing the whole, following a formalist schema, as it evinces the whole by passing beyond itself” by virtue of the whole; further, he advises that one exert oneself to understand the role of phenomena in the totality while not hypostasizing the whole without attending to the material itself (Ibid., p. 24). Adorno’s advice clearly offers a solid basis as to why the examination of changes in dress fashions, especially by observing the vibrations in quantity in relation to a qualitative change in fashion history, can assist us in apprehending the totality in historical specificity within the purview of “an open dialectic” by Adorno,23 as the dialectical development that is found in fashion history is hardly irrelevant to the progression of modern history.

22 23

 See also Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics (2017, 9).  For Adorno’s stance about “an open dialectic,” see the following remark: …. what motivated me personally to turn to dialectics in a decisive sense is precisely this micrological motif, namely the idea that if we only abandon ourselves unreservedly to the compulsion exercised by a particular object, by a particular matter, and pursue this single and specific matter unreservedly, then the ensuing movement is itself so determined out of the matter that it possesses the character of truth even if the Absolute, as an all-embracing totality, can never be given to us. This would be the concept of an open dialectic—in contrast to the closed dialectic of idealism …. (Ibid., 21.)

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 2017. An Introduction to Dialectics, ed. Christoph Ziermann and trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Brannon, Evelyn L. 2000. Fashion Forecasting: Research, Analysis and Presentation. New York: Fairchild Publications. Forster, Michael. 1993. Hegel’s Dialectical Method. In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser, 130–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York. ———. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. Geraets T, Suchting W, and Harris H. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishers. ———. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 3, trans. E.  S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2003. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ———. 2010. The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. 1917. The Superorganic. American Anthropologist 19 (2): 163–213. ———. 1919. On the Principle of Order in Civilization as Exemplified by Changes of Fashion. American Anthropologist 21: 235–263. Leonard F, Wheat. 2012. Hegel’s Undiscovered Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Dialectics: What Only Marx and Tillich Understood. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Lynch, Annette, and Mitchell Strauss. 2007. Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Meaning. Oxford: Berg. Richardson, Jane, and A.L.  Kroeber. 1940. Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions: A Quantitative Analysis. University of California Anthropological Records 5 (2): 111–153. Young, Agnes Brooks. 1937. Recurring Cycles of Fashion. New  York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.

Chapter 7

Dialectic of Fashion History in Modern Times

Fashion history in modern times is not merely a record of fashionable dress that comes and goes without its forerunner and successor; rather, it is a visual exemplar of the Hegelian dialectical process. Grounded in the theoretical analysis of the relationship between morphological changes in fashion in modern times and Hegelian dialectic that is made in the previous chapter, this chapter explores fashion history in light of Hegelian dialectical movement, in particular, surrounding the critical moments of mediation of antithetical modes and their passing over into another. In probing the process by which an existing form of dress is replaced by its opposite form, and then becomes a reconciled one, preserving and canceling the previous antithetical formal qualities, one can come to a fair understanding of how Hegelian dialectical movement is at work in fashion history. This will, in turn, help us to see how the objective world is dialectically related to the Hegelian thought process, thereby assisting us in coming to grips with the puzzling aspect of subject-object relations that are not confined to our consciousness. I do not claim to provide an exhaustive account of qualitative formal changes of all kinds in dress fashions, nor do I aim to cover all the different periods in modern history. Instead, this chapter will delve into the two cardinal dialectical movements that occurred during the most turbulent periods in modern times, that is, the Revolutionary Napoleonic era (1785–1835) and the period immediately before, during, and after the First World War (1910–1936). These time periods were charged with vibrant energy, causing drastic qualitative shifts, according to Alfred Kroeber and Jane Richardson.1 This chapter will also track down traces of dialectical mediations of the development in dress fashions that took place during some of the previous centuries they didn’t examine. The overall trajectory of progression of fashion history in modern times was shaped by superorganic forces beyond individual influences,2 as Kroeber’s

 Refer to Chap. 6. “Formal Changes in Fashion and Hegelian Dialectic.”  See Chap. 6., note 4.

1 2

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­ orphological research on fashion has disclosed, although there were some prem dominant individuals who had an effect on some fashion trends of the time. Based on this premise, this chapter aims to unpack the mode of the dialectical evolution, in terms of the silhouettes of dress fashions, over certain centuries prior to the 332year time span Kroeber and Richardson wrote about; as well as unpack the dialectical evolution in the full-blown fashion system. The former, which I dub “the prefashion system,” has more to do with the politico-religious hegemonic relations, while the latter, which I call “the fashion system,” pertains to the autonomous relay between the individual and the collective. The terms “the fashion system” and “the prefashion system” do not signify object-based sartorial fashion systems. As I have discussed in the Introduction, these two terms depict “arbitrary frames of reference by which judgements about the nature of antithetical opposites found in fashion history are made.” And the discussion on the difference between these systems as well as on the characteristics of each system is an intellectual exercise by applying Hegel’s philosophy of history to fashion history, rather than an attempt to write a history of (sartorial) fashion. I do not contend that comparing some sartorial fashions from the disparate systems is absolutely flawless, because the subject matter of analysis in each system is different. The morphological transformation under the prefashion system is neither gender specific nor limited to one specific dress item, whereas the formal change in the fashion system discussed in this chapter is concerned primarily with women’s fashion, including the female evening dress—the same item Kroeber and Richardson conducted an investigation into. Albeit imperfect, this comparative study will still allow us not only to see the general modus operandi of the dialectical evolution of vestimentary styles in modern times, but also to discern the essence of fashion and the impelling force behind its dialectical transformation, which Hegel calls “logical necessity” (Hegel 1991, p. 16). As Sally Sedgwick (2017) points out, the logical necessity that governs the relation between consciousness and the material world cannot be detected without leaning on metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of Vernunft (Sedgwick 2017, pp. 40–43). According to Sedgwick, not only is the object of the logic “thought itself,” but also the uncovering of the logic rests on “acts of thought” (Ibid., p. 42). Thus, the real question is how one can identify the necessity of the logic of fashion history in view of Hegel’s formal science. It is Adorno who offers us indirect but helpful guidance as to how one can spot the logical necessity of dialectical development—that is, by “simply looking on” or “abandoning oneself” to the matter itself.3 In Hegel’s system, “things themselves speak in a philosophy” (Adorno 1993, p. 6).4 This is due to 3  For more discussion of Adorno’s suggestion, refer to Chap. 6. “Formal Changes in Fashion and Hegelian Dialectic.” 4  

Paradoxically, historically, only absolute idealism gives free rein to the method that the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit calls, “simply looking at” [reines Zusehen]. Hegel is able to think from the thing itself out, to surrender passively, as it were, to its authentic substance, only because by virtue of the system the matter at hand is referred to its identity with absolute subject. Things themselves speak in a philosophy that focuses its energies on providing that it is itself one with them.

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the quintessential characteristic of Hegel’s system, in which “the whole realizes itself only in and through the parts, only through discontinuity, alienation, and reflection—through, in short, everything that is anathema to Gestalt theory,” as stated by Adorno (Ibid., p. 4). Thus, it is important to apprehend the role of phenomena in relation to the totality to see how fashion history is shaped through the mediation between fashion phenomena. It is in this vein that I attempt to make an observation regarding fashion phenomena and fashion history, so as to discern the underlying law of the evolution of fashion in modern times, which resides in the realm of our consciousness, ideas, and ideologies. This chapter is comprised of four parts. In the first section, as the title reveals, I will discuss “The Genesis of Fashion and Its Etymology,” so as to search for the link between fashion and modernity. In the second section of “Introduction regarding the Division between the Prefashion System and the Fashion System,” I will analyze the dissimilarity between the prefashion system and the subsequent “true” fashion system. In the third section, titled “The Prefashion System,” I will explore the dialectical development of the prefashion system, prompted by the complex relations between secular power and the church, unlike the fashion system in which the individual and collective relations are the key impetus of the dialectical movement. In the fourth and final section, I will examine the fashion system with a special focus on the two most critical threefold dialectical movements in fashion history. I will, first, investigate fashions before and after the French Revolution in order to demonstrate the predominance of ideological change as a force behind morphological change. Next, the materialist dialectical account of fashion history will be provided with the example of the effect of the bicycle on the fashion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the time the commodity mode of production began to exert its influence over the dogmatic social order of society, the dialectical process in the development of fashion history also took on a different outlook, while still ruled by nonmaterialist forces. Hence, in order to penetrate the procession of the history of fashion in the modern era, an understanding of the complementary relation between Hegelian dialectic and Marxist materialist dialectic is required. Following Hegel, Marx believes that history is a constant process of dialectic. However, unlike Hegel, Marx asserts that the determinant force behind the development of history is the material reality. While the former holds that Spirit leads the direction of the World’s History (Hegel, 2001, p. 21) and Reason governs the world and its history (Ibid., p. 25, p. 28, and p.  40), the latter claims that material reality constitutes who we are or who we believe ourselves to be.5 The material reality remains as a mere contingency in the  See the following remark made by Marx and Engels, for example:

5

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is

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Hegelian dialectical development of history, unless adopted by the individual and the collective simultaneously; nonetheless, the tacit communication between them is empty without the material world from the materialist perspective. Take note of Hegel’s remark that his logic is a “formal science” and its content is concepts (Hegel 2010, pp.  522–523).6 Devoid of material reality, Hegel’s system appears to be detached from the concrete, objective world. However, a philosophical scrutiny of fashion will prove this accusation against his delineation of the formal process of consciousness to be groundless, mainly because fashion manifests the dialectical mediation between subject and object. Faced with post-Hegelian criticism of lack of content—lack of reality—I also suggest that one take Francis Fukuyama’s message in the converse way. He proposes resorting to Hegel in assessing whether “we have reached the end of history” in his critique of the implications of termination of the Cold War. Fukuyama laments that owing to the intellectual baggage of materialism, economic theories do not touch upon such topics as consciousness and culture, which are deeply intertwined with consumer behavior (Fukuyama 1989, p. 7), and contends that Hegel’s system might unveil the problematic nature of many materialist explanations that are not questioned (Ibid., p. 8). As such, he proposes seeking a solution to the question of whether we have reached the end of history in the domain of consciousness, ideas, and ideology (Ibid., pp. 8–9). Albeit Fukuyama’s thesis that the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over communism signifies the end of history has undergone substantial criticism, what he puts forward for consideration as a larger conceptual framework is essential in probing the historical development in modern times. Taking into account Fukuyama’s suggestion, the last section of this chapter will examine the two most momentous time periods in the evolution of fashion history by drawing on the postulates of both Hegel and Marx as analytical tools, thereby unveiling how the two different systems are at work in the development of fashion history.

not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and intro. C.  J. Arthur [New York: International Publishers, 1970], p. 47).  

6

Since it is logic above all and not science generally whose relation to truth is the issue here, it must be further conceded that logic as the formal science cannot also contain, nor should contain, the kind of reality which is the content of the other parts of philosophy, of the sciences of nature and of spirit…. As contrasted with them, the logic is of course the formal science, yet the science of the absolute form which is implicit totality and contains the pure idea of truth itself. This absolute form has in it a content or reality of its own; the concept, since it is not a trivial, empty identity, obtains its differentiated determinations in the moment of negativity or of absolute determining; and the content is only these determinations of the absolute form and nothing else—a content posited by the form itself and therefore adequate to it.

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7.1  The Genesis of Fashion and Its Etymology There is an ongoing dispute among scholars over when fashion began to germinate. One recent publication that touches on the topic of the inception of fashion is Fashion Journalism: History, Theory, and Practice (2018), in which Sanda Miller and Peter McNeil contend that it is impossible to determine when fashion emerged, although “a ‘fashion system’” is already operative (p.  100). They exemplify Burgundian fashion in the fourteenth century as evidence that such a system made possible the changes in male dress at the Burgundian court (Ibid.), while also introducing Anne Hollander’s description of fashion as “what everybody wears” in everyday life, whose form has gone through countless changes for about seven centuries7; and they suggest that the birth of fashion took place no later than the fourteenth century. The dating of the beginning of fashion by many fashion historians and theorists, including Miller and McNeil, draws on the view of fashion essentially as an array of material objects, that is, what one wears around the body, just as Hollander has rendered.8 The notion that the key attribute of fashion is essentially bound with corporeal matter is prevalent in academic circles. To illustrate, after having reviewed different approaches to defining fashion, Malcolm Barnard (2014) makes the following remark: Once the issues and theories behind it have been understood, this may be the best that can be done with a definition of fashion. Fashion may now be understood as everything that is worn on the body and that is done to or with the body: all the dress, clothing, adornment, and modification and so on that happens on and to the body in the West is fashion. This includes, but is not restricted to or exhausted by, catwalk creations, street fashions, civil, military and domestic uniforms, tatooing, cicatrization and hairdressing…, as Baudrillard notes, there is no outside this system. In the modern West, at least, there is no outside to the fashion system and everything is fashion (p. 17).

If one subscribes to Barnard’s logic, clearly at issue is what is Western and what is modern, when discerning the qualifications of fashion, which is nothing but material objects one wears or uses around the body for a variety of purposes or reasons mixed with such factors as social, cultural, political, and/or economic values. In this vein, as a consequence, the question of what makes an object a fashion can be answered only by investigating external attributes of fashion. However, Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun in Fashion History: A Global View (2018) consider fashion within the parameters of the basic desire to decorate the body; thus, for them fashion has no temporal or spatial boundaries. They argue, “Dress has never been 7  “[E]verybody has to get dressed in the morning and go about the day’s business. What everybody wears to do this has taken different forms in the West for about seven hundred years and that is what fashion is,…” Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 6; cited in Sanda Miller, Peter McNeil, Fashion Journalism: History, Theory, and Practice (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 101. 8  See note 27 for some observations made by different fashion historians regarding the topic of the genesis of fashion and their reasoning behind their dating.

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static in any culture; the desire to use the human body to express a host of changing meanings, what Craik terms the ‘fashion impulse,’ has been present in societies since time immemorial” (Welters and Lillethun 2018, p. 7). According to Welters and Lillethun, fashion, which is “endemic to human nature,” denotes “changing styles of dress” (Ibid., p.  29). They assert that archaeological evidence of dress unveils the “fashion impulse,” a notion borrowed from Jennifer Craik (2009), which is manifested in the changes in dress and appearance, and that this impulse is found to have existed from prehistory to the present.9 In the concluding chapter of the same book, they maintain: The measurement of time is a flexible concept, however, and the desire for novelty existed across time and space,… Given that humans inherently possess the desire to decorate themselves and that evidence of fashion change has been demonstrated in the case studies and examples in this book, as well as by scholars elsewhere, it is time to stop limiting ourselves to the West after the mid-fourteenth century in the telling of fashion’s history (Ibid., p. 195).

What is overlooked in Welters and Lillethun’s assertion is the fact that the desire for something new by means of fashion is not a mere quest for a novelty that has no point of reference. For them, the fashion impulse refers to the innate desire for novelty as well as to the universal human desire for adornment10; therefore, the human impulse for adornment of the body and the pursuit of the new are not discrete factors, according to their thinking. Welters and Lillethun’s rationale shows us how fashion loses its theoretical backing as a cardinal motor of modernity as well as its spatiotemporal values as soon as the essence of fashion is deemed limited to the embellishment of the body and confined to articles of dress and appearance. The kernel of fashion that is central to grasping what fashion is, is newness or change, as Barnard states.11 However, what is often omitted from the discussion of fashion in conjunction with the pursuit of the new is the consciousness of the present time, which is the quintessential feature of modernity.12 Michael Allen Gillespie points out that people in modern times define themselves in relation to time, 9  See Chap. 5, “Fashion Systems in Prehistory and the Americas,” esp., p.  72  in Welters and Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (2018). 10  See the following remarks by Welters and Lillethun:

“It is more truthful to understand that the desire to embellish the human body—the fashion impulse—is the dominant reason for dress and that humans seek novelty or change; thus, fashion is endemic to human nature and is the term that we prefer over dress, clothing, costume, toilette, and apparel” (Ibid., p. 29). “As sites of novelty, new materials and processes play important roles in fashion systems; desire for novelty, the so-called fashion impulse, serves as an impetus to fashion” (Ibid., p. 98). 11  According to Barnard, such a statement as “constant and incessant change is what fashion is” is uncontroversial (Barnard, Fashion Theory: An Introduction, 37). 12  For the discussion of the relationship between time-consciousness and modernity see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14; Jürgen Habermas, Chapter 1. Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for SelfReassurance, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 1–22.

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c­ ompared to those “in previous ages and other places,” who understood themselves in terms of their birth place, place of residence, race, ethnicity, beliefs, or religion (Gillespie 2008, p. 2). Gillespie makes a critical point that living in the flow of time, which is how one defines oneself in the modern era, means conceptualizing oneself as “self-originating,” “self-liberating,” and “self-making” (Ibid). Note that being aware of the movement of time is virtually the same as locating oneself with respect to time in Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which only in time does one apprehend oneself as one appears to oneself.13 Gillespie’s explanations as to the nature of modernity help us come to grips with the implications of living in the time called modernity. Being modern entails such characteristics as being fashionable according to the tempo of the time and searching for the self in time, both of which are closely interrelated at on a philosophical level, as well as in terms of everyday experience. By referencing Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas also elucidates that the connection between modernity and fashion is based on the comprehension of time (Habermas 2007, pp. 8–11). As per Habermas, for Baudelaire, transitory moments that are captured by seemingly trivial things like fashion disclose “the authentic past of a future present,” and “eternal beauty” evinces itself through the fashion of the times, which influenced Benjamin’s concept of dialectical image (Ibid., p. 9). What is in common to both thinkers is that ideas such as eternality and truth make their appearance via nonessential trifles, most notably fashion. Just as Baudelaire opines that the task for the modern artist is “to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory” (Baudelaire 1981, p. 402), so does Benjamin suggest that one have recourse to fashion in order to show how the dialectical image, which pertains to the revelation of truth that requires the “now of recognizability” (“Jestzt der Erkennbarkeit”), is at work.14 The modern concept of newness, novelty, or change, which is a first-order predicate of fashion logic, is closely related to time awareness—the consciousness of “marching together with contemporaries,” keeping abreast of time, and being in the moment of now, which is fleeting and fugitive. This is one major reason such objects as articles of clothing/dress are regarded as the most prominent representation of fashion, or considered to correspond to what fashion is by many people, since they encapsulate what is new and current in terms of time, while they are soon to be replaced by another variation of the same thing, exposing the transitory nature of time. Indeed, not only has the mode of production in modern times made it possible for a new dress under the name of fashion to be displayed and sold at an unprecedentedly fast pace, only to be updated with a new version under the logic of fashion,  For further discussion on the connection between the self’s endless quest for itself and the flow of time, see Chap. 2, “What Immanuel Kant Would Say about Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit of the Self by Way of Fashion.” 14  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 867, . For a detailed discussion on the link between fashion and Benjamin’s concept of dialectical image, see Chap. 4. “In Search of Unintentional Truth.” 13

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but also the pursuit of newness by means of consumption of clothing or dress articles packaged and advertised as a new fashion has been, in a sociopolitical sense, at the forefront of the further development of freedom in modern times.15 In addition to the concept of newness, novelty, or change, there is another important element that makes fashion a significant topic of sociopolitical discussion, which is the tacit negotiation or communication between the individual and the collective along with the tempo of constantly changing time. Different contentions over the nature and birth of fashion by many fashion scholars are grounded mainly in the object-based analysis, with some social, cultural, political, and economic observations added in order to support their perspective. Nonetheless, I argue that one should delve into the relations between the individual and the collective as well as into the concept of newness or ceaseless change as chief constituents in the search for the ontology and epistemology of fashion. Although today fashion is often used synonymously with such terms as dress, clothing, and apparel, without clear distinctions,16 it is not just something that adorns the body but also a concept that is communicated in our mind. Yet fashion is not universal, regardless of time and space. Fashion as a mental construct did not exist until the seventeenth century, during which time period individualism vying against collectivism made its appearance for the first time. This is grounded on the postulation that fashion is a medium by which individuals exercise their humanist volition—the will to find a position in their society by making choices—by means of which they reveal how they relate to society; at the same time, and to no less a degree, they differentiate themselves from each other in an increasingly homogenized society, disclosing what Georg Simmel says of contradictory forces, that is, socialism and individualism (Simmel 1957, p. 542). Fashion in its origin is a pan-Western phenomenon, and its temporality is located in modern times. Taking into account contentious debates over when fashion came into being in history and when modernity first glimpsed its existence, one should be able to see that the birth of fashion virtually signals the arrival of modernity, and that they share the same genealogy in history. Thus, any effort to date the genesis of fashion is the same as that of tracing the beginning of modernity. Fashion is an anglicized French word originating from the old French façon, fazon (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1913) whose Lain roots are factio and facere, which both imply making or doing something without specifying what that something is (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, p.  743). Fashion in a broader context, such as architecture, plate, jewelry, face, and form as opposed to matter, first appeared as early as the 1300s (Ibid.). Around 1489, fashion had come

 For more discussion of this topic, see Chap. 8, “Fashion as A Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy via the Consumption of Fashion,” and Chap. 9, “The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion.” 16  For example, see Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter, Fashion and Anti-Fashion: Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 9; Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 2nd ed. (London and New  York: Routledge, 2002), 8; Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2018), 2. 15

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to have the meaning of describing a prevailing custom, especially one characteristic of a particular place or period of time (Ibid.). However, it is from the sixteenth century on that fashion bore reference to attire, adornment, or a particular cut or style (Ibid.); and yet, the meaning of fashion is confined to clothing itself. Quotes from the OED disclose that the word fashion employed to describe the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture, or style of speech adopted in society for the time being, and as an example to lead others or which to be followed by others is first recorded to have occurred in 1568; while conventional usage in dress or mode of life, especially as observed in the upper circles of society, and conformity to this usage first appeared in 1602 (Ibid.). Hence, it can be said that fashion as a social concept emerged no earlier than the second half of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, taking into account the diverse implications of fashion, it is impossible not only to gauge when fashion came into existence but also to define fashion “as long as the focus is on the material objects,” to borrow Kawamura’s words (2018, p. 4). As Malcolm Barnard points out, the exact circumstances under which the word fashion has been used is not crystal clear. To illustrate, while fashion is often regarded as a synonym of the terms adornment, style, and dress in the contemporary Western world, clothes or clothing is also considered a synonym of the word fashion by some.17 Added to this complication, there are other possibilities in which the word fashion is used to denote something different from what such terms as dress and clothing mean. It is no difficult task to unearth other objects or certain booms or upsurges that are called “a fashion,” even in academia.18 As Barnard states, nothing is common to things that are called fashion and it is only through its context that a garment is deemed as fashion or nonfashion (2002, pp. 12–19). Whereas fashion is ambiguous in its meaning, its French counterpart, la mode, seems more concrete and palpable due mainly to its association with modernity, as spelled out in sociological and philosophical discourse about the relation between the two concepts. In a strictly etymological sense, they are even more closely related: mode and modernity share the same Latin base modus, meaning “measure,” “manner” or “way of doing something,” according to Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1966, pp. 411–412).19 Therefore, Matei Călinescu’s  Polhemus and Procter, Fashion and Anti-Fashion, p.  9; as cited in Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 9. 18  For example, concerning the sublime, one of the most grandiose concepts in political philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy says the following: 17

The sublime is in fashion…. In this sense, the sublime forms a fashion that has persisted uninterruptedly into our own time from the beginnings of modernity, a fashion at once continuous and discontinuous, monotonous and spasmodic. The “sublime” has not always taken this name, but it has always been present. It has always been a fashion because it has always concerned a break within or from aesthetics (whether “aesthetics” designates taste or theory). (Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Sublime Offering,” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jean-Francois Courtine et  al., trans. Jeffrey Librett, [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993(1988)], 25) 19  Also refer to Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2. According to Gillespie, all later forms derive from the late Latin deriva-

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commentary in his parenthesis to the relationship between modernity/modernism and la mode put forward by Renato Poggioli is fallacious: “both modernity and modernism go back etymologically to the concept of la mode [this etymology, suggestive as it may be, is erroneous]” (Cǎlinescu 1987, p. 80).20 To be precise, however, the English word modern is derived from the ablative of modus, modo meaning “recently, just now,”21 while mode is not, and was first recorded in 1585. Hence, something modern pertains to “present times,” “new,” and “not old-fashioned” (OED 1989, p. 947). The word modernity as a noun of quality or condition from modernus is also first found in 1627 (Ibid., p. 949). And yet it should be noted that although the etymological sense of mode itself has no direct connection with the Latin modo,22 la mode is not simply a style or manner of any time but something that is closely linked with the sense of keeping abreast of the times, in particular of modern times. For example, à la mode is still defined as up-to-date and contemporary in dictionaries of our time. The OED also provides an earlier example of this: “1655 FULLER Ch. Hist. I. 14 With Bands, Cuffs, Hats and Caps, ‘al a mode’ to the Times.” La mode bears reference to the sense of being aware of the times, which is the quintessence of modernity. Although the word mode developed the sense of fashion in the sixteenth century, differentiating itself with le mode, it is no earlier than the seventeenth century that it became a pan-European word while being adopted into English, and further the German mode, Spanish moda, Italian moda, and Portuguese moda, as all can be identified as in some sense being derived from the French word, according to the OED (p. 940).

7.2  Introduction Regarding the Division Between the Prefashion System and the Fashion System The seventeenth century is the most pivotal as far as the mutation from the premodern to the modern is concerned, for it was the climax of strenuous efforts in defense of feudal, premodern values. In fashion history, the seventeenth century is also a most crucial time period, in which the watershed between the prefashion system coupled with mercantilism on the one hand and the fashion system coupled with

tive modernus. The term modern and its derivatives come from the Latin modus, which means “‘measure,’ and, as a measure of time, ‘just now.’” 20  See Renato Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (English: The Theory of the Avant-Garde), trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 216. 21  It should be noted that modernus was coined from modo, as hodiernus was from hodie (today), and its etymological root is not modus but modo according to A Dictionary of English Etymology (London: Hensleigh Wedgwood, 1773). 22  Ernst Robert Curtius categorically says mode has nothing to do with modern, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1948]1953), 254.

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bourgeois capitalism on the other took place. The dialectical evolution in vestimentary forms in the prefashion system from the Renaissance to the seventeenth century is closely intertwined with the political and religious hegemony of early modern states. A morphological investigation into the vestiary styles during the premodern time will help us not only discern the momentum of the changes in the contour of the clothed body prior to the period of the fashion system, but also grapple with the disparity between the prefashion system and the fashion system. Unlike the prefashion system, in which the politico-religious power struggle is most decisive in the dialectical change in dress styles, the fashion system is impossible to sunder from the modern socioeconomic sphere, which is, in point of fact, where the individual and the collective are most conspicuously at interplay with one another. Alan Hunt’s studies on sumptuary laws show us that sumptuary restrictions on dress and appearance were, rather than a prop of the feudal system, a reaction against capitalism (Hunt 1996, p. 28 and p. 146). Hunt maintains that the enactment of sumptuary projects is a signal which marks the shift from the premodern to the modern (Ibid., p. 28, p. 44, and p. 140). According to him, the volume of sumptuary laws in the West from the twelfth century to the seventeenth century progressively increased from 4 to 121.23 However, in the eighteenth century there was a dramatic decline in the restrictions on sumptuary goods (Ibid.). Hunt believes that this has a strong connection with the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. That is to say, the most active period of sumptuary regulation occurred between the demise of feudalism and the growth of manufacturing capitalism, which corresponds to the transitional period between the premodern and the modern (Ibid., p. 28 and p. 140), although it is impossible to find a moment or a location at which the “historical finger” can be placed (Ibid., p. 44). Nevertheless, as the seventeenth century saw the highest in the number of sumptuary laws ordained, it can be said that this period is the most pivotal as far as the change from the premodern to the modern is concerned, for, dialectically speaking, it was the climax of strenuous efforts in the defense of feudal, premodern values. At this time, a historical turning point was reached and the movement to the next stage of a dialectical cycle occurred. The seventeenth century can be considered to be among the most momentous of historical junctures, because of both Hunt’s systematic research on sumptuary projects and the epoch’s developments in political philosophy. It can be seen as signaling the advent of the civil/liberal society through which individualism and the modern individual appeared. The mid-seventeenth century, in which absolutism exerted great influence (Lynn Hunt et  al., 2012, p.  516), saw the rise of modern individualism first hatched by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke (Rossides 1998, p. 49). They both maintained that a social contract, instead of divine right, endows all authority, although Hobbes espoused absolute authority while Locke offered the rationale for constitutionalism (Lynn Hunt et al. 2012, p. 531). Their theories mark the onset of a liberal society characterized by “individualism, private property, the  Hunt’s quantitative investigation covers France, England, Italian cities including Venice and Florence, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Scotland, and North America during the time that spans from the twelfth century through to the eighteenth century. (Hunt 1996, 29).

23

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primacy of economic motives and market relations, utilitarianism, and a separate and supreme realm of positive law” (Rossides 1998, p. 49). What both Hobbes and Locke challenged all at once was centuries-long feudal Christendom and theocratic feudalism. The intimate connection between the monarchy and the church had been mutually beneficial in order for both to maintain their ruling power, as illustrated by the absolute monarchy established in the reign of Louis XIV. Earlier in the sixteenth century, the Paris Parliament remained within the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, because it offered the authority of the monarch (Charbit 2010, p. 159). Traditionally all kings of France were reckoned as the protectors of the Roman Church, being titled “Roi Très Chrétien —‘Very Christian King’” (Hancock and Bauval 2011, p.  13). Across the English Channel, in post-Restoration England, not only did Charles II ally himself with the pro-Anglican gentry on religious matters, but he also managed to position himself as the loyal protector of the Church of England (O’Malley 1986, p. 36), following Queen Elizabeth, who in the second half of the sixteenth century had already succeeded in becoming both the queen of England and the head of the Church of England. All this points to the fact that secular kings and queens in the transitional period between the premodern era and the modern era made great exertions to take advantage of religious doctrines and institutions, so as not to surrender their privilege and sovereignty. The reason why I give special attention to the concatenated relationship between the church and the monarchy, and between nonreligious forces and Catholicism and Protestantism, is that first, the thrust of the dialectical principle of the prefashion system can be found in politico-religious unions as well as conflicts, and, second, the seventeenth century, in which the monarchical effort to accomplish absolutism by means of quasi-religious doctrines was most proactive, was the time when the “true” fashion system finally came into being. Indeed, one should ask how the fashion system emerged during the epoch when divine-right theory was so eagerly sought after. It is because, I claim, the questioning of absolutism led to the emergence of individualism24 as a dialectical response to the most aggressive absolutist movement. By looking at the convolutions (1) between the secular or humanist interest and Christian morality surrounding the topic of the body and dress (mid-­ fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), (2) between monarchical power and religious supremacy as manifested in the era of Queen Elizabeth (mid-sixteenth century), and (3) between Protestants and Catholics (seventeenth century), which I am going to discuss in detail in the section “Prefashion System,” one can come to grips with the propulsive force behind the dialectical transformation prior to the time of the fashion system. On the other hand, in order to comprehend the “true” fashion system, one needs to grapple with the mixed momentum of the dialectical change of fashion, as the modern era is when materialist forces began to increasingly exercise their influence over the development of history. However, one should be cautious when linking fashion and the capitalist environment. Mercantilism, the nationalist form of early capitalism, should be distinguished

24

 See Yves Charbit, The Classical Foundations of Population Thought, 160.

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from the capitalism that developed in the seventeenth century, because the former was enchained with state interests in which the Crown took an active part by and large to secure its military force, while capitalism from this time on provided a site in which the relay between the individual and the collective became feasible, thereby engendering an autonomous dialectical progression in fashion. Mercantile capitalism first emerged with the growth of city-states, most notably in Venice as early as in the twelfth century (Poitras 2007, pp. 30–31). Some authors believe that the seventeenth century prefigured the modern capitalist economy structure, as China Miéville argues. He cites evidence from the relationships between states and capital as well as international law (Mieville 2006, p. 224) to demonstrate that this century was “transitional to capitalism” (Ibid., p. 200). Nonetheless, he also notes that the rise of mercantile capitalism was not “sufficient,” although “necessary,” to bring in the switch to productive capitalism (Ibid.). Why do scholars view mercantilism and capitalism as so disparate in nature? And what can this tell us about fashion and its dialectical evolution? The keynote of the discrepancy that also accounts for the difference between the prefashion system and the fashion system is that mercantilism contributed to the consolidation of the sovereign state, absolutist or not (Ibid., p. 203), whereas individualism, the politico-philosophical foundation of which was laid by Hobbes, Locke, and others in the seventeenth century, was fundamental to liberal bourgeois capitalism, legitimating bourgeois social and economic relations as well as private property.25 In other words, in the context of fashion, the dialectical transformations of dress styles under the prefashion system were in alliance with the interests of the mercantile states; however, those under the fashion system were prompted gradually by the capitalist market economy (Caporaso and Levine 1992, p. 160), into which individuals enter of their own volition. As free markets, supported by contemporary thinkers, replaced state and feudal control little by little, the eighteenth century finally saw “the consumer” as a social character; and with increasingly affordable fashion goods, new consumers from various classes, not limited to a privileged few, began to express their identity.26 Nevertheless, the theorization of consumption of fashion as a means of expressing subjectivity and individuality does not fundamentally undermine the principle of Hegelian history, which moves toward the actualization of spirit’s liberation, for fashion as a material reality is a positive objectification resulting from the dialectical relation between the individual and the collective.

 This interpretation of various seventeenth-century thinkers, so-called possessive individualism, is made by C.  B. MacPherson. See C.  B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 26  See Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, “The Fashion Revolution: The ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” in The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, eds., (New York: London, Routledge, 2010), 174.

25

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7.3  The Prefashion System The prefashion system in Western society can be traced from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Before analyzing the dialectical development of the prefashion system, I shall first discuss why I assert that the mid-­ fourteenth century27 is its beginning and then go into the topic of the advent of gendered dress and its relationship to the emergence of a sense of individuality, upon which my dating of the prefashion system hinges. The basis for assigning a date as to when fashion came into being is absolutely contingent upon the definition of fashion. Fashion with respect to modernity did not have its beginning until the seventeenth century. This is grounded in my definition that fashion is more or less a balancing act between universality and individuality, not unlike Georg Simmel’s view,28 as well as in the observations I have made in the etymology section of this 27  Cf. On the grounds of object-based observations, many authors argue that sometime in the fourteenth century fashion emerged.

The most widely accepted hypothesis dates fashion’s emergence to the appearance of a new men’s clothing styles in the mid-fourteenth century Burgundy…, it said that modern male dress first appears in France around 1350 with the revolution produced by the appearance of the short surcoat on young men, in radical opposition to the long robe, which continued to be worn by older and more venerable men. (Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France [Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2007], 48). From what is taken by most scholars to be the beginnings of an institutionalized fashion cycle in the West, namely, fourteenth-century Burgundian court life, up to the present, fashion has repeatedly, if not exclusively, drawn upon certain recurrent instabilities in the social identities of Western men and women. (Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity [Chicago, University Press, 1992], 17). An intensified aristocratic interest in fashionable clothing seems first to have become noticeable at the Burgundian court in the fourteenth century,…. (Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev. ed. [London: Tauris, 2003], 20). The Court of Burgundy was especially notable for luxurious dress during the 14th and 15th centuries…. Tortora, Phyllis G. and Sara B. Marcketti Survey of Historic Costume [London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, (1989/2015)], 148. Scholars generally recognize the fourteenth century as a time when workers in costume crafts, merchants, and eager customers, both an aristocracy and a wealthy bourgeoisie, clearly portrayed the kinds of social behavior associated with fashion, behavior from which the highly complex fashion system of the twentieth century and twenty-first centuries has evolved (Roach-Higgins 1995: 395–96). (Kawamura, Fashion-ology, 49). It was in the second half of the fourteenth century that clothes both for men and for women took on new forms, and something emerges which we can already call ‘fashion.’ (James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], 62). Also see Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 3 and 13. 28  Georg Simmel writes: Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation; it leads the individual upon the road which all travel, it furnishes a general condition, which resolves the conduct of every individual into a mere example. At the same time it satisfies

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chapter. If I may revisit the critical point addressed by Kawamura, inasmuch as the emphasis is on material objects, it is not possible to trace the genesis of fashion or to define fashion in a conclusive manner (Kawamura 2018, p. 4). One might question why “formal” investigations into dress fashions are of necessity or significance, if it is not viable to pin down the key attributes of fashion on the basis of objective analysis. A morphological examination can help us have a better understanding of the dialectical progression of fashion history, which has to do with Hegelian subject/object, body/mind, and universal/particular relations. For example, take note of the advent of gendered dress as part of the constitution of individualism that goes against the grain of the order of the nondescriptive or universal body governed by feudal and religious ideology. According to Hunt, when sumptuary regulations in Western society were in most active operation, that is, during the transitional period from the premodern to the modern, the gendered ordering of dress also appeared (Hunt 1996, pp.  13–14). Many dress historians also state that gendered dress appeared sometime in the mid-fourteenth century, with which they directly or indirectly associate the beginning of fashion,29 while sumptuary laws were already enacted by the early decades of the fourteenth century (Ibid., p. 45).30 Hunt maintains that the court was an important source for the fourteenth-century initial development of male and female difference in dress, coupled with the increasing interest in appearance and the introduction of tailoring, and that gendered dress was spurred by “conspicuous consumption and self-individualization” (Ibid., pp. 45–46). During this transition to capitalism the breakdown of the feudal system, which valued familial bonds and kinship, continued until the modern “individual” who sought pleasure through consumption in the bourgeois mode came into existence. Hunt also points out that sexual dimorphism in dress discloses anxiety about gender hier-

in no less degree the need of differentiation, the tendency towards dissimilarity, the desire for change and contrast,…. Thus fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change. (Simmel, “Fashion” [1957], p. 543) 29  See Crane, The Performance of Self, 13; Jay Calderin, Form, Fit and Fashion: All the Details Fashion Designers Need to Know but Can Never Find, (Beverly, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers Inc. 2009), 28; Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard, and Kay Staniland, Textiles and Clothing, 1150–1450 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1992), 7; Welters, “Introduction,” p.  3; Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 13 and 29; James Laver, A Concise History of Costume (London: Thames and Hudson, and New York: Abrams, 1969), 62; Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, p. 18; Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, Volume I of Civilization and Capitalism, fifteenth– eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 317. 30  Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (1996), 45. The reason that some caution is needed about linking the advent of sumptuary legislation with the rise of fashion is that in both England and in the Italian cities of Florence and Venice sumptuary laws were already well established by the early decades of the fourteenth century and predated the eruption of the increasingly self-conscious fashion in the Burgundian court.

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archy at a time when the characterization of sexual differences was made in the advent of modernity (Ibid., pp. 13–14). The emergence of gendered dress can be viewed as a significant take-off toward the constitution of individualism as opposed to the nondescriptive or universal body that is ruled by conventional, feudal, and religious ideology. Not unlike Hunt, Christopher Breward makes a similar remark as to the relation between the appearance of gendered dress and individuality in the mid-fourteenth century, in which “a sense of self-knowledge” emerged, ushering in the rise of individuality.31 Francois Boucher also points to sexual differentiation as “the first symptoms of Humanism,” which were a movement toward secular art and the independent and self-governed individual, “an interest no longer applied to the universal, but to the individual and particular” (Boucher 1966, p. 191). The fourteenth century is pivotal to the evolution of fashion because a prefashion system, if not the full-blown fashion system, began to emerge during this period. As indicated by many scholars, including Fernand Braudel, “cutting-to-fit,” or tailoring, as opposed to simple methods like draping or gathering, which were the chief method of dressing the body for the previous centuries, (perhaps, for the preceding millennium, according to Linda Welters [“Introduction,” 2011b, p. 3]) was invented sometime around the mid-fourteenth century.32 Since this turning point, as one can see from any dress history book that covers modern Western societies, countless shapes in dress with varied tightness and looseness in different parts of dress, which sometimes became extreme exaggerations or distortions, also have appeared and disappeared. Given the “big picture” of the formal changes in dress styles over centuries, we should take a look at each stage with a distinct shape or contour from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century, the time period Kroeber and Richardson did not deal with; that is, from the beginning stage of the prefashion system to the time when the fashion system is about to go into operation. Not only does this help us see the differences between the two systems, but it also helps us fathom the overall flow of fashion history in view of dialectical movement. In this section, I will discourse on the vying relations in the midst of the “politico-­ religious” evolutions propelled by the Protestant Reformation, including Renaissance humanism, the English Reformation in the sixteenth century, and the Puritan Movement in the seventeenth century, with growing secular power as the impetus of 31

 Christopher Breward states:

As well as defining gender roles and status within family based communities, the pervasiveness of fashion as a new concept from the 1350s had a more direct impact on the emergence of the individual—a sense of self-knowledge and an understanding of man’s place in the wider structures of the world. Within medieval society the body was prioritized as the dwelling-place of soul, inner character was displayed throughout outward signs and clothing could not avoid implication in such a problematic moral arena. Individuality and the communications of the soul were manifested through various strategies. (Breward, The Culture of Fashion [1995], 35) 32  See Crane, The Performance of Self, 13; Jay Calderin, Form, Fit and Fashion, 28; Elisabeth Crowfoot et al., Textiles and Clothing, 7; Linda Welters, “Introduction,” 3; Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion, 13 and 29; Laver, A Concise History of Costume, 62; Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 18; and Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 317.

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the “formal” or “morphological” transformation in dress styles during the prefashion system. This avenue in search of the momentum of the changes in the contour of the clothed body before the period of the fashion system will greatly help us come to understand the disparity between the prefashion system and the fashion system: the former is swayed mainly by politico-religious hegemonic relations while the latter is shaped increasingly by the autonomous relay between the individual and the collective. This does not mean that ideological predominance as the most significant dialectical force in forging the history of fashion suddenly ceased to exercise its influence with the rise of the fashion system. As one can see from the fashion changes before and after the French Revolution, which I will discuss later, ideological hegemony was a most powerful factor in the dialectical development of the early stage of fashion system. But toward the turn of the century, material forces became a significant impetus for the evolution of fashion history. And yet the realm of consciousness was and is still indispensable for the development of fashion history, as the individual-collective interaction in fashion phenomena shows consciousness as a cardinal factor in wardrobe choice. Now let us take a look at the dialectical evolution of dress styles under the prefashion system. Many dress historians hold that clothes during the Middle Ages were cut in different versions of simple rectangular or circular shapes in general until the early fourteenth century,33 at which point tailoring was invented, and used for men’s doublets and women’s bodices thereafter. However, closely fitted garments were worn periodically, most notably in Italian city-states, in the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth century, as well as the early thirteenth century, and reappeared in the fifteenth century; and even until the fifteenth century simple, long robes were not uncommon in England and France (Houston 1996, p. 1). As Mary G. Houston in her research on the medieval costume in England and France puts it, “In general the costumes of this century (in 13th-century England and France) are cut on the simplest geometric plans and, except for a few very early examples, there is no attempt to fit the figure as was seen in the twelfth and again in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” (Ibid.).34 It is worth mentioning that, as explained in the previous chapter with the findings by Kroeber and Young, the sublation of “form” in dress occurs with the foregoing swings of the stylistic pendulum. Although some elements of figure-fitting garments, such as lacing, buttons and gores, appeared from time to time, clothes were basically simple, long and baggy until the mid-­ fourteenth century. In spite of regional differences in detail of various types of garments, during the late medieval period of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century, and the Renaissance, which spans roughly from the mid-fifteenth to sixteenth century,35 the shapes of male dress and the upper-body forms of female dress

 Refer to note 32.  The words in parentheses are my own addition. 35  Refer to Fernand Braudel’s comment: 33 34

…whereas the traditional costume had been much the same all over the continent, the spread of the shorter costume was irregular, subject to resistance and variation, so that

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were periodically either closer to the body, as they accentuated physique, or looser, but gradually moved in the direction of truly tailored-to-fit garments. This signals a morphological transformation that has bearing on the development of a sense of individuality, indispensable to the individual-collective relations—the essential element of the fashion system. The general dress style of men became slimmer, shorter for young men than in proceeding centuries, concurrent with the contemporary cultural trend of the veneration of the youthful body and its physical sensuality (Russell 1983, pp. 139–156), particularly inspired by the Italian Renaissance (Wilcox 1958, p. 69; Fabretti 2008, p. 12). During the Mannerist Renaissance, after 1520, with the influence of first the German and later the Spanish court (Welters 2011a, p. 30), exaggerated distortion appeared, achieved by padding (of the doublet in particular) and slashing with the lining fabric forced through the slits, creating a somewhat tense, twisted, or grotesque look (Russell 1983, pp. 196–212; Cavallaro and Warwick 1998, p. 12). In Christopher Breward’s opinion: “Within medieval society the body was prioritized as the dwelling-place of soul, inner character was displayed throughout outward signs and clothing could not avoid implication in such a problematic moral arena” (1995, p. 34). However, by the Renaissance, when a general sense of freedom for man to control his own destiny emerged, leaving behind oppression by the church (Anthony and Benson 2003, p. 159), geometrically shaped robes and gowns gradually gave way to more form-fitting clothing, especially for men, while the female dress in the early part of the period retained a religious or traditional style (Wilcox 1958, p. 69; Gilchrist, 2012, pp. 71—72; French 2013, p. 199). In later sixteenth-century Europe there were huge national and regional differences in dress, while Catholic Spain was the strongest influence (Bradley 1954, pp.  155–160). The political and economic dynamics among Italy, Spain, France, and England greatly affected the way people dressed in this period (Ibid., p. 158). Although the heart of culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italy lost her supremacy to Spain with the discovery of America (1492), which affected trade by Spain, France, and England, leading to the decline of the Italian city-states’ mercantile power (Ibid., p. 155). However, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the glorious age of Queen Elizabeth, England became a significant power in Europe, with wide exploration of different parts of the world (Ibid.). A great Catholic Armada of 132 ships, the largest massing of maritime power until the nineteenth century, was defeated by England in 1588 (Winks 1993, p. 243). It was not only a battle over the naval power but also a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. The campaign of the Invincible Armada, with banners bearing the image of the Holy Virgin, prepared by Phillip II of Spain, in agreement with the Roman Catholic pope in retaliation for the execution of the Catholic Mary, Elizabeth’s cousin (John P. McKay et al. 2011, p. 425) was initiated to get rid of England Protestant queen, who was supported by a wave of nationalism (Winks eventually national styles of dressing were evolved, all influencing each other to a greater or lesser extent―the French, Burgundian, Italian or English costume, etc. (The Structures of Everyday Life, 317.)

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1993, p. 243). As shown in the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, commissioned to celebrate a great victory over Spain, Queen Elizabeth’s dresses and gestures, rendered in her portraits, are filled with allegories of the political supremacy of England (and herself as the symbol of the monarchical state) and artificial display of power, visually exhibiting the rise of England as a power at sea and in commerce and diplomacy (Ashelford 1996, p. 33; Hagen and Hagen 2003, pp. 201–207). The dress style in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era (c.1560–1620), which projects a rigid and repressive atmosphere,36 enhanced by an exaggerated display of power, is antithetical, in terms of form, to the relaxed and casual Renaissance mode (Reynolds 1951, p. 131). It has to be pointed out that this sartorial impression is achieved in the midst of politico-religious struggles during the evolution of medieval kingdoms into early modern nation-states, in which the monarchs strove to consolidate their status, steering the relation between church and state. Although different kinds of trimmings and embellishments such as starched lace and ribbons adorned the doublets and cloaks,37 the serious impression of the dress style of the Elizabethan/Jacobean era, enhanced by strict bodily deportment, is unmistakably identifiable.38 The shape of Elizabethan/Jacobean dress is opposite to that of the Renaissance dress, in that it is the acme of exaggerated, unnatural dress, more distorted than the stiff Spanish silhouette, as opposed to the natural, form-fitting dress of the Renaissance. In the second half of the sixteenth century the farthingale and the ruff grew to exaggerated proportions. For example, Anne of Denmark’s farthingale is reported to have been “four feet wide in the hips” (Cunnington and Cunnington 1992, p. 51). These ostentatious expressions of power or grandiosity, particularly in late sixteenth-century England, by the medium of dress with its exaggerated form achieved by a variety of tools and methods, were in accordance with the art of governing people by Elizabeth as both the secular sovereign and the head of the Church  Cf. Douglas Russell says, “During the Elizabethan-Jacobean Period the modes in male and female dress were loosely characterized as the Spanish style because in color and somewhat less line and silhouette, their major inspiration came from the fashions of the formal Spanish court.” Russell, Costume History and Style, 218. 37  Ronald M. Berger, The Most Necessary Luxuries. The Mercers’ Company of Coventry, 1550– 1680 (University Park, PA: 1993), 23. 36

Men adorned their doublets and cloaks with lace, ribbons, buttons, and gold and silver thread…. Starch, which Puritans called “the devil’s liquor,” was used to fashion exotic cambric and lawn ruffs…. Complaints of wasteful spending on clothes increased dramatically after the mid-sixteenth century. 38  As Ronnie Mirkin points out, It is evident that Elizabethan and Jacobean costume was built so as to enforce the body to act according to correct rules of conduct. Right behaviour would strike the spectator with awe; wrong deportment would have a comical or grotesque effect. The most important items of clothing to determine the correct position of the body were the rigid whaleboned doublet and the stayed corset—stiff instruments for encasing the torso of both men and women and setting it upright. (Ronnie Mirkin, “Performing Selfhood: The Costumed Body as a Site of Mediation Between Life, Art and Theatre in the English Renaissance,” Body Dressing, ed. J. Entwistle, E. Wilson [Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001], 155.

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of England at once. The imposing dress style of the Elizabethan/Jacobean era and the dignified vestiary mode of the High Medieval Ages are not wholly dissimilar, for they are not “figure-friendly” garments, and they are an indispensable means of upholding politico-religious supremacy. The politico-religious unity and conflicts were the underlying driving force of the prefashion system, contrary to the fashion system in which the autonomous individual-collective relations are the key momentum of the evolution of fashion, fostered by capitalist, bourgeois social relations. During the early part of the Baroque period, the exaggerations of the Elizabethan/ Jacobean period would give way to the “Cavalier” style. Like Italian Renaissance dress (during the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries) that had preceded Mannerist style, the Cavalier style presented a comfortable and sprightly look.39 This early Baroque style sat in opposition to the modes of the Renaissance and the Elizabethan-Jacobean era, being completely different from them in both form and content. The corseted shape was softened. Men’s hair became longer, softer and more flowing and, instead of starched ruffs, relaxed, falling lace collars and limp, unstarched ruffs appeared, “as if released from the inhibitions against length and fullness created by the high neckwear of the Elizabethan-Jacobean Period” (Russell 1983, p.  241). The overall look became more relaxed and animated, accentuated with turned-down leather boots and a wide-brimmed hat, which developed into different cocked hats (The Leisure Hour, 1893, p. 282). However, this carefree style with loose hair was different from the sartorial type of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the idealized, classical dimensions of the body, as well as from that of the Elizabethan/Jacobean era, which projected an impression of stiffness and a bombastic air with starched, stiff fabrics and other devices. Towards the mid-­ seventeenth century not only men’s dress but also women’s dress became relatively lighter and softer than in the late sixteenth century: wires and padding disappeared, and the farthingale was replaced by looser, layered skirts, allowing much greater freedom of movement (Blanche Payne et al. 1992, p. 338). The simplification of women’s clothing was also achieved with gauze scarves, which replaced lace collars and kerchiefs, and a less exuberant use of fabrics (Breward 1995, p. 80 and p. 83). Francis M.  Kelly and Randolph Schwabe write, “‘Cavalier’ dress, graceful and unconstrained, was a protest against Spanish artificiality,…” (Kelly and Schwabe 2002 [1925], “Introduction,” p. xiii). The taut, inflated, or sometimes disfigured dress style of the Elizabethan/Jacobean can be said to have served as a counterinflu-

39

 Douglas Russell describes this change in dress as following: Compare, for example, the qualities of dress in the Evening Ball for the Wedding of the Duc de joyeuse, dated about 1581, with those in the famous The Garden of Love by Rubens, dated about 1632. It is as if the ruffs had suddenly melted into soft lace collars and the boning, padding, and forcing of the body had relaxed into an easy expansion of the clothing away from the contours of the body. The tortured, excessively decorated fabric surfaces have been replaced by an interest in the natural character of the fabric itself. Like architecture, sculpture, and painting in the Baroque era, the costumes moved, expanded, and spread out into space to create a sense of size and grandeur. (Russell, Costume History and Style, 237)

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ence, a dialectical opposite, that brought forth the Cavalier style, the jaunty look of which did not come into being out of nowhere however, as its prototype can be traced back to the “body-hugging” Renaissance mode of dress. In view of the silhouette, the sartorial transformation of the first half of the seventeenth century is progressive. By progressive I mean that the Cavalier style takes on quite a different mood because of its distinctive shape or form, probably unknown to anyone on earth previously. In spite of the more relaxed look of garments, thanks to the Baroque period’s renewed interest in the natural human form and movement, there is also some flavor of theatricality or grandeur, if not artificiality, like the Spanish style. The Cavalier wore a hat at a skewed angle, a cloak flung over one side, and a lovelock fell loosely at one side, and even the boot tops were not cut straight (Russell 1983, p. 249).40 The Baroque irregularity or asymmetry in dress style with a sense of flamboyant movement, which some people call a braggadocio air, not only endows the Cavalier mode with a unique dynamic but also makes the silhouette of the Cavalier dress distinctively progressive. The Cavalier style was a reaction to the politico-religious unity that existed during the Elizabethan era while at the same time being a successor to the earlier example of the Renaissance mode characterized by freedom from feudal, religious politics. It demonstrates how dress styles were fashioned by a growing conflict between monarchical interest in political and religious supremacy and the spread of individualist dissent with the reformation. The less rigid, more relaxed style of Cavaliers in the first half of the seventeenth century was a dialectical consequence set against the stiffened, starched, and structured late Elizabethan mode of the second half of the sixteenth century, while containing some trace of Renaissance dress styles. However, the Cavalier fashion could not stay clear of a dialectical movement either, as it was also supplanted by the Restoration style in the second half of the seventeenth century—the outcome of the antithetical relations between the Cavalier style and the Puritan style. It has to be noted that the conflicting style war between the Cavalier mode and the Puritan mode foreboded the beginning of the modern dialectical transformation whose thrust was shaped by the autonomous dialectical relation among people from different classes rather than by the politico-religious power game among those of privileged, aristocratic classes that occurred in previous centuries. Now I will explain this dialectical cycle. Another dialectical sublation in dress style can be observed in the late Baroque period (c. 1660–1715), in which the soft, relaxed style in men’s clothing was superseded by decorative frenzy, becoming more ornate and stiff. For example, soft turned-down leather boots with lace and ribbon trim, of Spanish military origin, were gone in favor of heeled court shoes and silk stockings (Bossan 2004, p. 46). As a matter of fact, it is by no means simple to analyze the dialectical changeover in the late Baroque vestiary style, for the religious wars, inseparable from wars of political dominance during this time, resulted in the complexity of the dialectical transformation in dress styles. Already in the early Baroque, through the Thirty Years’ War

 Also see Douglas Gorsline, What People Wore: 1800 Illustrations from Ancient Times to the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 66.

40

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(1618–1648), conflicts between Protestants and Catholics surfaced across the European continent.41 After the English Civil War (1642–1651) between Parliamentarians (Roundheads)42 and Royalists (Cavaliers), who espoused Catholic Stuarts (McElligott 2007, p. 5), came the period of the execution of King Charles I, followed by parliamentary and military dictatorship by Oliver Cromwell, during which time clothes became dull and drab (Danesi 2004 [1994], p. 187). Yet, there was also the contrasting costume of the aristocratic supporters of the king, termed the Cavaliers, who existed simultaneously with the Puritans in the seventeenth century (Hill 1893, p. 279).43 It should be noted that “the cavalier as a type was by no means exclusively English” (Tunis 1999[1954], p.  92). Between 1625 and 1660, both men’s and women’s clothing became relatively more comfortable (Blanche Payne et al. 1992, p. 338), and female dress like men’s attire became relaxing, as ruffs, farthingales, boned stomachers, which created the stiff-corseted contour, disappeared (Wilcox 1958, p. 153). The Cavalier style is flamboyant but gracious, if compared side by side with the dark, dry and unpicturesque Puritan style (Hill 1893, pp.  282–283): the Cavalier wore long hair and donned a slashed silk doublet, a point-lace collar, and a broad-brimmed hat decorated with rosettes, plumes, and flashy buckles (Ibid., p. 268); on the other hand, the Puritan, with short hair, wore “a stiff, high-crowned, plain, broad-brimmed hat of severe and forbidding aspect,” “a doublet and a hose made of coarse dark cloth,” and “a clock of some sombre shade,” “brought well round his shoulders instead of being flung over one side,” as was the Cavalier’s (Hill 1893, pp. 281–283). Notwithstanding that the Cavalier style often typifies the sartorial mode of the early seventeenth century, it is erroneous to think that the Puritan dress code was marginal during the first half of the seventeenth century in England. Georgiana Hill states that the puritans represented a considerable number of the middle class (Ibid., p. 283). She also remarks that their wardrobe choice was “a matter of conscience,” rather than “a matter of custom” (Ibid.). The fact that the Puritans chose drab outfits owing to their “conscience” that resulted from their belief, discloses the fact that it was a time when individuality, individual autonomy, and conscious choice became increasingly valued although the ordering of society was still dictated by the established church and the king. However, the principle for dialectic of premodern society and the early stage of the modern era resides in the ideological realm in which political views and religious belief are most dominant. Out of the irreconcilable modes of the Cavalier and the Puritan came the Restoration style as a dialectical consequence not long after Charles II returned from exile in 1660. The Restoration brought with it not only a return of the Stuart monarchy and of the traditional Church of England, but also a movement against the Puritan morality and the recent upheavals (MacDonald 1996, p. 21). This is reflected in the dialectical mutation of the dress style of the time,  Refer to James Harvey Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1903), 465. 42  For the origin of the nickname see Georgiana Hill, A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day, Volume 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 281. 43  Also see Gorsline, What People Wore, 66. 41

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illustrating its association with the development of history. As Kelly and Schwabe have noted, the late Baroque style in England is a “reaction against” the Puritan mode of dress (Kelly and Schwabe 2002 [1925], “Introduction,” p. xiii); and yet, the vestiary mode in the second half of the seventeenth century also succeeded to the royalist Cavalier style. The sartorial style during the rule of the pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant Charles II of England again became ostentatious with a lot of embellishments added, as Charles II and later James II viewed “fashion leadership” no different from “political leadership” and tried to restore the splendor in dress of the glorious Tudor and Stuart monarchy in French style (Kuchta 1996, p.  56). Noteworthy is that the two kings in England, along with Louis XIV of France, aspired to establish an absolute monarchy, the doctrine that tries to justify an authoritarian political and religious program (Reiner 2010, pp.  399–340). It has to be pointed out that, with the rise of absolutism and divine-right theory, the style of clothing in all the countries of Europe also became heavier, bulkier, and more excessive.44 This supports my argument that the contour of the dressed body had enlarged and diminished over the course of the prefashion system, depending on the fluctuating monarchical interest in enhancing political and religious power.45 The point at issue is not simply that the volume of dress became bigger or smaller simply in proportion to the actual power of kings or queens or the Church, but that their interest in dress was inseparable from their effort to get control over the politico-­religious status quo, which is to say that fashion history in the premodern era is hardly disparate from the Hegelian development of history that is governed by ideological superstructure, from which political, religious convictions or beliefs are in no way kept apart. As many Hegel scholars argue, the comprehension of the dialectical development of history should be accompanied by the understanding of the progression in the domain of human consciousness, ideas, and ideologies.46 Likewise, grap-

 Douglas Russell notes that the dress shape became much bulkier and heavier toward the end of the seventeenth century. This coincides with the theoretical development of diving-right monarchy.

44

The costume fashions after about 1685 in all the countries of Europe were much heavier than those in the 1660s and 1670s and often remind one of a great upholstered chair. (Russell, Costume History and Style, 260) Also see Toby Reiner, Divine Right of Kings in Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010), 399–340. 45  However, toward the close of the rein of Louis XIV, interest in the aesthetics of dress and private life, not from the court but from elite individuals, increased, resulting in the different fashion cultures of la cour and la ville. See Jennifer Michelle Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France, (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 41. 46  For example, Fukuyama writes: And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed, creates the material world in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world: hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology. (Fukuyama, “The End of History,” 6)

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pling with the long-term change in dress styles during the premodern period also requires some knowledge of the history of ideas, as the dialectical evolution in dress styles before the germination of the fashion system manifests more of the dogmatic rule of the time coupled with the shifts in monarchical leadership in relation to the church and the emerging mercantile class than of the communications between the individual and the collective. However, it is during the period of the prefashion system that self-awareness of the body as an individuated and gendered site in league with the interest in personal taste and needs began to grow, although full-scale individual and collective interactions are found in the fashion system.

7.4  The Fashion System In the first half of this section, I will discuss the formal change in fashion that took place before and after the French Revolution, the main impetus of which is still ideology or ideas people shared during this transitional period. In the second half of this section, the fashion transformations caused by the advent of the safety bicycle at the turn of the twentieth century will be analyzed with special interest in Marx’s materialist dialectic, whose materialist conception of history best accounts for the dialectical evolution of fashion styles during this time. The safety bicycle is not an example Marxian mode of production; that is, it does not represent the compound of productive forces and relations of production of the time. And yet the safety bicycle typifies the significance of material forces at a time when the commodity mode of production began to get the upper hand over the power of the dogmatic order of the religious and autocratic, social order in many areas of life. Women’s formal dress at the turn of the eighteenth century went through three distinctive stages of evolution, the driving force behind the transformation of which is ideological shifts. As opposed to the aristocratic Bourbon style, which is pompous and sumptuous with a lot of decorations, Greco-Roman dresses, reflective of the collective aspiration towards democracy, were adopted and later supplanted by the mode of the Bourbon Restoration. Nevertheless, fashion did not revert after these processes of transition just as the Bourbon Restoration did not succeed in getting back the equivalent of the power of the absolute monarchy of the previous century. Anticipating the demise of the monarchy and its vestimentary norms, a wave of Anglomania in the 1770s and 1780s had already swept through France, almost all areas of society illustrating the denigration of the French as well as a keen interest in the English manner and freedom of thought (Grieder 1985, p. 9) which had grown from the radical philosophies of Isaac Newton and John Locke in the early decades of the eighteenth century (Israel 2001, pp. 515–527). The anglophile was readily identifiable by appearance: the robe à l’anglaise for women was much simpler in ornament and fabric while the luxuriant justaucorps, the staple for the male aristocrat, was eschewed in favor of a frac or a redingote (Grieder 1985, pp.  11–12). However, it should be noted that the robe à l’anglaise and the robe à la française existed together in Paris in the 1770s and 1780s (Steele 1998, p. 32). To be sure, this

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visually demonstrated the cohabitation of the two different rules of late eighteenth-­ century France, that is, of the French absolute monarchy and of English political liberties achieved by a series of constitutional breakthroughs such as the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), both of which diminished the power of the Crown while establishing the sovereignty of Parliament. Notwithstanding the concurrence of antithetical modes of appearance, the epitome of the aristocratic grandiosity of the French Bourbon monarchy is the robe à la française with yards of resplendent silk brocade draped over wide panniers creating an exaggerated rectangular shape (Challamel 1882, p. 290). Typical of Rococo style, with intricate floral motifs often used for surface ornamentation, this mode of dress was particularly popular in the mid-eighteenth century. Another extravagance de rigueur for the French aristocrat was huge wigs which went to extremes in both size and form towards the 1770s. Indeed, the spectacular coiffures with their elaborate embellishments were also another means of ostentatious exhibition of aristocratic power and wealth. However, symbols of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, such as brocades, lace, periwig and powder, not to mention the robe à la française, suddenly disappeared under the Republic, especially during the Reign of Terror, because the French nobility deliberately avoided them lest they be recognized as aristocrats. The ebbing of the badges of aristocracy occurred, without doubt, out of political turmoil; a letter (1818) from France by Franklin James Didier clearly shows the atmosphere of this time. During the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins, fashion was as anarchical as the government. After the famous 6th October, and 10th August 1791 and ’92 when the Chateaux of Versailles and Tuileries were pillaged, you might have seen blacksmiths in court dresses, coalsellers with embroidered waistcoats, and fishwomen in high-heeled shoes. Terror arrived with the red cap of Liberty, introduced a Spartan simplicity in dress. The least foppery was regarded as an aristocratic symptom, and ragged clothes were the order of the day. (Didier 1821, p. 202)

Although the vestimentary rules were chaotic in these turbulent years as was society in general, issues regarding dress were among the main concerns of the Republic from the beginning of the Revolution. The concept of equality was the chief element of its propaganda, for which sartorial codes were employed (Ribeiro 1988, p. 101). For example, one of the first acts of the new National Assembly in October 1789 was to allow the Estates to wear whatever they chose instead of the official costumes designated by court order (Ibid.). With the progress of the revolution, things became even more confusing and disorderly than before. The confusion of the politics of physical appearance made the identification of internal enemies as well as political opponents of the Republic difficult (Ibid., pp. 239–241). As a result, attempts were made to restructure dress codes. In 1793 black wigs à la Jacobine were banned while bonnets rouges were restricted to meetings of sections’ committees only, for example, as it became extremely perplexing to tell apart intentional misuse of republican signs and manifestation of self-expression (Ibid.). Thus while the idea of universal equality via dress and appearances was utilized to abolish the visible signs of hierarchical order of the absolute monarchy, acquiring a “salutary

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political significance” (Ibid., p. 232), it also placed the inchoate government at risk. As the revolutionary spirit was consolidated with the red liberty cap, tricolor cockades, and sans-culottes, of great demand on the part of the government led by Robespierre was the establishment of the dress of the new regime by which people could express their political convictions. To further this goal, Jacques-Louis David, as both an ardent supporter of Robespierre and the master of neoclassicism, was commissioned to design uniforms for government officials as well as civilian costumes, which were mixtures of classicism, historicism and his own imagination (Ibid., pp. 102–104). Although the campaign directed by the Committee of Public Safety, in a bureaucratic attempt to have civilians adopt these designs, was never successful (Ibid., p. 104), his other project, the Fête de la Révolution, whose prototype is Roman Catholic ceremonies, drew tens of thousands of people. This fete made the public familiar with his version of Grecian dresses.47 The white Directoire dress made of almost transparent muslin, a loosely woven cotton fabric, became so popular among fashionable ladies that they wore the diaphanous dress even in the winter. Certainly, the adoption of the flowing Grecian-inspired dress with high waist unveils the French collective ideal of their new regime as heir to the Greek and Roman Republics. It is interesting that the collective preference for light and sheer muslin over heavy brocades and glossy satin typically used for the dresses of the old régime was also looked to as evidence of the democratic zeitgeist.48 As a matter of fact, the rage for the neoclassical style of dress was encouraged by governmental efforts to control the politics of dress and appearances in accordance with its ideological interests. Most telling is the March 1794 ban on wearing mourning dresses in public for the reason that they were incompatible with the new regime of appearances (Wrigley 2002, p. 235). The widespread popularity of the Directoire gown during the French Revolution years was not coincidental but a result of the collective values created by the revolution in the name of “the despotism of liberty against tyranny” (Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality, February 1794”). No institutional propaganda can make anything “fashionable” among people unless the dream of the individual and that of the collective converged at some point, as exemplified by fashion during the Revolution. The fascination of the Greco-Roman dress, indeed, is a manifestation of the shared desire of the individual, the collective, and government for democracy in the style of the Roman Republic.

 Alice Mackrell, “The Dress of the Parisian Élégantes with Special Reference to Le Journal des dames et des modes from June 1797 until December 1799,” MA thesis, Courtauld Institute, 1977, 45; cited in Alice Mackrell, Art and Fashion: The Impact of Art on Fashion and Fashion on Art (London: Chrysalis Books Group, 2005), 40. 48  Even the cotton fabric used for the dress gave off some sort of sensation having political resonance synesthetically ingrained in the mind as Walter Benjamin’s quotation from Edouard Foucaud elucidated: 47

“Cotton fabrics replace brocades and satins,… and before long, thanks to … the revolutionary spirit, the dress of the lower classes becomes more seemly and agreeable to the eye. Edouard Foucaud, Paris inventeur: Physiologie de l’industrie française (Paris, 1844), p. 64 (referring to the Revolution of 1789) [B 6a,3]” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 75).

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No less political than the vogue for the neoclassical style of dress was the advent of the fashion of the Bourbon Restoration. The first thing the Bourbon royalists did was bring back corsets and wider skirts in order to regain some of the look of the ancien régime.49 However, this time parts of women’s dress, such as the sleeve and the neckline, all became larger and more accentuated toward 1830s (Chazin-­ Bennahum 2005, p.  148).50 Just like imperialism, to which Vischer symbolically attributed crinoline later in 1850s and 1860s, the revival of the fuller skirt and the new puffed sleeves during the Restoration visually proclaimed the return of the Bourbon monarchy with the connotations of “its domination” “over all aspects, good or bad, justified and unjustified, of the revolution” (Benjamin 1999, p.  68, [B2a, 7]). Passing through the upheavals of the Revolution, female attire regained somewhat elaborate features during the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Yet, the male wardrobe overall became more functional than aristocratic just as the sword was gradually replaced by canes and sticks (Bryde 1979, p. 33). But this does not mean fashion changed entirely in the name of practicality. For example, after the Paris revolution of 1830, Louis Philippe of the House of Bourbon, France’s citizen king, carried an umbrella as a “democratic symbol of his proximity to the people” (Hagen and Hagen 2003, p. 396), not because he could not afford his own carriage. It is hard to deny that these changes in vestimentary behavior resulted from the ideological transformations that had begun at the turn of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, later in the century new consumer products through technological innovations led the permutation of fashion. The advent of the safety bicycle in the 1890s, if not the first rudimentary bicycle in the 1820s, best exemplifies how fashion was transformed in the hands of materialistic power, as women began to wear bifurcated dress in public owing not to ideological supremacy but to the sway of commodity and technology.51 A dress reform movement in the preceding decades  See Phyllis G. Tortora and Sara B. Marcketti, Survey of Historic Costume (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1989/2015), 329. 50  Also see Russell’s account in Costume History and Style (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983): 49

Female gowns, even in the very last days of the Empire, had added many ruffles and much lacy trim, and by 1820 the high waistline began to drop from just below the bust to just above the waist, the corset now returned; sleeves began to expand in size; skirts began to flare out in many folds over layered petticoats to the ankle; and appliqué, ruching, embroidery, and lace ruffles began to trim all edges of the gown … (334) Later in the 1820s the sleeves gradually took the focus of attention as they continued to grow in size until they had to be stiffened with special linings. Some were still puffed at the top and then pleated into a slim sleeve below, but the majority were of the tapering, leg-omutton variety…. Skirts became even wider at the bottom during the 1820s, with more ornamentation and definition toward the bottom of the skirt such as tucks, pleats, ruffles, appliqué, or loops of silk or fur. (341) 51  According to Robert Crego in Sports and Games of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2003, 67), the first rudimentary bicycle, “little more than a saddle atop a bar connecting two wheels,” was introduced by Baron von Drais to the public in 1816. However, not until the mass production of the modern “safety” bicycle in 1890s did a large number of women begin to ride. See the following remark by Zack Furness:

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led notably by Amelia Jenks Bloomer in the USA failed to get collective approval while Rational Dress Societies, which appeared in 1880s in England, gained little acceptance from the public (Banner 1994, p.  278). The distortion of a woman’s body by using corsets or hoops, which was viewed as limiting her sociopolitical and economic standing and her public role, as well as a woman’s freedom of movement, gave rise to dress reform movements in the nineteenth century (Nickolai 2013, p. 220). And yet, they were unsuccessful in changing the wardrobe choices of the majority of women, according to C.A.  Nickolai (2013, p.  221) and Kendra Van Cleave (2003, p. 270).52 By 1855, most leaders in women’s rights movements stopped promoting dress reform, opting for devoting themselves to such impending sociopolitical issues as suffrage, marriage reform, and education (Van Cleave 2003, p.  270). In an article titled “Redeeming the voices of Reform” (2013), Patricia A. Cunningham opines that such an argument that dress reform had no impact on fashion is a myth, as many different professionals, artists, and designers, such as fashion icons like Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet, were actively involved with dress reform in one way or another. Notwithstanding, dress reform movements led by women’s rights activists did not serve as the inciting cause of the social environment in which women were allowed to make a choice to wear a pair of pants in public. As Nickolai commented, “Although shorter skirts over pantalets or pantaloons were the pattern for most efforts at reform, they failed miserably in part because they violated the cultural imperative that forbade women wearing anything resembling trousers” (Nickolai 2013, p.  221). Patricia Warner points out that throughout the entire nineteenth century not only men but also many women did not accept women in pants (Warner 2006, p. 141). However, with a growing interest in sports and exercise, women in the last decades of the nineteenth century were allowed to wear a new kind of uniform style of gym suit, which not only initiated the take-off of modern sportswear but also contributed to the improvement of wom-

Elite women in Europe and the United States were the first to utilize cycling technologies, though most were excluded from riding the high-wheeler, or “ordinary,” bicycle (the one with the big front wheel) as well as most models manufactured prior to the modern “safety” bicycle, which is essentially the bicycle as we know it today. “Ordinaries” were incredibly difficult to operate and both clothing and behavioral restrictions made it nearly impossible for women to ride them…. Women could thus operate tricycles without dramatically challenging the dominant social norms of the period. Following the mass production of the safety bicycle in the 1890s, many women took up cycling and found in it a renewed sense of freedom and mobility. (Zack Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010], 19) 52  Van Cleave writes: “Eventually, however, the public ridicule attracted by the reform costume proved too much for women’s rights advocates, who felt that the attention paid to their appearance detracted from their ideas on other issues.... By the following year (1855), most women’s rights leaders had given up dress reform, choosing to focus instead on issues such as suffrage, marriage reform, and education.” (Kendra Van Cleave, “Moral and Dress Reform Movement, 1800–1869.” Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, Vol 1. (ed.) Immanuel Ness. [Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003], 270).

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en’s clothing in the twentieth century (Ibid., p.  196). Nevertheless, most of the clothing inspired by Amelia Bloomer was confined to private spheres, spas, gymnasiums, or segregated educational communities (Ibid., p.  142). Women’s higher ­education also encouraged women to wear trousered dress, but it was also private clothing, “never meant to be seen in public” (Ibid.) It was not really deemed as “appropriate” for ordinary women to wear pants in public, however, things changed due to the bicycle, as Warner writes: Without it, the sea change in women’s dress in the early twentieth century could not have taken place. Acceptance of new ideas about clothing had to begin somewhere, and as we have seen, it certainly wasn’t about to happen in the public sphere. If anything could have brought it about, it would have been the bicycle craze, embraced with such enthusiasm by all classes everywhere. (Ibid.)

The bicycle fever at the end of the nineteenth century finally made it possible for women to wear trousers in public gradually without taking the risk of receiving a moral reproach. This social complaisance toward the exposure of the legs is indeed revolutionary because it provided the touchstone for women to expose their legs and wear short skirts with “unsuspected possibilities for the depiction of the raised skirt” as Walter Benjamin describes (Benjamin 1999, p. 64, [B1a, 3]. The daring look of the female cyclist and her fashion comparable to that of the cabaret singer and her revealing dress was “provocative” in men’s eyes during this time (Ibid., p. 62, [B1, 2] and [B1,8]).53 The effect of bicycle fever was not limited to wardrobe choices, as it offered respectable women a moral safety net with which to come out of the domestic sphere and make their appearance in public places without being subjected to criticism (Smethurst 2015, p. 95). Female bicyclers were hailed as modern, progressive, and fashionable, although in the very beginning some medical doctors suspected that women were likely to be sexually stimulated when riding bicycles. Contemporary readers may be bewildered about why the adoption of pants in the female wardrobe was controversial at the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, pants were an emblem of masculinity and male authority which must be kept away from women; therefore, the issues surrounding pants were not confined to a matter of how one dresses oneself but were associated with phallocentric ideology. Nevertheless, the bicycle as a distinctive material force coupled with the collective interest in newness and technological innovation transcended all the complicated ideological concerns as to gender distinctions, changing not only the fashion of the turn of the century but also women’s sociopolitical status in a practical sense. It is the opinion of pioneer feminist Susan B. Anthony that “It [bicyling] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world…. It gives women a feeling

53

 See the following comment by Benjamin: Who still knows, nowadays, where it was that in the last decade of the previous century women would offer to men their most seductive aspect, the most intimate promise of their figure? In the asphalted indoor arenas where people learned to ride bicycles. The woman as cyclist competes with the cabaret singer for the place of honor on posters, and gives to fashion its most daring line. [B1,8]

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of freedom and self-reliance.”54 Thanks to the bicycle, trousers, which were ­antithetical to the full skirt, finally led to the advent of short skirts as an immanent synthesis, demonstrating a tripartite dialectical development. The knee-length skirt and the short hair style that became all the rage among flappers in the 1920s would have not existed without the collective endorsement of trousers for female cyclists decades previously, which had already cut across the commotion brought out by the hegemonic conflicts between the sexes. With the craze for jazz, by the 1920s evening dresses not only became as short as daywear (Nicolson 2011, p. 158), but also were designed with panels, flounces, godets and pleats, for women to dance as well as to walk (Lehman 2013, p. 14). Upon examining the morphological changes in fashion during the decades around the turn of the century, one should be able to see that material forces were critical to its dialectical evolution, probably more so than in any other time period. While not the mode of production itself, fashion was a significant impetus behind the dialectical transformation in modern society as well, whose influence was not limited to physical appearance or bodily matters only. But this does not mean that the law of Hegelian dialectical development suddenly disappeared. The mode of Hegelian dialectic in modern times, operated by the relay between individual and collective that belongs to the domain of consciousness or ideas, was and still is in effect, in spite of the fact that the material reality contains in itself numerous possibilities by which a history evolves accordingly. Put another way, without a “cue,” the mutual agreement between the individual and the collective, which is a sort of engine of dialectical development in modern times, material forces would have little influence on shaping a purposeful course of [Hegelian] world history. But this does not mean that the law of materialist dialectical movement is not in operation either, as the material world mediates the realm of consciousness and vice versa. That being so, more to the point in our search for the logical necessity of dialectical process in fashion, which is none other than the underling law of history at large, as discussed in the previous chapter, is to find out how different dialectical processes are at work together or against each other, generating complicated mediations, and how we make sense of history based on the observation made while “faithfully” embracing “all that is historical,” as Hegel advises (2001, p. 24).

 New York World interview, February 2, 1896. Scribner’s Magazine (1896) in the same year also wrote:

54

It [the bicycle] has given all women practical liberty to wear trousers if they want to, and indeed, to get themselves into any sort of decent raiment which they find convenient for whatever enterprise they have in hand…. Three years ago, no modest American woman would hardly have ventured on the street in New York with a skirt that stopped above her ankles, and leggings that reached obviously to her knees. To-day she can do it without exciting attention. (Scribner’s Magazine 19, (1896): 783). The words in square brackets are my own addition.

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Chapter 8

Fashion as a Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy Via the Consumption of Fashion

On a positive note, the most critical role of fashion in the modern world is to provide a site for exercising individuality in an increasingly homogenized and standardized society. By the time feudalism was replaced by capitalism, the concept of individuality had emerged. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the power and free will of individuals began to be unbridled at the same time. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in The Social Contract (1762), the individual is still controlled by the collective will rather than by the feudal system, in which public power was in the private hands of the king or the lord. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution have provided both superstructure and infrastructure for individuals to find their identity through material reality. However, they have also brought about alienation (Entfremdung), which has become an urgent issue that needs special attention in the metropolis where consumer products are increasingly standardized and distinct individuality is hard to find. This concept, developed by Feuerbach, Marx, and later Weber, unfolds the ultimate conflicts in society underneath which a tension between the individual and the collective are always at work. This is why fashion takes a significant stance in modern societies, for it is a means by which individuals relate to their community, disclosing what Simmel says of contradictory forces, that is, socialism and individualism (Simmel 1957, p. 542). Following Georg Simmel’s line of thought, it can be said that fashion serves as an intermediary between the rules of the dominant and those of individual discretion. To put it another way, it is through fashion that individuals demonstrate their compliance with the norms of class or society which they are dependent on or aspire to belong to, and at the same time express their individuality. Thus, fashion is not simply an ornament for beautification but a relay between the individual and the collective, balancing each other out. If fashion lost its function as a provider of sources for distinctive individuality, the members of society would all wear the same clothing, as Thomas More described in Utopia (1516): “Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes, … The fashion never alters, … ” (More 2008, p. 51). Indeed, Fourier’s utopia in the early nineteenth century is no different from the Ur-utopian society Thomas Moore predicted, in that both anticipated a land of milk and honey but in drab uniforms. What they did not take into account when © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 E. J. Kang, A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_8

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conceiving of a utopia whose essence is a classless or fair social structure is not simply a variety of clothing to choose from but the desire for subjectivity, which is completely clouded by the interest of the collective. The unsuccessful revolution carried out by communists in the twentieth century shares the same defect as the utopian idealism—that is, the underestimation of the desire for individuality acting against collectivism, which is a fundamental trait of human nature.1 The Constructivist products in both art forms and commodities, which were created not just in favor of practicality and functionality but also in the service of the Bolshevik Revolution, allow few or no variations for individual taste, visually exhibiting the collective interest in mobility over individual discretions during the revolutionary era.2 Those revolutionists also failed to grasp the social atmosphere in which the individual consciousness became secure, whereas the collective consciousness began waning from the nineteenth century, as indicated by Walter Benjamin (1999, p. 389). In this transition fashion takes a historically and politically significant stance, for not only has fashion greatly facilitated the reversal as a purveyor of individual interests, but the remit of fashion has also resided in the dream consciousness of the collective, as elucidated in the modes of life in utopian communities. Simmel’s explications about fashion also offer some important insights about the roles of fashion as a domain in which the dialectical relations between domination and subordination and between separation and union are distinctively in operation, as well as one in which the dynamic forces between individuality and collectivity interplay with each other. Simmel states that fashion is “a product of class distinction” (Simmel 1957, p. 544)3 and “the valve through which woman’s craving for some measure of conspicuousness and individual prominence finds vent, when its satisfaction is denied her in other fields” (Ibid., p. 551). He also adds that women are more interested in fashion because it is the only territory in which they can exercise their individuality, as opposed to men who have a social sphere where they can express their distinctiveness mainly through a calling or profession (Ibid.). This is

1  Refer to Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 135. Cf. Charles Fourier, for example, saw fashion as the main means of subsistence of commerce which is harmful to all productive industries. See “Fashion and Parasitism,” in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 2  Refer to Susan Buck-Morss, Chap. 4, “Culture for the Masses,” in Dream World and Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000). 3  Also see Simmel (1957, 545):

Social forms, apparel, aesthetic judgment, the whole style of human expression, are constantly transformed by fashion, in such a way, however, that fashion—i.e., the latest fashion—in all these things affects only the upper classes. Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.

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the general view not just of Simmel but of other sociologists and commentators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose notion of fashion has resonated, whether as a reaction against it or as a positive affirmation, with many scholars from different fields of study. However, it should be emphasized that Simmel regards the relation between domination and subordination, between separation and union, and between individualism and collectivism as the key to understanding almost all social phenomena, including fashion. Besides, the reflections on fashion made by Simmel are specific to the time in which he was living, such that any criticisms concerning the turn-of-the-century fashion phenomena made today are anachronistic. Accordingly, it is more accurate to say that his perspective on fashion as regards class and women is not erroneous but incongruous with our time. Examples illustrating why Simmel’s theory of domination and subordination with regard to the fashion system doesn’t fit in with our contemporary time are numerous. One example would be the vestimentary trends of our time. In spite of the fact that an unprecedented number of women have entered the business world, fashion has not passed out of sight nor lost its power as a social “common denominator” that connects the individual and the collective. Who are the fashion leaders now when there are no visually distinctive class strata as before, or when the upper echelon no longer generates as many fashions as before with which the lower class strives to catch up? Clearly, early sociologists’ arguments regarding the trickle-down theory of fashion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries do not hold the same weight today. New ideas of fashion come from diverse sources including ethnic groups, musicians, or urban street-corner gangs. In concert with this is the concept of cultural capital with which Pierre Bourdieu interprets how minorities create their own identity and even further exert their influence over mainstream society in such a way that social mobility from the lower social strata with less economic means becomes possible. Notwithstanding, one should not dismiss Simmel’s observations about fashion simply as passé. His view about fashion as a prop that supports the hierarchy of society or an outcome that is generated from the superstructure of society, which somewhat contradicts his comments regarding certain progressive aspects of fashion, is not because he is ambiguous or shortsighted but because the nature of fashion is dialectically complex, since it pertains to the antithetical relations between domination and subordination, between separation and union, and between individualism and collectivism. Despite what many people think, money is not the most decisive factor in the fashion system. Even people with lower disposable income have enough purchasing power to change the direction of fashion market forces. The dynamics of fashion are never like those of other consumer products, because they are intricately intertwined with such human feelings and ethos as desire and envy. While the rationalization of supply and demand can be made for most commodities, that of pure articles of fashion are hard to foretell. This volatile market of fashion is often ascribed to the characteristic of fashion—incessant change (Ibid., p.  557). The essence of fashion, change, or newness, has strong political implications in the creation of a positive utopian society, as the momentum of change created by the means of consumption of fashion has some significant power to change the course of history. Fashion as a

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utopian impulse provides a relentless schematic platform on which to alter or transcend existing social conditions in order to reach an ideal, most notably freedom. This view of fashion as an implement to bring forth change from which social progress is made goes against the grain of the conventional account that fashion bespeaks the status of the wearer according to the hierarchy of class or that it functions as a social manifestation of the surplus of industrial production. Nonetheless, change, or the quest for something new, which is the most critical feature of fashion, is that which makes fashion not only politically charged but also historically significant, since change is the driving force of a revolutionary vision of any kind towards progress. Simply put, without the desire for change no progress is possible. The most conspicuous example of fashion’s progressive role in society is the introduction of short skirts and short hair styles in the decades after the turn of the century. Women’s adoption of short skirts in the early decades of the twentieth century was not just a sartorial change but also a sociopolitical revolution. It was a revolution because what fashion engendered was an out-and-out upheaval in society.4 One should question why the whole of society became agitated at the advent of short skirts if it was a mere change in our appearance. It is because some radical changes in fashion, if not all, are absolutely relevant to those in power relations, while also illustrating the tacit negotiations between the individual and the collective. In addition to short skirts, short hairstyles also became fashionable for women in the 1920s, something which by and large had been a taboo in most cultures for thousands of years (Sherrow 2006, xxii). These radical fashions during the Jazz Age are not the results of sociopolitical advancements; rather, the opposite is the case. To cite a concrete example, it was the cloche, which came into high demand among fashionable ladies in the 1920s, that finally got women in both America and Western European countries to cut their hair short,5 causing controversy over gender politics (Sherrow 2006, xxii).6 In the 1920s, 4  A brief account by James Laver about the reactions against short skirts in Europe and America offers us a glimpse into the social atmosphere of the time. See James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 232—233. 5  See Jacqueline Herald, Fashions of a Decade: The 1920s (New York: Chelsea House, c2007), 30. 6  Also see “The Bob” (Sherrow 2006, pp. 63—66), particularly 64.

Critics complained that bobbed hair meant women were trying to ‘act like men.’…. People who wanted women to maintain their traditional roles and appearance urged them to keep their long hair. (64.) The following excerpt from Mary Louise Roberts’s introductory part of the article, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” [The American Historical Review. 98, 3 (June 1993): 657–658], vividly discloses the general attitude toward the short haircut. In 1925, an article in L’oeuvre jocularly described how the fashion of short hair had completely overturned life in a small French village. After the first woman in the village cut her hair, accompanied by “tears and grinding of teeth” on the part of her family, the fashion had quickly become ‘epidemic: from house to house, it took its victims.’ A gardener swore he would lock up his daughter until her hair grew back; a husband believed that his wife had dishonored him… . Throughout the decade, newspapers recorded lurid tales, including one

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women had to cut their hair short in order to wear the “It” fashion, the tight-fitting, bell-shaped hat, which made short hairstyles such as the bob, the shingle, or the Eton crop extremely popular.7 James Laver, the British art historian and pioneering fashion historian, who is known for having “made the study of costume respectable” (Gibbs-Smith 1976), affirms in his book Between the Wars (1961) that in the twenties women cut off their hair so that they could wear the cloche.8 Even older women found it impossible to keep their hair long, according to Laver, because the hat became “universal” (Laver 1983, pp.  232–233). Certainly, some might suggest a contradictory theory claiming that bobbed hairstyles led to the invention of the cloche, the helmet-like hat. However, I would like to point out that, as Anne Hollander in her book Seeing Through Clothes (1993) reveals, ever since classical antiquity the body in the Western world has been modified or distorted to fit current fashions, not the other way around. Hollander’s finding, which has been referred to by many dress or fashion historians, gives high credit to the assertion that fashion is politically charged while being rebellious against the existing order, because it endorses the assertion that a fashion item can alter the shape of the body and bodily deportment or practice. Such alterations are intimately associated with the dynamics of power relations. The connection between the body and hegemony is not an unknown idea. The body as a site of power has become among the spotlighted topics in the field of the history of ideas, in particular with Michel Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish (1977), in which he states, “the body itself is invested by power relations” and “Power relations have an immediate hold on it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (1977, pp. 24–25). Resting on theoretical discourse on the body and its rela-

husband in the provinces who sequestered his wife for bobbing her hair and another father who reportedly killed his daughter for the same reason. A father in Dijon sought legal action against a hairdresser in 1925 for cutting the hair of his daughter without his authority. 7  Refer to Alan Jenkins, The Twenties (New York: Universe Books, 1974), 56. The cloche hat appeared in 1924, and reigned until 1930. It was often worn with a brooch in front… . The important thing about it was that if you wore it you had to cut your hair short. Also see Doreen Yarwood, The Encyclopedia of World Costume (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), p. 220 and Jacqueline Herald, Fashions of a Decade: The 1920s (New York: Chelsea House, c2007), 30. 8  Regarding the relation between short hairstyles and the cloche, see James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History, 233. Laver also adds a following explanation regarding the extent of the popularity of the new fashion: “This was extremely important, because when it had imposed itself on fashion it almost compelled women to wear their hair short. Those who would not cut off their locks were condemned to wear the only possible hat on the tops of their head, where it gave a very ridiculous appearance. Within a couple of years of the first appearance of the cloche 99 percent. of the young women of Western Europe had short hair.” James Laver, Taste and Fashion from the French Revolution to Today (London: George G. Harrap, 1937), 130.

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tion to power, I contend that some seemingly passing fashions, if not all, have such a huge political potential as to fundamentally transform the dogmatic order of things. The thrust of the argument that the cloche hat got Western women to cut their hair short is this: It is not the ideologies people shared during the early twentieth century, but the power of fashion that made many women decide to cut their hair. Some fashion theorists’ attempt to limit the boundary of fashion to sartorial fashions and/or their relation to social, cultural, and political systems is futile, since fashion works in many areas of life in which the individual and the collective interact. And yet, fashion phenomena are not just the mere manifestations of social interaction, as fashion is not only an intangible social form, but also the concrete representation of the form of social interaction as a material object or phenomenon. Thus, my argument—fashion items such as the cloche assisted women in breaking from masculine dominance concatenated with the principles or practices of patriarchy—does not simply account for Marxist materialist predominance over Hegelian Idealist historical development. The adoption of a particular material object or phenomenon under the name of fashion by the collective evidences the fact there are tacit negotiations and interactions between the individual and the collective. The reciprocal relation between the individual and the collective, although not always symmetrical, also helps us comprehend why fashion phenomena should not be deemed as the direct result of the influences of a few famous, powerful, ingenious individuals’ personal intentions or creative contributions. Despite the fact that some creative innovators can contribute to the initial stage of the introduction of a fashion, it should be noted that fashion is essentially the outcome of the interactions between the individual and the collective. The very essence of fashion is not contingent upon arbitrary individual geniuses’ tastes or decisions, because no fashion is viable to spread unless coupled with the collective approval. The notorious failure of John Fairchild’s endorsement of the midi-skirt in the early 1970s9 unveils that fashion is not something that is to be swayed by a few luminaries who are influentially powerful within the industry. Some may argue that the fashion for bobbed hair was not a result of the popularity of the cloche hat or that such fashion innovators as Irene Castle, Coco Chanel, and the bohemians of Greenwich Village, who had bobbed their hair a decade before the cloche hat became fashionable, influenced women to cut their hair short. However, such an argument is flawed in terms of the point of reference as to what is necessary in the process of the genesis of a fashion. In other words, the argument above is plausible, but not sufficient enough to prove why the bobbed hair style became a fashion. By stating this, I am not suggesting that the avant-garde artists and designers were not among the early innovators of the short hair style, or they did not contribute to the popularity of the cloche. In point of fact, the argument above is not unlike the great men thesis of the nineteenth century, which regards history as the outcome of the actions of great men. This theory credits exceptionally talented leaders and geniuses for the source of power that can change the direction of history. However, we all know empirically that so many style

 Refer to “Introduction.”

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changes have been introduced in the world of fashion, but not all of them have been accepted by the collective. Again, it is important to come to grips with the key constitutive element of fashion—collective endorsement, which makes a mere object or phenomenon suffice to be a social phenomenon. Everything remains as circumstantial, secondary, or auxiliary, except for the collective acceptance, when it comes to the genesis of fashion as a social phenomenon, since the unity between the subjective will and the universal will is by no means attainable unless there is collective approval. The history of the cloche and its influence on short hairstyles in the 1920s best illustrates how instrumental fashion was in shaping a new configuration of hegemonic relations but also signals fashion’s role in the development of freedom, especially women’s freedom in the early decades of the twentieth century. Crudely put, women were liberated by the cloche just as they were by the bicycle,10 which made short skirts “fashionable” among women, and the cloche and the short skirt affected social relations between men and women while bringing on more freedom on the part of women. Some people may question what the “look” of being free has to do with the actual conditions of freedom, as Mary Louise Roberts does. First, did women’s participation in this visual fantasy of liberation produce any real political effects? Obviously, to look emancipated was not to be emancipated. Since the illusion of freedom could as much undermine as reinforce a liberated self-image, participation in this visual fantasy represented a political risk…. Second, in considering fashion as a political gesture, one needs to ask whether or not participation in this visual fantasy of liberation was a conscious political choice…. These considerations of motive point up the possible weaknesses of fashion as a political or feminist strategy. (Roberts 1993, p. 683)

Here Roberts raises two very opportune questions for the purpose of our discussion as to how fashion is of political import. In short, the first question concerns the politics of appearance, while the second is about the motivations behind human behaviors and decisions. As is evident, it is hard to conclude once and for all whether the freedom fashions carry within themselves constitute real freedom and whether “politically meaningful” fashions are the results of consciously made choices. (The difficulty in answering these questions is absolutely related to the dialectical aspect not of fashion per se but of human beings, both rational and impulsive, such that it is not easy to define the motivations behind fashion choices as well as the symbols or meanings they represent.) Out of her first question, Roberts expresses a remonstration with fashion’s role in the “look” of our appearance, saying, “to look emancipated was not to be emancipated,” which is actually not dissimilar to Adorno and Benjamin’s criticism, that is, that changes made in the form of commodities including fashion are anything but conducive to real changes in society. As shown in the second question, Roberts also doubts that there is a politically conscious behavior or decision constantly in operation in the domain of fashion. The weakness of fashion—that fashion is superficial and concerned only with the surface, not with the innermost intention or will of the human subject—is paradoxically the most

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 See Chap. 7. “Dialectic of Fashion History in Modern Times” for more discussion on this topic.

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p­ owerful weapons that fashion possesses, and it easily disarms any forms of resistance against fashion’s permeation through all levels of society. Though fashion is commonly believed to be most frivolous and least related to the domain of the mind, it is actually this seeming foible that makes fashion an incomparable spearhead of revolutions.11 In point of fact, however, this is the reason fashion is also responsible for changes that may also lead to a deterioration in the conditions of humanity, for what it brings about is nothing but changes, regardless of the ideology of any group of any kind that lie behind it. Yet the fact that fashion serves as a momentum for change in the modern age does not alter, as fashion is essentially an anticipation of something new, which is closely interconnected with the mode of progress in modern times. In this regard, Roberts’s argument that fashion is a visual language for social upheaval while a visual fantasy of female liberation (Roberts 1993, p. 661)12 is not enough, in that it does not fully grasp the true potency of fashion. Fashion is not just a passive reflection of society but also an active catalyst in the process of revolutions or sociopolitical upheavals while not consuming its energy, since it appears unrelentingly throughout the course of modernity. This, however, is not to say that the politics of appearance via fashion is of little or no significance, since the vestimentary aspect of fashion is indispensable to the construction of modern individual identity.13 Simply put, it is no exaggeration to say that, in modern times, you are what you wear each day since your consciousness is not the sole factor that determines your identity. That description also touches on the link between the natural or materialist conditions of human life and one’s thought about oneself. Namely, “thought about oneself” cannot ascertain if he or she is free or autonomous, for it does not maintain possession of any of his or her social, economic, and political relations, the base of human conditions by which to seek out freedom. A genuine vindication about our identity in modern times, which is inseparable from our feeling of being autonomous, can be found in materialist philosophers such as Feuerbach who states, “You are what you eat,” or Marx who would say, “You are what you produce.” Nonetheless, such a Marxian description is by no means impartial, in that women were largely left out of the area of production until the early decades of the

11

 As Mary Garden puts it in “Why I Bobbed My Hair,” Pictorial Review, April, 1927, 8:

Bobbed hair is a state of mind and not merely a new manner of dressing my head. It typifies growth, alertness, up-to-dateness, and is part of the expression of the élan vital! [spirit] It is not just a fad of the moment, either like mahjong or crossword puzzles. At least I don’t think it is. I consider getting rid of our long hair one of the many little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom. Whatever helps their emancipation, however small it may seem, is well worth while. 12  Also see Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” 682–683. 13  Concerning this topic, refer to Daniel L. Purdy’s The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). See his points of argument in the Introduction, especially p. x.

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twentieth century, while being labeled consumers, as opposed to male producers.14 I will further discuss the setting of production versus consumption assigned by sex difference, since the backdrop of this division elucidates how fashion is related to the liberation of women as well as the downfall of feudal class structure in modern times, contributing to the progress of humanity in terms of freedom. In Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (2004), Jennifer M. Jones, using historical evidence from journals, pamphlets, letters, and other sources, unsnarls how fashion, femininity, and frivolity had become intertwined in France by the end of the eighteenth century (Jones 2004, p. 180), although in the seventeenth century la mode was more or less gender neutral (Ibid., p.  9). She argues that fashion became “sexed” as feminine during the time when the transition of the fashion leadership from court to city took place (Ibid., pp. 73–74). While in the midst of this shift, rank and distinction were replaced by taste as the arbiter of fashion choices (Ibid., p. 195). Whereas fashion was lambasted as a social vice in the previous century, toward the end of the eighteenth century it became extolled as a virtue for women, resting on a new belief that women should visually please men and that the desire to wear fancy dresses is natural to women (Ibid., p. 150 and p. 185). Many contemporaries, including Rousseau, arguably the most influential, made widely spread the propaganda that women are naturally receptive to sensory stimuli, lacking the intellect of higher reasoning while being vulnerable to sensual delight. This makes women innately fit for being consumers (Ibid., pp. 136–137).15 Reaching back to Aristotle, Rousseau rationalizes the disparity between men and women, the former as creative and intellectual, the latter as physical and sensual (Okin 1979, pp. 99–100), and following the model of the ancient Greeks, Rousseau also encloses women within the domestic sphere (Ibid., p. 130). While a philosopher of equality and freedom, Rousseau adheres to the tradition of the patriarchal family to which women are confined (Ibid., 102). As he puts it: “A home whose mistress is absent is a body without a soul which soon falls into corruption; a woman outside of her home loses her greatest luster, and despoiled of her real ornaments, she displays herself indecently” (Rousseau 1968, p. 88). Analogous to Rousseau’s naturalization of the link between women and finery and adornment, contemporary journals of the late eighteenth century such as Magasin des modes nouvelles and Journal de la mode publicized women’s infatuation with fashion as an innate desire to please men with the charm of dress and

 One can find numerous books and articles by cultural historians, media and communications scholars, and feminist historians regarding this topic. For example, see JoAnn Jaffe, “Patriarchy,” Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, vol. 2, ed. Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010), 661–663; John Fiske, “Shopping for Pleasure,” Reading the Popular (London & New York: Routledge, 1989), 13–42. 15  Also see the following remark made by Rousseau: 14

“Consult the taste of women in physical matters, which pertain to the judgment of the senses, and that of men in moral matters, which are more dependent on the understanding,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, His Educational Theories Selected from Émile, Julie and Other Writings, edited by R. L. Archer, (Woodbury: Barron’s Educational Series, 1964), 212.

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ornament. This stands in contrast to the seventeenth-century journal Mercure, which had presented fashion as a product of culture for the display of state pomp and sophisticated etiquette. Once deemed as malicious for draining the family’s fortune or causing working girls to become fallen women, succumbing to their desire for finery, toward the end of the eighteenth century fashion was embraced by French society as a part of a female’s duty to please men (Jones 2004, p. 180 and p. 199). According to Jones, the messages transmitted by the late eighteenth-century fashion press are: first, fashion is part of feminine nature; second, it has more to do with inner taste than external ostentation; and, third, it does not have power to topple the male-­centered society, because fashion belongs to the domain of feminine frivolity.16 In this indoctrination, taste played a vital role in democratizing French fashion culture, as the marriage between fashion and taste effectively dissolved the intimate bond between fashion and rank and wealth (Ibid., p. 195).17 It is during this transitional period to modernity that female consumers and male producers became a norm that lasted until the end of the World War II.18 Jones contends that “sexing la mode” within the large context of the divisions between producers and consumers, between public and private, and between husbands and wives is part of the developmental process of the modern economy or of liberal politics (Jones 2004, p 76).19 In other words, the complementary relation between the two sexes as regards sartorial 16 17

 Ibid., 180.  Refer to the following explanation by Jones (2004, 195). The journal [Cabinet des modes] never suggested that elite men and women possessed a monopoly on taste; it organized the economy of taste around sex and nationality, with French women possessing the most refined taste. The connection made in the late eighteenth century between fashion and taste threatened potentially to sever the link between fashion and rank and wealth: as presented in the pages of the fashion press, any woman, whether aristocrat or shop girl, who possessed a modicum of taste, could accentuate her natural graces and participate in the culture of fashion.

Here the words in square brackets are my addition. Jones (2004, pp. 181–183) argues that the study of contemporary fashion press also uncovers that, unlike the Mercure, the seventeenth-century periodical published biannually, which distinguished fashions based on class and position, eighteenth-century journals such as the Cabinet des modes and the Magasin des modes nouvelles described fashions regardless of class. She also asserts that the court no longer served as the sole reference point. 18  This statement can be substantiated by changing advertising rhetoric. For example, see Diane S. Hope, “Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising.” Defining Visual Rhetoric, ed. Charles A Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 155–77. 19  See Jones’s own explanation: For eighteenth-century French men and women, who did not yet have a well-developed conceptualization of the modern economy or liberal politics, the process of “sexing la mode” played a crucial role in helping them make sense of the seemingly irrational economy that imbued their lives as consumers and producers and husbands and wives. Ideas about novelty, social change, fashion, and femininity were all deeply entwined.

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matters was a political prop by which eighteenth-century French society, influenced by growing bourgeois commercial power, enshrouded the bone of contention, that is, class breakdown, at a time when a new paradigm of social structure was required, as the feudal class structure of the previous centuries increasingly disintegrated (Ibid., p.  204).20 I would like to flesh out that the dichotomy between men and women as a form of unilateral relation between producers and consumers is one way of sustaining the family in defense of a burgeoning individualism that has threatened the patriarchal social relations and traditional political economy. The late eighteenth-century fashion press’s praise of women’s natural right to consume and its glorification of the harmonious liaison of interests among women, their family, and their clothing merchants (Ibid., p. 203), is hardly irrelevant to the eulogy of the “sanctioned confines of monogamous marriage,” to borrow Jones’s expression (Ibid., p. 215).21 The exclusive polarity between production and consumption, promoted during the eighteenth century, was a vehicle by which to bolster and prolong the patriarchal family structure and, while in the transition to the stage of civil society and state, to keep intact domestic and social masculine domination. To this end, women were required to stay within the walls of the home both physically and symbolically, say, breastfeeding their children and making themselves attractive to please men, as Rousseau advised, whereas men were encouraged to venture out and keep abreast of civil society and the state, in lockstep with the development of political theory under the influence of Enlightenment thought. In this metamorphosis from feudalism to the modern system of states, family remained the only sanctuary where men could still have dominance over the “weaker sex,” and not be castigated for patriarchal injustices, the remnants of feudal relations. According to Rousseau, the family is the basic social unit in which one learns about inequitable sex roles and where men are educated regarding how to live in political society as well as in society in general.22 He also insists, “the father should command in the family,” and “nothing of this kind exists in political society” (Rousseau 1994, p.  90). Clear enough, it is within the confines of the home that patriarchal domination and its unilateral power relation between men and women have been unquestioned and taken for granted as natural and conventional, which have affected social relations

20 21

 Also see Ibid., p. 37 and p. 117.  Refer to the following comment made by Jones.

The new eighteenth-century distinctions between public and private and masculinity and femininity rested on the belief that women by nature had a duty to seduce men and to produce children; both, ideally, were to take place within the sanctioned confines of monogamous marriage. 22  See Mira Morgenstern, “Women, Power, and the Politics of Everyday Life,” Lynda Lange (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (University Park, PA: The Penn State University Press, 2002), 115.

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by and large, against the grain of the general development of discourse on freedom since the Enlightenment.23 The link between consumer power and political revolutions became particularly salient from the nineteenth century onward. In fact, a great number of books and articles in the field of consumption and consumer culture have unearthed over the last couple of decades the fact that the purchasing power of women has been potentially imbricated in the political domain, since the market where profits are obtained is created or expanded by consumers.24 It should be noted, first, that the divide between male producers and female consumers is not simply a naturalist view grounded on the seemingly natural conditions of each sex but a political economy designed by a male-oriented social order and, second, that the polarity between producers and consumers is a commercial relation, essential to the development of the Industrial Revolution, as it requires both demand and supply to have economic equilibrium. However, the bourgeoisie’s economic base, in which women were instituted to be consumers of luxury goods such as fashion, in contrast to male producers, eventually reshaped the patriarchal superstructure in family as well as in society and was propitious to the improvement of women’s social status toward the first half of the twentieth century. The transition of title from “householder” to the “mistress of domestic affairs” that took place in the nineteenth century both in France and in England25 is a clear sign of a linguistic turn, which also works as a structuring agent so as to legitimize women as the practical, if not legal, head of the household, the basic economic unit of modern political economy. The following century finally saw a new chapter, in which the role of housewife as the homemaker helped fortify women’s station as powerful consumers, which has become the greatest weapon by which women liberate themselves from the subordination imposed by traditional political economy in conjunction with bourgeois economic growth. In the midst of this transition, fashion has played a critical role as a purveyor of freedom for the making of a positive political economy, in which one-sided, patriarchal domination is relinquished. In the progression toward the creation of a true utopian society, one may have the freedom to choose what to wear following the law of the  For example, Immanuel Kant in “What Is Enlightenment” (1784) states that freedom is the sole requirement in enlightening people:

23

“For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784),” Mary J. Gregor (ed) Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18. 24  For example, see Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), 3: 817–44, 821. For a comprehensive list of books and articles by various topics such as definitions and theoretical issues regarding consumption, see Lawrence B.  Glickman’s “Bibliographic Essay,” Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, ed. Lawrence B., Glickman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 399–414. 25  See Michelle Perrot, “Women, Power and History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century France.” S. Reynolds (ed.) Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), 54.

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fashion system rather than being subjugated to the propaganda or the ideologies of the state or the community by which one is bounded. It may not be possible to put into effect the modern idea of utopia, because it is as ideal and conceptual as pure freedom itself. Yet progress toward an ideal utopian society is not merely an empty gesture but a practical movement toward a social polity improved beyond the limits of current sociopolitical conditions. “Incessant change,” the driving force of f­ ashion, provides a tireless impetus to keep marching toward the ideal. Perhaps what matters is not whether we can arrive at the stage of ideal social modernity but how we can galvanize the impulse of change for the better. Some feminist writers and cultural historians have called into question the merits of the consumption of fashion and expressed their concerns about the ugly aspects of the glamorous fashion industry, as it has thrived, in large part, with underpayment and labor exploitation, making cheap fashion goods available for Western consumers. For example, Angela McRobbie, in her article “Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption” (1997), argues that writing on fashion and consumption often excludes topics related to poverty, hardship, and those who produce for consumption. She also points out that women oftentimes purchase consumer goods on behalf of their family members and that there is a lack of account of black and Asian female consumers (McRobbie 1997, pp.  81–82). Consumption patterns found in different social classes disclose not only the uneven distribution of resources, but also sociopolitical inequality. As McRobbie puts it, “Modes of consumption thus become marks of social and cultural difference. Likewise the frustrated experience of exclusions from consumption can be a profoundly politicizing process which forces young people to confront the meaning of class, gender and ethnicity in their own homes, neighbourhoods, schools and shopping centres” (Ibid., p. 82). However, concerning the evaluation of the relationship between consumption, fashion, and freedom, there is one caveat, which is not about McRobbie’s observation per se, but about the complexity in regard to the experiences one can obtain via fashion. Modes of consumption of some consumer goods that are commonly entitled as “fashion” in everyday usage are certainly a discernible indication of inequality in terms of the excitement of shopping and the quality of each person’s life, as well as of disparities in the distribution of economic assets and income. The frustration that results from the exclusions from consumption plainly demonstrates the fact that fashion is deeply entwined with our desire for novelty, newness, or change, and for pleasure that can be satisfied with fashion goods. Nonetheless, with this subjective experience of fashion, what one can expect to attain remains personal; therefore, any assessment of this experience with reference to the topic of freedom is not impartial. The scope of the influence of the consumption of fashion is not limited to a personal freedom that comes into being when one makes his or her own personal choice or exercises his or her own taste or caprice by means of fashion. It is of great significance to grapple with the distinction between the experience of consumption of fashion goods that has relevance to our personal freedom and subjective feelings, and the experience of fashion as a way of interacting with the collective/society, which has to do with a fully developed ethical life, in which freedom actualizes itself according

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to the Hegelian view of history.26 In the former experience, modes of consumption of wide ranges of fashion goods are related to individual difference because fashion in this context is confined to the realm of subjectivity, subjective choices and whims, and bodily impulse, all of which can be reduced to personal freedom.27 On the other hand, fashion in the latter case not just manifests the interaction between the individual and the collective, and between the universal and the particular, but also embodies the union between subjective freedom of the individual and universal freedom. Because these two disparate experiences are enmeshed closely, as well as because some consumer goods which we customarily call fashion often involve the former experience only, it is not easy to separate one experience from another. Indeed, the kernel of fashion that is related to the progressive development of freedom in modern times has its footing not in sartorial fashions as mere material objects, but in fashion as a social phenomenon, in which individuals interact with the collective/society. Not all dress articles which we can wear around our body are relevant to the development of freedom over the course of modern times or charged with qualities that have the potential to assist the advancement of freedom. Hence, attention should be paid to both sartorial and non-sartorial fashions that embody the dynamic relation between the individual and the collective, rather than to some dress items that are conventionally called “fashion” in the vernacular, if one aims to explore the relation between fashion as a social phenomenon and the development of history toward freedom.

References Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dream World and Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. London/New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House. Fourier, Charles. 1972. The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. In Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, ed. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. London: Cape. Garden, Mary. 1927. Why I Bobbed My Hair. Pictorial Review 8. Gibbs-Smith, Charles. 1976. Obituary in Costume. Journal of the Costume Society 10. Glickman, Lawrence B. 1999. Bibliographic Essay. In Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman, 399–414. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorsuch, Anne E. 2000. Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herald, Jacqueline. c2007. Fashions of a Decade: The 1920s. New York: Chelsea House.

26  For more discussion on this topic, see Chap. 10. “Fashion History in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.” 27  For more discussion on this topic, see Chap. 2. “What Immanuel Kant Would Say about Fashion: The Metaphysics of the Pursuit of the Self by Way of Fashion.”

References

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Hope, Diane S. 2004. Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising. In Defining Visual Rhetoric, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, 155– 177. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jaffe, JoAnn. 2010. Patriarchy. In Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, ed. Albert J.  Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe, vol. 2. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Jenkins, Alan. 1974. The Twenties. New York: Universe Books. Jones, Jennifer Michelle. 2004. Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. Oxford/New York: Berg. Laver, James. 1937. Taste and Fashion from the French Revolution to Today. London: George G. Harrap. ———. 1983. Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1997. Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption. Feminist Review 55 (Spring): 73–89. More, Thomas. 2008. Utopia. Rockville, MD: Arc Manor LLC. Morgenstern, Mira. 2002. Women, Power, and the Politics of Everyday Life. In Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange. University Park, PA: The Penn State University Press. Okin, Susan. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Perrot, Michelle. 1986. Women, Power and History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century France. In Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789, ed. S. Reynolds. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Purdy, Daniel L. 1998. The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Roberts, Mary Louise. 1993, June. Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France. The American Historical Review 98: 3. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. In His Educational Theories Selected from Émile, Julie and Other Writings, ed. R.L. Archer. Woodbury: Barron's Educational Series. ———. 1968. Politics and the Arts, Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater, translated with notes and introduction by Allan Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1994. Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript. Vol. 4, ed. Roger D.  Masters and Christopher Kelly. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sherrow, Victoria. 2006. Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Simmel, Georg. 1957, May. Fashion. The American Journal of Sociology 62(6):541–558. Yarwood, Doreen. 1978. The Encyclopedia of World Costume. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Chapter 9

The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion in View of the Philosophy of History

The most conspicuous puissance of fashion beyond economic and commercial repercussions is the diffusion of egalitarianism or democratization through emulation, which greatly helped to bring about liberation from the feudal yoke. With regard to the power of fashion as a domain where one exercises a substantial degree of equality, disturbing the existing social equilibrium to an effect not restricted to sartorial freedom, Nathaniel Forster in 1767, more than a century earlier than Georg Simmel, wrote: In England the several ranks of men slide into each other almost imperceptibly and a spirit of equality runs through every part of their constitution. Hence arises a strong emulation in all the several stations and conditions to vie with each other, and the perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them. In such a state as this fashion must have uncontrolled sway. And a fashionable luxury must spread through it like a contagion.1

At the heart of the contagious consumption, portentous of great change in society, was the frenzy for fashion, whose intractable torrent fundamentally disrupted the order of the hierarchy of the time. It is noteworthy that fashion as a tangible material to be sold on the market, not limited to the domain of the body, spread over to almost all consumer goods that were fashioned with style and taste, something which had an enormous effect on the transmission of a “spirit of equality,” indeed. According to Neil McKendrick, from the eighteenth century onward women in the home were encouraged to shop for various new products, and fashion served as a perpetual source for consumption of a vast array of home-related products.2 What  Nathaniel Forster, An Enquiry into the Present High Price of Provisions (London: Fletcher, 1767), 41; as cited in Neil McKendrick, “The consumer revolution of eighteenth-century England,” in The Consumption Reader, eds. David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, and Kate M. L. Housiaux (London: Routledge, 2003), 41. 2  Neil McKendrick, “The consumer revolution of eighteenth-century England,” in The Consumption Reader, ed. David B.  Clarke, Marcus A.  Doel, and Kate M.  L. Housiaux (London: Routledge, 2003), 41. 1

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Forster and McKendrick epitomized is the dismantlement of feudal social relations, achieved by bourgeois economic growth with the aid of fashion. The bourgeoisie brought forth the modern economy in tandem with the spread of fashion, which has been at the forefront not only of consumption but also of production. From the perspective of production, fashion was a powerful impelling force behind the Industrial Revolution, given that the textile industry was in the vanguard of industrialization and urbanization; on the other hand, from the perspective of consumption in the bourgeois economic system, fashion was the ultimate stimulus for the consumption of virtually all consumer goods that are sold for their appeal to taste or novelty. A systematic investigation into production and consumption, both of which are in no sense peripheral to fashion, will help unravel the workings of modernity from the perspective of the development of freedom. It is the contrasting views of Marx and Simmel on production and consumption that cast a light on the complex web of modernity as it is. For Marx and Engels, and later Marcuse and Lukács, the themes of production and the mode of production are crucial to the development of bourgeois capitalist society. Even alienation, a power independent of the worker, which is thought of as the most serious plight of modernity by Marxists, is caused by production-related issues: the distance, first, between producers and products; second, between producers and their life activity, or the act of producing itself; third, between producers themselves and their “species-being”; and last, between producers and other producers (Marx 2000, pp. 85–95, esp. pp. 90–91).Therefore, suffice it to say that production is the overarching concept in shaping Marxist Weltanschauung. On the contrary, Simmel illuminates consumption as the key mechanism that props up capitalist economy and social relations. As H. Brinkmann puts it, “whereas Simmel seeks to analyse the economy from the side of demand and thus from the side of consumption and distribution, thereby allowing supply to be more or less a function of demand, Marx starts out from supply, from production.”3 What is more, in opposition to the Marxist claim that objective social relations lead

In fashion novelty became an irresistible drug. In possessions for the home, new fashions were insisted on―in pottery, furniture, fabric, cutlery, even wallpaper … . Spurred on by social emulation and class competition, men and women surrendered eagerly to the pursuit of novelty, the hypnotic effects of fashion, and the enticements of persuasive commercial propaganda. As a result many objects, once the prized possessions of the rich, reached further than ever before down the social scale. Regarding this topic, refer to Chap. 4, “Consumer Demand in the Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy,” in The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Here Jan De Vries states: The centrality of clothing to the power of consumer demand in the long eighteenth century is related to its impact on overall household expenditures, (Ibid., 138–139). 3  Brinkmann, H. Methode und Geschichte. Die Analyse der Entfremdung in Georg Simmels “Philosophie des Geldes” (Gießen, 1974), 87; as cited in David Frisby, “Introduction to the Translation,” in Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, Kaethe Mengelberg, 3rd ed. (London; New York: Routledge. 2004), 27.

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to alienation,4 they, for Simmel, are the source of individual freedom, as he sets forth in the following comments: As we have just seen, individual freedom grows to the extent that nature becomes more objective and more real for us and displays the peculiarities of its own order so that this freedom increases with the objectification and depersonalization of economic universe … . Only through the growth of the economy to its full capacity, complexity and internal interaction does the mutual dependence of people emerge. The elimination of the personal element directs the individual towards his own resources and makes him more positively aware of his liberty than would be possible with the total lack of relationships (Simmel 2004, pp. 303–304).5

In his most acclaimed book, The Philosophy of Money (1900), Simmel elaborates on how the impersonal exchange relations, most notably by means of money, give rise to individual freedom and equality in modern society,6 whereas Marx argues that capitalists exploit labor workers to aggrandize their profit by maximizing surplus value through the formula of Money-Commodity-Profit (M-C-M’) (Marx 1909, pp. 163–172),7 under which condition the loss of realization of labor occurs and workers’ labor becomes objectified (Marx 2000, pp. 85–95, esp. pp. 86–87). For Marx, in opposition to Simmel, money is the chief cause of the estrangement of human beings: “The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities, this divine power of money lies in its being the externalized and self-externalizing species-being of man. It is the externalized capacities of humanity,” says Marx (Ibid., p. 118). What can we conclude from these contradictory perspectives of Simmel and Marx concerning the “objectification” brought forth by the circulation of money? Dialectically speaking, these conflicting observations are equally true. Applied to the Hegelian dialectical 4  For example, see Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Studies in Critical Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). 5  Simmel also states:

“The importance of the money economy for individual liberty is enhanced if we explore the form that the persistent relations of dependence actually possess. As already indicated, the money economy makes possible not only a solution but a specific kind of mutual dependence which, at the same time, affords room for a maximum liberty.” [Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, Kaethe Mengelberg, 3rd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 295] 6  Refer to Simmel’s own remark: The cause as well as the effect of such objective dependencies, where the subject as such remains free, rests upon the interchangeability of persons: the change of human subjects― voluntarily or effected by the structure of the relationship―discloses that indifference to subjective elements of dependence that characterizes the experience of freedom. (Ibid., 299) Also see Ibid., 313–315 and 326. 7  Cf. On the other hand, the formula, Commodity-Money-Commodity (C-M-C) is for the circulation of commodities.

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formula,8 each represents the antithetical reality of modern society at the stage of being-there, whose qualities are freedom (occasioned by objective mutual dependence, i.e., objectification) and unfreedom (effected by alienation, whose cause is objectified social relations). Each determinacy, which is one-sided and finite, makes up the unity of modernity. Freedom and unfreedom are being-for-another, that is, otherness vis-à-vis each other that is to be sublated within the unity. Thus, they are not only interdependent but also essential to modernity. This view on the dialectical relation between freedom and unfreedom should not sound outlandish to those who are familiar with Adorno as well as Hegel. The antinomian nature of modern freedom, which has developed along with its otherness, unfreedom, has already been expounded by Adorno in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965 (2006). Accordingly, it can be said that what Simmel and Marx have proposed is nothing other than the concrete proof of the antinomies of modernity. Another dialectical twist that it is impossible to sunder from modernity is the nexus between production and consumption, whose unfolding is pertinent to the trajectory of progress in view of freedom. It is in Marx’s The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [1858]) that the dialectical relation between production and consumption is put forward in a Hegelian manner, furnishing a foundation in which a critical turning point for women’s freedom is found, quite contrary to the Marxist thesis with respect to the worker’s stupor brought about by alienation.9 According to Marx, the threefold identity between production and consumption is: first, production is consumption, consumption is production; second, albeit interdependent and indispensable to one another, they remain mutually external to each other, as production creates the material, whereas consumption creates the need for it; third, each creates the other in completing itself, while creating itself as the other (Marx 1993, pp.  92–93). “Thereupon,” he goes on to state, “nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical” (Ibid., p. 93). Having said that, Marx leaves room for sublation of the relation between production and consumption, as the form of dialectic, where two antithetical opposites consist of one entity, is a passing-over into another (Hegel 1991, p. 135). Marx’s comments that production is immediately consumption and consumption is immediately production, and that production is a

8  One can find this in G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, Trans. Geraets T, Suchting W, and Harris H. (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishers, 1991), 135–154. 9  In the Grundrisse, Marx reflects on the relationship between production and consumption as follows:

Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter’s material; without it, consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subject for whom they are products. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 91.

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means for consumption while consumption is the aim of production (Marx 1993, p. 93), neatly encapsulate why the preponderance of production over consumption has to be canceled under the law of dialectic, although at the same time preserved over the course of modern industrialization. I will further discourse about the relationship between production and consumption within the purview of means and wants by deliberating on Hegel and Marx. Prior to a probe into the dissimilitude between Hegel and Marx, it has to be pointed out that Marx is hardly at odds with the fundamental of the Hegelian dialectical relation between wants and means. As illustrated in Grundrisse, he is positive on the interdependence between the two in the abstract form of consumption and production, in which their mediation of each other is unavoidable. It is in this respect that his prediction of the increasing misery of the workers, so-called immiserization caused by alienation, is not just flawed but also self-contradictory, theoretically speaking. Alienation that is ontologically philosophized by Hegel (Frederick 2002, p. xxvii and p. 185) is to be superseded or sublated by another negation, as the negation of negation is the single most critical feature of Hegelian dialectic. Put another way, there is always a next stage where being is reestablished as being-for-self, as dialectic is an unending sublation of relations. Alienation or the objectification of the self, the condition under which the subject is situated to observe him- or herself from a distance, is in no way destructive in light of the Hegelian line of thought.10 This is no less than to say that one cannot side with Marx’s theory of alienation without repudiating the most integral part of Hegelian dialectic: nothing around us is stagnant, as everything finite undergoes dialectical metamorphosis.11 Being slanted toward Arbeit, namely, labor, work, or production, Marx ignores the fundamental aspect of Hegelian dialectic, that is, organic development through infinite sublation, which entails a stage of disunion, alienation. Certainly it is more correct to say that the incongruity between objectification and alienation about which we converse today has to do with the different perspectives of Hegel and Marx. In Hegelian dialectic, any forms of objectification, including alienation, ought to be superseded by way of sublation, since they refer to the moment at which the spirit or the mind becomes an object to itself before being sublated. On the other hand, Marxist alienation pertains to an estrangement of the workers specific to modern 10

 In regard to the process of the objectification of the self, see the following explanation by Hegel:

“Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what falls within its experience; for what is found in experience is merely spiritual substance, and, moreover, object of its self. Mind, however, becomes object, for it consists in the process of becoming an other to itself, i.e. an object for its own self, and in transcending this otherness.” G.  W. F.  Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 20. 11  Hegel writes: “Everything around us can be regarded an example of dialectic. For we know that, instead of being fixed and ultimate, everything finite is alterable and perishable, and this is nothing but the dialectic of the finite, through which the latter, being implicitly the other of itself, is driven beyond what it immediately is and overturns into its opposite.” Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 130–131.

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times. For Marx, alienation is a modern predicament in which workers are in thrall to the capitalist mode of production for the sake of the aggrandizement of the wealth of capitalists. Overly focused on labor, work and production, Marx remarks that “the labour-process” is “the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature” and it is “independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase” (1909, pp. 204–205). This is none other than a disclaimer of the dialectical interrelatedness between two poles of wants and means, between consumption and production. Marx thereby breaks himself off from the law of dialectic, that is, dialectical relativity between opposites. Perhaps most striking to some is the fact that the preeminence of production over consumption12 is a residual of the conventional, patriarchal, feudal system, although in The Communist Manifesto (1888), Marx himself applauds the bourgeoisie for liberation from this feudal system.13 In this regard, Marx is no more than a patron of the patriarchal ideology he tries to break away from. (Let me add, however, that it is on account of the preoccupation with production that Marx and Marxist philosophers are entrapped by reification, the aftermath of the ex parte concentration on production, while disregarding consumption, which is conjoined with wants, needs, and desires.) The limitation of Marx, the identification of labor with the only means by which to attain the true essence of man, reflects a phallogocentric political

12

 Refer to the following remark made by Marx:

“The important thing to emphasize here is only that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. But the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.” (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 94.) 13  Marx and Engels ascribe to the bourgeoisie the emancipation from the patriarchal rule and familial ties spliced by love and affection. In The Communist Manifesto they state: The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ … The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation … . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind … . The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore [Chicago, Charles H.  Kerr & Co., 1906], 16–19)

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economy,14 as women have been largely excluded from the ownership of the means of production. In other words, Marx’s persistent argument of Arbeit as that which manifests the potentialities of human beings15 is valid in a world where the patriarchal, feudal order is prevalent, since hegemony over the mode of production has been the key determinant in social changes throughout history, sustained by the sacrifice of the suppressed classes. Thus, the coupling between women and consumption, especially the consumption of fashion, is hardly trivial in terms of progress in freedom, though its inception was nothing but a patriarchal enchainment to the home, because women as consumers, taking advantage of the proliferation of fashion culture, achieved an unprecedented level of autonomy toward the first half of the twentieth century. This was another momentous feat achieved by fashion in modern history, in addition to the breakdown of the feudal-class system. Women, who have long been paired with consumers, are being recognized as a powerful entity by the masculine world, which has been driven by production. Many sales pitches of different kinds toward women in advertisements for consumer goods support this argument. Proof of the concretization of human desires and needs in the form of products, as implied by Hegel, is ubiquitous in our modern life.16 Countless studies on consumer needs and marketing gimmicks bear out that modern consumers more often than not open their wallet once they are moved by a sort of egoistic appeal that has to do with their wants, needs, and desires. Such catchphrases as “Because you’re worth it” are not mere passing advertisements, but an outcome of the recognition of consumers, with whom women have by and large been equated until recent decades. All in all, the power of consumption with which women were initially linked has been serving to balance out the otherwise unequal power relations between men and women, gradually releasing women from the trap of masculine domination. This is a consequence of the dialectical mediation between wants and means and between consumption and production from the view point of Hegelian dialectic.

 For example, see Teresa Billington Greig’s remark as to the relation between production and the male-centered public sphere.

14

“Public affairs have come to be the realm of man because man regarded himself as the breadwinner, the producer of wealth of the world; and public affair naturally are now entirely dominated by the producer’s point of view. Our politics are the politics of production.” Teresa Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt [London: Stephen Swift and Company, 1912], 57. 15  Here I have adopted Allan Megill’s interpretation of Marx’s usages of “species-being.” Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, MD, 2002), 149. 16  Even the number of consumption workers has increased, whereas that of workers in the production sector has declined under the influence of capitalism. See Rosemarie Pringle, “Women and Consumer Capitalism,” in Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions, eds. Linda McDowell and Rosemarie Pringle (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 150.

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At this juncture, it is appropriate to appraise the magnitude of the dialectical reciprocity between wants and means in modern history. It is absolutely correlated to the reciprocity between consumption and production. Hegel’s illumination of their dialectical mediations makes clear not only why the process of recognition is essential to the formation of universal consciousness as well as self-consciousness, but also how the pursuit of equality is required of the multiplication of wants and means. On this basis, it can be said that the increasing volume of consumption and production in modern times bears reference to the advancement of freedom. ­ Humanity saw a great improvement in freedom, particularly from the late nineteenth century onward, as a significant portion of people benefited from the dialectical evolution between wants and means and between consumption and production. It is by the sway of consumers whose wants, needs, and desires countervail production and the mode of production that a new constellation of bilateral power relations has been gradually under construction. How can we ascertain that the growing power of consumers entails humanity’s taking one step forward on the track of freedom? The emancipation of women by virtue of consumption, in particular of fashion, is proof of progress in view of freedom. Crudely put, however, it is at the expense of workers that women, who make up roughly half of humanity, have progressed in terms of freedom. In other words, the primary benefactor of consumption is the female consumer, while the victim of production is the proletariat, each of whom represents the dialectical antinomy of modernity. The erudition of the principle of the dialectical points to how both complete each other as antinomies of modernity, as the alienated world of the proletariat from which unfreedom originates stands in dialectical opposition to the market and the city, the commercialized world, in which women come by freedom as consumers. The mutual opposition caused by the relation between production and consumption is not the only antinomian reality of modernity. As discussed earlier, the incongruous findings made by Marx and Simmel as to the topic of money also throw light on the dialectical othernesses of modernity. These two antinomian truths of modernity that result from the relation between production and consumption and the relation between the freedom achieved by money in the objectified world and the unfreedom caused by money in the alienated world, show that there has been no freedom of any kind that is universal across all sectors of humanity in the modern era. Some parts of the world today enjoy a great deal of freedom, whereas injustice and poverty prevail elsewhere. In order to have a balanced stance toward the development of history, we need to carefully inspect the disastrous link between Arbeit and freedom that actually took place in the first half of the twentieth century. “Arbeit macht frei,” the slogan inscribed over the entrances to Nazi concentration camps, is a good example that helps us grasp the worst consequences of the strained Marxist materialist view on Arbeit in relation to freedom. As Walter Benjamin indicates, vulgar Marxism gave origin to fascist ideology, which camouflages the exploitation of human labor with the domination of nature.17 Nazi eugenics and the genocide of Jews are r­ epresentative

17

 See Benjamin’s own remark regarding the vulgar Marxist materialist view on labor:

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of this subterfuge carried out by the Third Reich. Yet, in contrast to this horrendous liaison between Arbeit and freedom, consumption has brought about an extraordinary progress with reference to freedom over the course of modernity. This is not a blind positivity but a statement grounded on the fact that women have been liberated in large part thanks to the preeminence of consumption of fashion. Though it is difficult to define once and for all the scope of a universal history that progresses in a homogenous, empty time, as Benjamin criticizes (Benjamin, 2003, pp. 394–395), since it is never possible to write down any linear narrative as to universal history, one cannot deny that an unprecedented advancement in freedom took place toward the beginning of the twentieth century. The French Revolution liberated Western societies; however, slaves were not included in this breakthrough of humanity. Neither were women. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) adopted by the National Constituent of Assembly of France in 1789 did not recognize women’s freedom, although it advocated the rights of “all the members of the social body.”18 Despite some remaining residue of feudal oppression, women as consumers have been set free, little by little, from masculine domination via the dialectical mediation between wants and means in the form of consumption and production. All things considered, it is not incorrect to say that Marx falls short in the purview of dialectic, owing to his oversight of the consumption side, which is impossible to disconnect from wants, needs, and desires. Notwithstanding, neither is Hegel free of errors from the perspective of dialectic. Interestingly, what he leaves out of his account is the same as Marx, that is, the domain of wants, needs, and desires; however, his mistake ends up leading to a different philosophy of history from Marx’s. Hegel’s conception of rational progress in history is made without the calculation of wants, needs, and desires that have their origin in something somatic, which stands in contrast to reason. For him, history develops toward a freedom that is rational and objective. As he asserts, “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process” (Hegel 2001, p. 22). It is Adorno who indicts Hegel for a flaw that Hegel shares with Kant—being biased toward reason without taking into account impulse, or whatever reason

“This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor scarcely considers the question of how its products could ever benefit the workers when they are beyond the means of those workers. It recognized only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerges in fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one advocated by socialist utopias prior to the Revolution of 1848. The new conception of labor is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which, with naive complacency, is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat.” (Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W.  Jennings. trans. Edmund Jephcott et  al. [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003], 393–394.) 18  See “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, August 1789,” Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee, eds. The French Revolution and Napoleon (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 27.

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opposes—and Adorno rectifies Hegel’s rational progress of history. This does not mean that Adorno tosses away Hegel’s notion of history, which progresses in the consciousness of freedom (Adorno 2006, p. 84),19 but he clarifies that freedom is a dialectical concept not only because freedom of reason and freedom of impulse are interdependent (Ibid., pp. 237–238), but also because the split between individual and social is indispensable to the concept of freedom (Ibid., p.  208).20 Indebted greatly to Adorno, we can appreciate equitably what freedom brings to bear on in the progress of history—history makes progress toward freedom, along with the dialectical mediations between reason and impulse and between the individual and the collective. Herein lies the nexus between fashion and freedom to which the essence of modernity is ascribed and with which women have pulled away from feudal patriarchalism. By far the most significant question in the philosophy of history—whether humanity is moving toward freedom—should be tackled with a thorough understanding of fashion, therefore, because not only is fashion a mediation between the individual and the collective in many aspects of modern life, while representing the connection between self’s subjectivity and universal consciousness,21 but it has also afforded a means by which wants, needs, and desires find vent in a world where reason has been greatly valued with the theoretical armaments made by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and Hegel.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Benjamin W. 2003. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Brinkmann, H. 1974. Methode und Geschichte. Die Analyse der Entfremdung in Georg Simmels ‘Philosophie des Geldes,’ Giessen. Forster, Nathaniel. 1767. An Enquiry into the Present High Price of Provisions. London: Fletcher. Frisby, David. 2004. Introduction to the Translation. In The Philosophy of Money, 3rd ed., ed. Georg Simmel and trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. Greig, Teresa Billington. 1912. The Consumer in Revolt. London: Stephen Swift and Company.

 Hegel writes, “The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (2001), 33. 20  Adorno writes: 19

… . the rift between individual and society is a necessary element of the emancipation of individual. Without this rift, the idea of freedom, which points the way beyond both this rupture and the undifferentiated state of affairs, would be inconceivable. For a focused discussion concerning the dialectical relations surrounding the topic of freedom, see Chap. 3. “Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique.” 21  For a detailed discussion see Chap. 5. “Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung), and Fashion.”

References

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Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. Geraets T, Suchting W, and Harris H. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishers. ———. 2001. The Philosophy of History, with Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books. ———. 2003. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Marcuse, Herbert. 1973. The Foundations of Historical Materialism. In Studies in Critical Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. 1909. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production, by Karl Marx. Trans. from the 3rd German edition, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels. Revised and amplified according to the 4th German ed. by Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co. ———. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2000. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1906. The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. McKendrick, Neil. 2003. The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-century England. In The Consumption Reader, ed. David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, and Kate M.L. Housiaux. London: Routledge. Megill, Allan. 2002. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Morris, Warren Frederick. 2002. Escaping Alienation: A Philosophy of Alienation and Dealienation. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Pringle, Rosemarie. 1992. Women and Consumer Capitalism. In Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions, ed. Linda McDowell and Rosemarie Pringle. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Simmel, Georg. 2004. The Philosophy of Money, Third Enlarged Version, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg. London: Routledge. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, August 1789. 2002. The French Revolution and Napoleon, eds. Dwyer, Philip G. and Peter McPhee. London/New York: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Fashion History in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of History

From the vantage point of Hegel’s philosophy of history, fashion history reflects the relationship between reality as a realization of spirit and reason as the law of history. This statement is grounded on the premise that his philosophy of history sees the interaction between reality and reason as constitutive of history. Fashion is an expression of the zeitgeist rather than a mere object or phenomenon. The coupling of fashion with the spirit of the time has become customary to the point that it has become a cliché. Nevertheless, this connection is nothing if not evidence that denotes how closely fashion history is related to Hegelian history. Not only is the essence of fashion dialectical, as it represents the dialectical tensions between the individual and the collective and between the particular and the universal, but also fashion history is hardly irrelevant to the Hegelian dialectical development in history. As such, it is crucial, if one is seeking any commonality between fashion history and the history of humanity, to look into fashion history in view of progress toward freedom. As Hegel writes, “the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom” (2001b, p. 477). To be more precise, the Hegelian conception of history views world history as the “progress of the consciousness of freedom” (Ibid., p. 33). A concise interpretation of the Hegelian philosophy of history in respect of the concept of consciousness of freedom is made by Theodor W. Adorno, who comments, “‘Consciousness of freedom’ does not refer to individual, subjective consciousness, but to the spirit that objectively realizes itself through history, thus making freedom a reality” (2006, p. 5). Therefore, this chapter will discuss how fashion is related to the actualization of freedom in modern times, so as to identify the nexus between the progression of fashion history and Hegelian historical development. With regard to the doctrine of Hegel’s historical progress, there is one important area of investigation: the concept of universal history. While there are attempts to revitalize the dogma of progress in relation to the Hegelian dialectical trajectory, there are some criticisms as to the view that history progresses according to some underlying pattern or order, which is often subsumed as universal history. However, as Adorno advises, “if you wish to say anything at all about the theory of history in © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 E. J. Kang, A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_10

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general, you must enter into a discussion of the construction of universal history” (Ibid., p. 81). It is in the same vein that this chapter resorts to universal history as a methodology, rather than an epistemological canon, offering a synoptic view with regard to fashion history. This is essential to the building of a theory of fashion history as a theory of the totality of spirit. Due to dogmatic a priori reasoning independent of experience, the Hegelian idea of progress is often reckoned as apriorism, in contrast to the notions of progress developed by other Enlightenment thinkers such as Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who suggests that the conditions of scientific, social, political, and economic progress facilitate the inevitable advancement of mankind, along with the perfectibility of man, and who regards the “social surplus” achieved by the development of agriculture as the means of progress (Younkins 2008, pp. 109–122). The concept of surplus value revives in Marx’s political economy and historical materialism, which considers the material conditions of individuals’ production as the driving force behind the dialectical movement in history. The essence of Hegel’s historical development becomes easy to identify when observed in comparison with that of Marx’s materialist conception of history. The former is fundamentally linked with the realm of geist, which is commonly translated as spirit or mind; on the other hand, the latter is linked with different modes of production and production itself. The former sees history as a progress toward freedom, which is self-realization of spirit, while the latter sees it as a development toward a classless society through a class struggle caused by the exploitation of labor and of the means of production, which pertains to the domination of nature.1 Not only has the idea of progress been united to various theories over time, but also a lot of polemics over the schema of progress tend to jumble the different trajectories or content of progress, so much so that it is difficult to distinguish different implications of the notion of progress from different philosophical traditions, which in turn leads to critical misunderstandings or depreciation of the Hegelian conception of history. Such oversights are found in Walter Benjamin’s most celebrated essay, “On the Concept of History.” Social Democratic theory and to an even greater extent its practice were shaped by a conception of progress which bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of the Social Democrats was, first of all, progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in human ability and knowledge). Second, it was something boundless (in keeping with an infinite perfectibility of humanity). Third, it was considered inevitable—something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these assumptions is controversial and open to criticism. (Benjamin 2003a, p. 394)

While the Enlightenment was cardinal to the social democratic worldview, a lot of intellectuals of the labor movement were proponents of “orthodox Marxism” (Bronner 2004, p. 100), which is, according to Georg Lukács, a scientific methodol See, e.g., Marx’s own remark about man’s domination over nature:

1

All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. (Karl Marx. “Introduction,” Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books, 1993, 110).

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ogy based on dialectical materialism as the principal tenet.2 The theoretical weaknesses in social democratic theory observed by Benjamin result not just from its connection with the dogma of progress “which bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims,” as he maintains, but more from the concept of progress itself. The criticism of the Social Democratic concept of progress as spelled out by Benjamin is grounded on a dismissive interpretation of Hegelian dialectical apriorism or historicism in a broader sense. To be more specific, Benjamin’s aversion to the ideology of progress is owing largely to its impenetrable obscurity and to the inevitable and endless movement toward something perfect that is innately contained in the concept of progress. However, it is Hegel’s view that, unlike nature, the domain of spirit is where anything new can be brought into being, and one peculiarity in this domain is “an impulse of perfectibility” to which all changes converge (Hegel 2001b, pp. 69–70).3 According to Hegel, no qualifications determine the concept of perfectibility except its capacity for change, a movement toward something more perfect, and the principle of perfectibility shares something with that of mutability, because neither has any standard by which to estimate its attributes (Ibid.). In this sense, perfectibility is fundamentally as noumenal a concept as freedom. As admitted by Hegel himself, freedom, while representing the “ne plus ultra of attainment,” is an unfathomable and unfixed term, vulnerable to misapprehensions, doubts, or imaginative speculations (Ibid., p. 33.).4 The impossibility of d­ eciphering such concepts as progress, perfectibility, and freedom stems from the fact that these are nou-

 In his widely quoted essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” Georg Lukács states:

2

On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism. (Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971], 1). 3  See Hegel’s own explanation. III. The course of the World’s History. — The mutations which history presents have been long characterized in the general, as an advance to something better, more perfect. … This peculiarity in the world of mind has indicated in the case of man an altogether different destiny from that of merely natural objects — in which we find always one and the same stable character, to which all change reverts; —namely, a real capacity for change, and that for the better — an impulse of perfectibility. The principle of Perfectibility indeed is almost as indefinite a term as mutability in general; it is without scope or goal, and has no standard by which to estimate the changes in question: the improved, more perfect, state of things towards which it professedly tends is altogether undetermined.  

4

But that this term “Freedom,” without further qualification, is an indefinite, and incalculable ambiguous term; and that while that which it represents is the ne plus ultra of attainment, it is liable to an infinity of misunderstandings, confusions and errors, and to become the occasion for all imaginable excesses  — has never been more clearly known and felt than in modern times. Yet, for the present, we must content ourselves with the term itself without farther definition.

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mena, philosophical concepts unknowable through our sensibility. Precisely this incomprehensibility is that which makes Benjamin see them as inappropriate for intelligible scrutiny, as he argues, “as soon as it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation” (1999, p. 478).5 The thing-in-­itself of such concepts as progress, perfectibility, and freedom is impossible to grapple with, as the cognition of these concepts via physical senses only proves to be its negativity, because the representations of these concepts in the phenomenal world can never be manifested as noumenon in toto. Notwithstanding, the noumenon of these concepts is an intellectual intuition about an unknown something that bears truth which is achieved via our intellectual cognitive faculty. It is the same incomprehensibility of noumena within the sphere of phenomena that also makes Benjamin call the concept of universal history, which is interlocked with the idea of progress, a “messianic concept” and an “affair of obscurantists” (Ibid., p. 485).6 Although abstruse, the concept of universal history is not completely rejected by Benjamin. Instead, he provides a clue as to how to construct a new version of history by including the domain of culture, in which the representation of the spirit of humankind as an intelligible entity, the ideal of universal history, holds its potency. Benjamin writes, “The notion of a universal history is bound up with the notion of progress and the notion of culture. In order for all the moments in the history of humanity to be incorporated in the chain of history, they must be reduced to a common denominator—‘culture,’ ‘enlightenment,’ ‘the objective spirit,’ or whatever one wishes to call it” (2003b, p. 403). In this sense, Benjamin’s unfinished project, The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), is nothing other than the “Copernican revolution in historical perception,” to borrow his own expression (Benjamin 1999, p. 388 and p. 883). As compared to the materialist account of history, according to which culture is posed as a mere byproduct of economic and class structures, Benjamin’s mode of writing/doing history, as presented in The Arcades Project, is predominantly concerned with the realm of a nineteenth-century Parisian culture that is replete with such cultural products as dolls, iron construction, fashion, and buildings, as well as with cultural phenomena including collecting, gambling, boredom, and idleness. The scope of culture and cultural products that is conceived by

 See Benjamin’s critique of the concept of progress:

5

The concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history from the moment it ceased to be applied as a criterion to specific historical developments and instead was required to measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end of history. In other words: as soon as it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation. The latter may be recognized, in the concrete exposition of history, from the fact that it outlines regression at least as sharply as it brings any progress into view. (Thus Turgot, Jochmann.) [N13,1] 6        “The authentic concept of universal history is a messianic concept. Universal history, as it is understood today, is an affair of obscurantists. [N18,3]”

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Benjamin is hardly dissimilar to that by Georg Simmel, whose delineation of culture revolves not only around mundane objects such as the bridge, the handle, the door, fashion and jewelry, but also around everyday aspects of social life, such as loyalty, flirtation, love, competition, and conversation. Simmel argues that the process of culture is the exposition of the “identical growth of our energies,” while cultural products that are manifested as an objective reality are “products of our own desires and emotions” (2004, pp. 451–452). With respect to culture, Simmel offers a distinctively Hegelian insight: Culture can be regarded as the perfection of individuals achieved as a result of the objectified spirit at work in the history of the species. Subjective being appears as cultured in its unity and totality by virtue of the fact that it is consummated in the acquisition of objective values: the values of morality and knowledge, art and religion, social formations and the expressive forms of the inner life. (Simmel 1984, p. 65).7

Simmel’s conception of culture is a rejuvenation of the Hegelian development of geist in time, one significant manifestation of which is a universal history. Hegelian dialectic is prevalent in Simmel’s philosophy of modern society and culture. Simmel’s notion of unity of the social organism cannot be disjoined from the vis-à-­ vis relation between subject and object in our thought process, which is the foundation of Hegelian dialectic. The binary construct between subject and object is the basis of the essential conditions of sociation, an ever-evolving process between the individual and the social, as posited by Simmel. The same applies to Simmel’s analysis of the objectification of spirit, in which the Hegelian conception of the mediation of an other (“being for another” returns into “being-in-itself”) is in operation. For Simmel, the objectification of the spirit refers to a process by which to facilitate the refinement of individuals, which, as one can now see, is inseparable from the idea of the perfectibility of humanity. The domain of culture is where we as subjective, individual, and particular beings acquire objective, social, and universal values as regards language, morals, art, religion, or wherever social intercourses/interactions are required. When he points out, “by cultivating objects … we cultivate ourselves” (Simmel 2004, p. 451), he is talking about the interrelatedness of subject and object, that is, between humanity as subject and cultural objects as object. Following the thread of his reasoning, it can be said that in the sphere of culture humanity as a whole grows beyond its given nature, and through cultural products the progress of humanity can be measured. Simmel’s “philosophical” sociology, which is a further development of Hegel’s dialectic, elucidates how the subject-­ object relations in our thought process are connected with individuals’ vis-à-vis confrontation with society. Simmel deems the tensions and conflicts between ­domination and subordination, between union and separation, between imitation and differentiation, between universal and particular, between freedom and unfreedom, and between individuality and collectivity not only as constitutive attributes of modern society, but also as those of human nature, whose root is the dialectical opposition between subject and object in our thought process. Indeed, fashion is  Italics are my addition.

7

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among the most preeminent cultural products that unmask these antithetical and contradictory forces of human nature, which affect our individual-social relations. As he puts it, “We have seen that in fashion the different dimensions of life, so to speak, acquire a peculiar convergence, that fashion is a complex structure in which all the leading antithetical tendencies of the soul are represented in one way or another” (Simmel 1957, p. 555). Fashion history as an indispensable part of cultural history requires an approach different from that of the traditional research paradigm, since fashion is not only a prime example of the cultural process in modern times, but also a peculiar epitome of the objectification of spirit in view of the dialectical unfolding of history. Accordingly, this chapter aims to scrutinize the affinity between fashion history and Hegelian historical development, which entails an examination as to whether fashion history also carries on in the direction toward freedom, since it is Hegel’s view that freedom is the highest stage of the progress of consciousness. Conducting a comprehensive survey of fashion phenomena across different countries and time periods is beyond the scope of this investigation. I do not claim that all the arbitrariness of the vestimentary system in any given historical time or space can be explained under one underlying principle of fashion history. Rather, the broader parameter of this chapter is to look to fashion history as a means by which to vindicate the proposition that fashion is closely tied with such topics as change, newness, and individual freedom in relation to collective freedom that are not disparate from the realm of geist, although some perspectives of historical materialism and historical facts and events are to be illustrated as supporting evidence, rather than as a significant trajectory of the main thesis. Hereafter, I will discourse on how the history of fashion unfolds like Hegelian history, which progresses in the consciousness of freedom. As a series of representations of the spirit of the time,8 from the outset of modernity, fashion history has been in line with the development of freedom, not just free will but also political freedom. This argument hinges upon the universal history of fashion, for which Georg Simmel offers an excellent vindication, as follows: “We have seen that in fashion the different dimensions of life, so to speak, acquire a peculiar convergence, that fashion is a complex structure in which all the leading antithetical tendencies of soul are represented in one way or another” (Simmel 1957, p. 555). Certainly, this “convergence” in fashion is that which makes it possible for us to observe a kind of linear sense of universal history in fashion. Yet, it gives rise to another quandary because this line-up comes about only within a homogenous society in which people have shared means of communicating their will and desires. In this regard, I 8  The connection between fashion and the spirit of the times has been recounted by scholars from different academic fields. See, e.g., H.  Blumer, “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” The Sociological Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1969): 275–291; Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste (London: Routledge, 1997); and José Teunissen, Clogs on High Heels: Dutch Cultural Heritage and Fashion, Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion (London and New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2017).

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have to say that the idea of a universal history in fashion is no less debatable than such a history in humanity. Notwithstanding, just as we can fathom the general trajectory of history from the perspective of the universal, so the current practice of writing fashion history in the same manner is sufficiently valuable. This amounts to saying that, in the vein of universal history in fashion, fashion can also be viewed as having developed alongside advancements in freedom. Of course, without further exposition this bold statement does not hold good. So let me bring into focus why fashion is part of the progression of freedom over the course of modern times. First and foremost is the fact that fashion stands by the interests of the middle classes, who have the power to change the direction of history. This critical aspect of fashion has already been postulated by Simmel: The real variability of historical life is therefore vested in the middle classes, and for this reason the history of social and cultural movements has fallen into an entirely different pace since the tiers état assumed control. For this reason fashion, which represents the variable and contrasting forms of life, has since then become much broader and more animated, and also because of the transformation in the immediate political life, for man requires an ephemeral tyrant the moment he has rid himself of the absolute and permanent one. (Ibid., pp. 555–556).

This comment about the affinity between the Third Estate and fashion made by Simmel may sound incongruous to a reader already mesmerized by the so-called trickle-down theory, according to which fashion starts from the upper classes and disseminates down to the lower classes by means of class imitation. Although Simmel is widely known as the original exponent of the downward-flow theory,9 Michael Carter in Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes (2003) rightly points out that he was one among many thinkers who have mentioned the tendency of fashion dissemination from the upper stratum to the lower stratum and is puzzled by why this has “overshadowed” the majority of his thought on fashion (p. 69). On this I agree. For instance, the dichotomy between the upper and lower classes is not the only way for him to diagnose fashion in regard to class. This is not because he is contradicting himself, but because fashion is multidimensional, without the understanding of which it is hard to figure out the dynamics of fashion. With the split between the upper classes and lower classes, he intends to unravel the relation between domination and subordination, which, by and large, is the key to comprehending social phenomena. For him, fashion is a prime example by which to demonstrate this mechanism. However, when he talks about the differences among the lowest, middle, and highest classes, his purpose is to describe the peculiar nature of each class so as to account for the reason the middle class, who “demand constant change,” “find in fashion something that keeps pace with their own soul-movement” (Simmel 1957, p 556).10 The other two classes are conservative, he further explains, 9  Nowadays this issue seems unquestioned by a majority of authors. For example, see Radha Chadha and Paul Husband, The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury (London: Nicholas Brealey International, 2006), 21. 10  Although the subjects for this description are classes and individuals, those “who demand constant change” among classes and individuals are middle class individuals.

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but the conservatisms of the lowest and the highest are different in nature, as the former is “dull, unconscious” while the latter is “consciously desired” (Ibid.). It is extremely important to grapple with why fashion and the class in the highest echelon are not in accord with each other, in that it discloses what is essential to the constitution of fashion. As Simmel aptly expounds, fashion does not help cement their status quo but rather is inimical to it, not because they dislike the content or because the content is harmful to them, but because “it is change” and “no change can bring them additional power, and every change can give them something to fear, but nothing to hope for” (Ibid., 555). It becomes clear with Simmel’s explications about class distinctions in relation to fashion that, while the top tier of the class structure is apprehensive lest anyone or anything rock the boat for any reason, those who long for change and find advantage in fashion are from the middle classes, for only through change is social advancement possible. The meaning of fashion has gone through a metamorphosis, along with the shifting identity of the bourgeoisie. Since something new was foreign or rare, fashion at the beginning of modernity made its appearance as a luxury that only the well-to-do could afford to purchase, thereby visually transmitting the socioeconomic status of the wearer. At this stage, most wealthy customers were aristocrats with a few middle-­class merchants marginal to the overall clientele. However, as modernity pushed itself from the embryonic phase to full maturity, fashion soon became a major weapon with which the bourgeois classes challenged the nobility, who eventually failed to adapt themselves in the changing socioeconomic environments tailored to industry and the trades. It should be noted that changes made under the law of fashion were not confined to sartorial matters only but extended to social phenomena as well.11 To be specific, the relentless pursuit of newness in the name of fashion furnished the impetus of modernity which, in essence, strived to distinguish itself from old world where aristocratic finesses and tradition were highly prized. This is due squarely to the power of fashion, which stimulates us to anticipate something new or something different for the next season or stage, not just in our wardrobe but in political life as well. In this respect, Marx’s interpretation of fashion as “murderous, meaningless caprices” conducive to the tempo of modern industry (Marx 1909, p. 525) is limited, for it fails to see fashion’s multifaceted influence on society. Fashion is more than this, more encompassing than the industrial cycle. A “more truthful” observation about the real value of fashion is made by Walter Benjamin, who is explicit about the broad circumference of fashion, which he sees as not restricted to vestimentary code only: “Each season brings, in its newest ­creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions [B1a,1]” (Benjamin 1999, p. 64). One should not err by assuming that fashion directly brings about all social revolutions or that all fashion changes are related to radical upheavals. Fashion in view of communication simply signals what is coming next. And yet, what is sig For more discussion of this point, see Chap. 9. “The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion.”

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naled is not a random near-future but an intricate amalgamation of visions of the individual and the collective, which makes it hard to brush off fashion as an empty communication among human beings. Added to this function of fashion as a gobetween to work out the conflicting interests between the individual and the collective, of utmost significance is the unstoppable propulsion of fashion as the mechanism that titillates us with the expectation of something new or of changes in existing conditions, without which no revolution is to be realized.12 However, the social atmosphere in which people look forward to something new is never ubiquitous throughout history. Only in modern times did the somatic and mental, everunabated yearning for something new or different appear, not just on the part of individuals but as a kind of collective craving. What is required in the propagation of fashion is both production and consumption, which are inseparable in the materialist conception of history. Although some Marxist discourse on the forces inducing change in history tends to revolve around the mode of production, as it is considered to determine the class structure and class relations, consumption and production are, in fact, two sides of the same coin and therefore equally decisive in the development of history in view of Hegelian dialectic. This is markedly indisputable in the history of fashion, in that it is the consumption of “something new” as well as the production of something new, with which the nouveau riche from lower socioeconomic ranks brought into play their power against old money, in the midst of which fashion played a cardinal role in breaking down the feudal system that had been based on landed gentry and peerage. Nevertheless, toward the end of modern times criticism emerged against the overflowing supply of goods and uncontrolled consumption which were blamed for weakening the autonomy of the individual to the point where people were reduced to the status of functions, while at the same time they suffered a loss of autonomy in the ability to determine their own life, as Adorno remarked (2006, pp. 5–7). I would like to highlight that this is a stalemate not only of fashion but also of bourgeois society in general. Just as fashion was transformed from a status symbol of the upper classes to an instrument by means of which the bourgeoisie competed against their superiors in rank, and then later to a shackle with which to constrain the further development toward freedom, so did the bourgeois classes themselves undergo a dramatic mutation. To illustrate, although the compound word bourgeois gentlemen as in Molière’s comedy ballet, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), was nonsensical to contemporaries during the reign of Louis XIV, the bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense are, in reality, the upper classes, who possess capital, as opposed to the proletarians, who have labor as their only source of income. Once positioned somewhere in the middle of the class structure, the bourgeoisie became the upper classes toward the second half of the nineteenth century. Hence, it is hardly possible in straightforward manner to pin down the position of the bourgeoisie in the class structure, as Engels implied in his letter to Marx,13 although the middle class and the bourgeoisie  For further discussion of this topic, see Chap. 8. “Fashion as A Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy via the Consumption of Fashion.” 13  In the correspondence to Marx, Engels points out that bourgeois society is the middle class while also being the ruling class. See “Marx-Engels Correspondence 1852 Engels to Marx in London 12

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are often treated as no different.14 At issue is the fact that, while the middle class is a purely technical concept that statistically designates a broad cluster of people representing any nondescript body of people located in the middle of a social hierarchy, “the bourgeoisie” or “the Third Estate,” often correlated with the middle classes, are actually historical terms.15 For this reason, it is difficult to directly equate the middle classes with these two entities. The assertion that fashion stands up for the interests of the middle class and also of the bourgeoisie does not mean that the middle class and the bourgeoisie are one and the same. Rather, it exposes the quintessence of fashion, whose radical characteristics overturn existing conditions, as suited to the dynamism of the middle class and of the bourgeoisie. To put it in a different way, what places them under the same rubric is a kind of energy that puts in motion a state of tranquil equilibrium. Once the bourgeoisie fell into the upper layer of the class structure in the second half of the nineteenth century, fashion also began to lose momentum as a source of creating disturbances in social stratification, while increasingly contributing to the accumulation of profits of the capitalist bourgeoisie. In late capitalism, fashion seems to have lost its progressive idiosyncrasy as a medium to keep social change going. Again, this is not because fashion itself has changed but because its relation to the bourgeoisie has taken on a different significance. Although the bourgeoisie by name are not in our time conceived of as warriors against unfreedom any more, we cannot ignore their contribution to the general advance toward liberation from feudalism in past centuries. It is interesting that the link between the bourgeoisie and freedom is also found in the history of philosophy. As a matter of fact, combining the bourgeoisie with freedom is more philosophical than one might think. Contrary to popular belief, it was not long ago that freedom became of great concern in the history of ideas, as, in combination with the emancipation of the bourgeoisie, concepts like freedom came into existence (Adorno 2006, pp. 193–194). According to Adorno, the bourgeoisie sought after freedom in the nature of man in an attempt to overcome the feudal system; as such, not until the seventeenth century did such topics as freedom become issues in modern philosophy (Ibid.). This not only accounts for the reason that the advent of the bourgeoisie is fundamental to the development of the concept of freedom, but also renders a thread of reasoning for the compounding of fashion and freedom together, because it is fashion that furnished an unyielding force whereby

[Manchester, 23 September 1852]” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected correspondence, 1846–1895, with explanatory notes, translated by Dona Torr. New York, International publishers [c1942]. 14  Although problematic, many scholars equate the middle classes with the bourgeoisie. For example, see Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Karin A. Wurst, “Fashioning a Nation: Fashion and National Costume in Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786– 1827).” German Studies Review. 2005. 28 (2): 367–86; Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, Harvard University Press. 2003. 15  For further discussion, see the introduction of The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie (Maza 2003) esp. 4.

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the bourgeoisie accomplished their goal to be free from feudalism. That is, while the conceptualization of bourgeois freedom is shaped by a vigorous ideological effort in philosophy, fashion helped solidify the social mechanism of freedom in a bourgeois mode and opened up possibilities to move toward freedom in the real world. Some scholars of cultural studies go further and maintain that fashion actually contributed to building up the modern identity which has a direct bearing on the middle-class individual. For instance, Daniel L. Purdy and Karin A. Wurst argue that fashion is itself constitutive of modern identities, reasoning that the unique individualism represented by the clothed body, specifically by way of fashion, has replaced unambiguous class identity (Purdy 1998, “Introduction,” p. x; Wurst 1997, p. 173). Indeed, that fashion is intimately associated with the establishment of individualism is another critical element that brings fashion and freedom in league with each other. In order to come to grips with the connection between fashion and individualism as well as to step out beyond the scope of the sartorial sense of fashion, it is important to dwell on the Hegelian dialectical process in history, in which family, civil society, and state are “stages in the development of the idea of the absolutely free will” (Hegel 2001a, §33, p. 49). In grasping fashion with reference to the progression of history, civil society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft), in which interests between the individual and the collective are mediated, is particularly worth delving into, in addition to morality; or ethical life) as compared with Moralität (individual morality). Although objective Sittlichkeit and subjective Moralität are interdependent (Ibid., §141 n., pp. 130–131),16 the former gets the upper hand over the latter, because Sittlichkeit which stands in its own right is the source of authority to which the individual is subordinate (Ibid., §144–§146, pp.  155–157).17 Here arises a ­problem that runs deeper, because freedom with which subjective feeling is inextricably entangled is maimed by the predominance of Sittlichkeit over Moralität. Tilted towards Sittlichkeit throughout his exposition of civil society in Philosophy of Right (2001a [1821]), Hegel is called authoritarian or totalitarian.18 As a consequence, the following questions arise: Are we free insofar as we are bound by the 16  Although cited in specific sections, the relation between the individual and the universal is permeated in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 17  There is no exact English counterpart of Sittlichkeit. It is often translated as ethical life, while it also pertains to community morality as compared to Moralität (individual morality). Refer to the following explanation by Michael Inwood:

The word Sittlichkeit, usually translated in Hegel’s works as ‘ethical life,’ but occasionally as ‘(social or customary) morality,’ etc., derives from Sitte, the native German for a ‘custom,’ a mode of conduct habitually practiced by a social group such as a nation, a class or a family, and regarded as a norm of decent behavior. … Hegel often uses Sitte-words in these senses, when discussing the view of other writers. But from early on, he distinguishes between Sittlichkeit and Moralität: Moralität is individual morality, arrived at by one’s own reason, conscience or Feeling. Sittichkeit is the ethical norms embodied in the customs and institutions of one’s society. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992, 91–92). 18  See Frederick Beiser’s argument over this issue in Frederick C.  Beiser, Hegel. (New York; London: Routledge. 2005), 233–239.

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morality of the social? Are human beings always rational, while feeling a sense of freedom? Indeed, these predicaments can be tackled in part with fashion, because fashion, which carries with it endless tacit negations between the individual and the collective, performs a balancing act and resolves the issue of the “right of objectivity”19 over subjectivity, especially in such areas as wants, desire, and satisfaction, which are thought of as impulsive and somatic, nevertheless human. While Sittlichkeit is a kind of system of ideas concerned principally with objective moral conduct upholding civil society from the perspective of the whole, which is, therefore, rational in Hegel’s view, I contend that one critical aspect of fashion, the mediation between the contrasting interests of the individual and the collective, serves as a “practical” agent pivotal to the shaping of civil society. Besides, unlike Sittlichkeit, whose verdict is in the hands of the universal, fashion is at the individual’s discretion as to whether or not to follow it, which allows for an enormous amount of freedom on the part of the individual. This elucidates why fashion and individualism have progressed in tandem toward freedom, about which the history of the progression of civil society provides a clear picture. Civil society20 has a lot to do with bourgeois social relations from the standpoint of Hegel and Marx,21 if not of Kant.22 The bourgeoisie, the town dwellers, managed to bring down the feudal agrarian economy while forming capitalism through the expansion of commerce and trade. This is subversive, not just because a market-based economy completely changed material life but also because it gradually transformed the way people enter into social relations. The feudal mode of production, on the basis of agriculture, was buttressed by the patriarchal order which highly regards the kinship system in family where the male head supervises virtually all household affairs. On the other hand, the capitalist economy developed by the bourgeoisie is intrinsically individual-oriented. When Hegel remarked that family life depends “on the soil, on land, terra firma,” what he means is the agrarian mode of production within the patriarchal family, around which most economic activities were carried out; on the contrary, the sea, which is “the natural element for industry, animating its outward movement,” is deemed indispensable to international commerce and trade (Hegel 1974, §247, p. 282).23 He goes on to say that making the most of the sea as a means of communication and connection among countries is also inevitable in the course  See Hegel, Philosophy of Right (2001a), §132.  For a historiography of civil society, see Civil Society and Fanaticism (1997) by Dominique Colas, in particular Chapter 1. 21  See, e.g., Hegel, Philosophy of Right (2001a). Also, for a discussion of the link between civil society and Marx’s capitalist property relations see “Bourgeoisie” by J.  Foster in The New Palgrave: A dictionary of Economics edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (1987) 1990. 22  For Kant, Bürgerliche Gesellshaft means both “civil society” and “bourgeois society.” Bourgeois society stands for society of Stadtbürger (Stadt=city), whereas civil society stands for Staatsbürger (Staat= the state); see Kant 1793, 245). Cited from Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom by Slavko Splichal (2002, Chapter 3, n35.) 23  Here, instead of Philosophy of Right (2001a) translated by S. W. Dyde, I have cited Hegel: The Essential Writings (1974) edited by Frederick G. Weiss. 19 20

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of colonization, on the grounds that, as a civil society becomes mature, it has to explore overseas to meet the supply and demand of industry (Ibid.). The shift from the soil to the sea implied by Hegel is not just confined to the changing socioeconomic environment but also projects the change from a clan- and family-oriented society to a civil society, from male-centered patriarchalism to individualism, which correlates with the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. The history of sumptuary regulations offers factual evidence about this drastic transition. A great many sumptuary laws were enacted during the passage from feudalism to capitalism in attempts to protect the current hierarchy and to fend off the forces of emerging social groups (Hunt 1996, p. 143). According to Alan Hunt, there was a remarkable shift in the kinds of sumptuary projects during this time. Although under the feudal system, funerals and feasting at weddings and other rites of passage were the preoccupation of censorship, later, with the advent of capitalism, fashion became the main target of restraint (Ibid., p. 403).24 This reveals the changes not just in the items under control but also in the way people related to each other and in the areas to which they gave priority in spite of the risk of legal punishment. It is easy to infer that such communal events as funerals, weddings, and baptisms are occasions at which all the family members tied by consanguinity and by marriage get together along with some guests within the community; on the other hand, activities regarding fashion comprise an individualized behavior whose motive is, in essence, to make oneself distinct from others. This switch from a manifestation of a family’s wealth through a union of kinfolks to an individual means of display by way of conspicuous consumption runs parallel to the shifting interrelationship among people from the view point of the Hegelian transition from family to civil society. There is another substantial finding in Hunt’s extensive studies on sumptuary laws which also indubitably bears out the metamorphosis from family-­ centered feudalism to individualistic capitalism. Sumptuary ordinances were ­targeted at women rather than men in the early modern period, while during the Middle Ages they were enforced with a focus on male attire, although there were periodic vilifications of women (Hunt 1996, p.  252). In addition, it is during the most active period of enactment of sumptuary projects that fashion and femininity became increasingly paired with each other (Ibid., p.  219). Hunt holds that the invectives of fashion, which increased dramatically after the medieval period, were in fact a patriarchical reaction to the growing power of capitalism (Ibid., pp. 262–263). The rationale behind this is that the advent of capitalism undermined

24  Also see Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (1998), especially chapter V: The Legacy of Medieval and Early Modern Sumptuary Laws. Purdy writes:

“Very little consumption occurred in private, away from communal life. Since celebration inevitability included the extended family as well as guests from the community, they provided opportunities for conspicuous displays of a family’s wealth and generosity. Indeed, prior to the eighteenth century, family festivities were thoroughly intertwined with the local community. Expensive clothes, elaborations meals, parading musicians, performing acrobats, and the distribution of alms were part of any successful wedding.” (94)

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the hegemony of patriarchalism, in which a “presumed ‘natural’ division of labor identified specific roles for males and females” (Ibid.). Hence, the divisions between reason and desire, between production and consumption, between public and private, and between masculine and feminine settled down during this period, which demonstrates the union between patriarchy and the projects of sumptuary restraints (Ibid., pp.  262–263). In a nutshell, Hunt’s probe into sumptuary laws during the early modern period reveals the fact that clothing ordinances were a backlash against an increasingly individualized society, and that the forces behind such statutes came from the patriarchy, which cherishes communal values and familial bonds. Rebuffed as a social vice within the context of luxury, fashion cannot be fully understood without looking into the discourse on luxury during the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism. Although numerous commentators lamented the collapsing social order caused by the unstoppable desire for luxury, with ample examples citing luxury and its connection with fashion,25 I would like to draw our attention to Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who with acumen makes solid linkages between luxury, cities, and capitalism in The Spirit of the Laws (1748): “Luxury is also in proportion to the populousness of the towns, and especially of the capital; … In proportion to the populousness of towns, the inhabitants are filled with notions of vanity, and actuated by an ambition of distinguishing themselves by trifles.”26 Montesquieu’s comments on the nexus between luxury and cities clearly identify their roles in the making of capitalist social relations. He penetrates the significance, first, of the city as a place where, lured by luxury, people dare to emulate their superiors in rank and each person can assume himself or herself to be equal without social markers, and second, of the anonymity that only a city can bestow. Though imputed to the cause of alienation in late capitalist times, being incognito functioned as a source of egalitarianism in late feudal society. In contrast to a kinship-based community, in which mutual relationship is built upon feeling and love, the city is a place where social relations come to the fore with desires to express individuality. It creates a special milieu in which the individual finds him- or herself free with the aid of “reserve”—the “mental attitude of metropolitans towards one another”—which “has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions,” as Simmel spells out a century later in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) (Simmel 1950, pp. 415–416). This is to say, living in obscurity with indifference to neighbors in a large city is favorable to attaining freedom, so much so that the greater the population in a city, the weaker its unity, thereby grant-

 For example, see Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law, 1996; Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe, 1998; Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, 2003; and Wurst, “Fashioning a Nation: Fashion and National Costume in Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827),” 2005. 26  Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Book VII. Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the Condition of Women in The Spirit of Laws (1752) translated by Thomas Nugent and revised by J. V. Prichard. This text is based on a public domain edition published in 1914 by G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London. 25

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ing more freedom to the individual (Ibid, pp. 416–417). As opposed to Montesquieu and Voltaire, however, most eighteenth-century writers in France, including Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau and the Physiocrats, criticized the corrupting effects of urbanity (Rahe 2008, pp. 277–278; Maza 2003, pp. 54–55). The so-called “back to nature” movement, initiated in Rousseau’s treatise Émile, or On Education (1762), not only sums up his view on education but also captures the pith of his philosophy of political economy. Against the growth of industry and the burgeoning capital city, which are, he believes, detrimental to the state, Rousseau, in “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” (1754), asserts: From society and the luxury which society engenders are born the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, literature and all those useless things which, in making industry flourish, enrich and destroy states. The reason for this deterioration is very simple. It is easy to see that agriculture by its nature is bound to be the least lucrative of all the arts, … As industry and the arts extend and flourish, the despised farmer, burdened with the taxes which are necessary for the maintenance of luxury, and condemned to divide his life between labour and hunger, abandons his fields to seek in the towns the bread he ought to be taking there. (Rousseau 1984[1755]), pp. 151–152)

The great number of peasants leaving the countryside looking for jobs as domestic servants in the city became one of the biggest social problems in the second half of the eighteenth century (Maza 2003, p. 53). Accordingly, luxury, which was impossible to detach from urban life, was viewed as an imminent social malady, for it dismantled the system of family and the cohesion of patriarchal social unity, both of which are grounded in terra firma. In fear of social dissolution and looser morality spurred by the pursuit of luxury,27 writers in the last decades of the eighteenth century championed the ideal of les moeurs (social morality) with a set of images: “nursing mothers, venerable fathers, chaste peasant girls, agrarian utopias, and swooning families,” and a rural life in which such natural feelings of human community still remained intact (Ibid., pp. 59–60). Thus, Sarah Maza’s argument that the countryside, lauded as the “cradle of morality,” was a metaphor rather than a real place (Ibid., 68), is erroneous. The vogue of a loving family in the second half of the eighteenth century is indubitably a token of the counterrevolutionary demand for social coalescence in defiance of the progress from family to civil society, which runs in parallel to the transition from an agrarian feudal society to a capitalist industrial society. To be sure, it is now clear why the cult of family was rampant in the eighteenth century. It was a reaction against rising capitalist dominance over a waning agrarian feudal system. Just as sumptuary laws during the passage from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era were not implemented simply to stop the circulation of luxury goods, so was the myth of family hyped in the eighteenth century no less intentional. Yet neither the enactment of sumptuary projects nor the promotion of family love impeded the arrival of civil society along the path of historical progress, in light  For example, Rousseau equates the “dissolution of morals” with the “necessary consequence of luxury.” See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, tr. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20.

27

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of both Hegel’s philosophy of history and Marx’s materialist conception of history. Indeed, fashion lays open the gist of each narrative on the progress of history without countermanding either one, especially on the topic of individual freedom. En route from agrarian feudalism with its emphasis on a familial connection to bourgeois capitalism and also from family to civil society, fashion was acting as a real proxy for individual freedom in view of both Hegel’s idealistic dialectic and Marx’s materialist dialectic. It needs to be emphasized that this is due to the link between fashion and the bourgeoisie. As introduced earlier, human beings began to pursue individual freedom as with the advent of the bourgeoisie. This is a momentous advance in the consciousness of freedom with reference to the Hegelian principle of the philosophy of history. From the Marxist point of view the historical change from feudalism to capitalism is also a triumph of the bourgeoisie in consort with the capitalist mode of social relations as well as of production. Fashion has made an enormous contribution to this sublation (Aufhebung) with regard to materialist dialectic, not just as an impetus for consumption but also as a vanguard of the capitalist mode of production. The evidence is abundant. It was the textile industries that launched the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, with the first cotton mill driven by water power. Following that, many new, powered machines, including the spinning jenny, were invented, mainly in textile manufacturing. With technological innovations, the textile industry was in the forefront of transforming the guild system to a factory system in the passage from a subsistence system to a market economy (Wurst 2005, p. 386). During this conversion, cotton is probably counted by historians as the single most important booster.28 Not only were cotton textiles the most global among various commodities in the period between 1500 and 1800 (Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy 2009, p. 9), but also the domestication of global luxury goods such as cotton fabrics originally imported from India led to industrialization in England.29 The metropolis that is the center of modernity was initially the place where factory workers for the cotton mills congregated. Even serious labor issues such as the exploitation of child labor, proper work hours, and workplace strike action originally came from the textile-related industries. Informed as he was by Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy cotton manufacturer in Manchester, of the conditions of modern workers, it is hardly by accident that Marx conceptualized class conflict and alienation in a cotton mill.30 Indeed, the repercussions of cotton were not restrained to the ill treatment of the domestic labor force but inflated to an

 For a comprehensive discussion of the influence of cotton on regional, national, and international economy, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014). Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015). 29  See Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, No. 182 (2004): 85–142. 30  See, e.g., When the Center is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times by Diane Sue (Harriford & Becky W. Thompson, University of Texas Press, 2008), 115. 28

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interstate slave trade. One might be surprised by the fact that a vast literature on slavery in the modern era also talks about the correlation between the spread of cotton cultivation and the slave trade. Thus, suffice it to say that both industrial capitalism and slavery would not have developed together without the growth of the cotton and textile industries. As Marx puts it: “Direct slavery is the pivot of bourgeois industry as well as machinery, credit, &c. Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you cannot have modern industry” (Marx 2008, p. 121). To recap, fashion is not a mere object or phenomenon but a mediated reality as an expression of zeitgeist. Fashion embodies an independent, objectified spirit of modern times, for fashion as a material object is not a product of random selection but the result of the ceaseless dialectical mediations between the individual and collective and between subject and object. Not only that, but the direction of fashion history can also be traced in accordance with the development of human history, in which freedom plays a decisive role. Fashion’s contribution to the progression of history toward freedom is threefold: first, by working with the middle class, not in the sense of a statistical cluster of population but as a dynamic entity like the bourgeoisie that stood against feudal aristocracy; second, by serving as a vehicle for expressing individuality and individual freedom; and third, by mediating the antithetical interests between the individual and the collective. The trajectory of the history of fashion discloses the relation between reality as a realization of spirit and reason as the principle of Hegelian historical development, which moves toward freedom.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Beckert, Sven. 2014. Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Beiser, Frederick C. 2005. Hegel. New York/London: Routledge. Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2003a. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. ———. 2003b. Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History.’ In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W.  Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et  al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berg, Maxine. 2004. In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century. Past and Present 182 (1): 85–142. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection. Sociological Quarterly 10 (3): 275–291. Bronner, Stephen Eric. 2004. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press. Carter, Michael. 2003. Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes. Oxford/New York: Berg. Chadha, Radha, and Paul Husband. 2006. The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury. In London. Boston: Nicholas Brealey International. Colas, Dominique. 1997. Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories, trans. Amy Jacobs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Foster, J. 1987. Bourgeoisie. In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. New York: Stockton Press. Giorgio, Riello, and Roy Tirthankar. 2009. Introduction: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-­ 1850. In How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Gronow, Jukka. 1997. The Sociology of Taste. London/New York: Routledge. Harriford, Diane Sue. 2008. When the Center Is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times, ed. Becky W. Thompson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1974. Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederick G. Weiss. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 2001a. Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde. Kitchener: Batoche Books. ———. 2001b. The Philosophy of History, with Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Hunt, Alan. 1996. Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Inwood, Michael. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press. Marx, Karl. 1909. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production, by Karl Marx. Trans. from the 3rd German edition, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels. Revised and amplified according to the 4th German ed. by Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co. ———. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2008. The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. Harry Quelch. New York: Cosimo Classics. Maza, Sarah. 2003. The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-­ 1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat Baron de. 1914. Book VII. “Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the Condition of Women.” In The Spirit of Laws (1752), trans. Thomas Nugent and ed. J.  V. Prichard. [electronic resource]. London: G. Bell. Purdy, Daniel L. 1998. The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Rahe, P.A. 2008. The Enlightenment Indicted: Rousseau’s Response to Montesquieu. Journal of the Historical Society 8 (2): 273–302. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1755. A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice William Cranston. Harmondsworth/New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1997. Selections. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. and ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated, edited and with an introduced by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———. 1957, May. Fashion. The American Journal of Sociology 62(6):541–558. ———. 1984. Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2004. The Philosophy of Money, Third Enlarged Version, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg. London: Routledge. Splichal, Slavko. 2002. Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Svendsen, L. 2006. Fashion: A philosophy, trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion. Teunissen, José. 2017. Clogs on High Heels: Dutch Cultural Heritage and Fashion, Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion. London/New York: I. B. Tauris. Torget, Andrew J. 2015. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

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Index

A Absolutism, 10, 103, 104, 115 Adorno, T.W. on culture industry, xiv, xv, 45 interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic, xvi, 3, 155 interpretation of open dialectic, 91 on redemption, 9 on the concept of truth in philosophy, 3 Aesthetics, 5, 10, 21, 22, 34, 51, 101, 128 See also Sociological aesthetics Albion, S., 19 Alienation, v, 71–73, 95, 127, 144–147, 168, 170 A priori cognitions, v, 2, 27, 29, 30, 33 Ancien régime, 119 Anglomania, 116 Anglophile, 116 Anthony, S.B., 110, 122 Anthropology, xiii, 10, 14–16, 21, 28, 100 Antinomy between freedom and unfreedom, xiii, 146 of modernity, xiii, 7, 70, 146, 150 of taste, 48 Apodictic, 5, 34, 51, 53–56, 59, 60 Apodictic certainty, 34, 35, 51, 53, 56, 60 Arbeit, 72, 74, 147, 149–151 Archaeology, 14, 15 Aristotle, xii, 5, 54–57, 60, 61, 135 Arthur, C., 74, 96 B Back to nature movement, 169 Barnard, M., 11, 97, 98, 100, 101 Baroque period, 112, 113

Barthes, R., 25, 161 Baudelaire, C., 37, 99 Baudrillard, J., 74, 97 Bauer, B., 71 Baumgarten, A., 22 Benjamin, W. concept of aura, 52 concept of the dialectical image, xii, 4, 6, 53, 62–65, 67, 69, 75, 76, 99 epistemology, 4, 53, 54 skepticism about scientific knowledge, 60 theory of experience, 4–6, 52, 67, 76 Bicycle influence on fashion, 95, 116, 119, 121, 133 Bloomer, A.J., 120, 121 Bolshevik Revolution, 128 Boucher, F., 108 Bourbon Restoration, 116, 119 Bourbon style, 116 Bourdieu, P., 129 Bourgeois consciousness, 42, 73 Bourgeois gentlemen, 163 Brannon, E.L., 80 Braudel, F., 107–109 Breward, C., 107, 108, 110, 112 Brinkmann, H., 144 Brooks, A., 79 Buridan’s ass, 40, 44 C Călinesc, M., 101, 102 Capitalism bourgeois, 103, 105, 170 individualistic, 167

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176 industrial, xi, xv, 127, 169, 171 liberal bourgeois, 96, 105 manufacturing, 103 mercantile, 105 Carter, M., 161 Cartesian dualism, 10 Castle, I., 132 Catholicism, 104, 110, 114, 118 Cavalier style, 112–115 Chalybäus, H.M., 87 Chanel, C., 120, 132 Change desire for change, 7, 107 as a driving force behind a revolution, xi, 130 formal or morphological changes in fashion, 82, 91, 93–95, 109, 110, 122 Kant’s interpretation of change, 89 social changes, 74, 136, 149, 164 Christendom, 104 Civil society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft), 165, 166 Class conflict, 170 Cloche, 130–133 Clothed body, 103, 109, 165 Cogito, 10, 36 Cohen, G.A., 8, 53 Collective consciousness, 5, 52, 64, 67, 76, 128 Collective unfreedom, xiii, 8, 159 Commodity, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 9, 26, 52, 65, 73, 74, 95, 116, 119, 128, 129, 133, 138, 145, 170 Commodity fetishism, 9, 65, 73, 74 Common sense (Sensus communis), 10 Conformity, xiv, xv, 33, 39, 42, 101 Constructivist, ix, xv, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 26, 47, 53, 70, 74, 75, 100, 128, 134, 150, 156, 158, 159 Consumerism, 10 Consumers, xii, xiv, xv, 7–9, 46, 70, 74, 96, 105, 119, 127, 129, 134–140, 143, 144, 149–151, 164, 167, 168, 170 Consumption, 7–9, 12, 45, 70, 72, 75, 100, 105, 107, 127–140, 143–152, 162, 163, 167, 168, 170 Cotton, xi, 118, 170, 171 Craik, J., 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 98 Crinoline, 83, 119 Cultural capital, xiv, 129 Cultural history, 160

Index Culturalism, 15, 16, 21 Cultural relativism/multiculturalism, 21 Culture industry, xiv, xv, 45 D Darwin, C., 19 Deduction/scientific deduction, 5, 40, 51, 54, 56–58, 60 Deleuze, G., xvi, 36 Democracy, 9, 96, 116, 118, 119, 156, 157 Democratization, 136, 143 Demonstration (Apodeixis), 54–56, 60, 61 See also Syllogistic demonstration Desire, x, xvi, 6, 7, 21–23, 44–46, 48, 54, 68–76, 89, 97, 98, 107, 118, 128–130, 135, 139, 148–152, 159, 160, 162, 166, 168 Dialectic Hegel’s dialectic, x, xi, xvi, 2, 5, 58, 59, 65, 67, 86–88, 90, 170 Marx’s materialist dialectic, 116, 170 and Socrates, 54, 59 Dialectical image, xii, 4, 6, 53, 62–65, 67, 69, 75, 76, 99 Didier, F.J., 117 Dilthey, W., 52 Directoire dress/Greco-Roman dress, 118 Dress, definition of, 26 Dunning, E., 12, 13 E Egalitarianism, 143, 168 Eicher, J.B., 15, 26 Elias, N., 3, 11–13 Elizabethan/Jacobean era, 111–113 Empiricism, xvi, 10, 27 Engels, F., 71, 95, 96, 144, 148, 163, 170 English Reformation, 108 Enlightenment, xiv, 10, 41, 137, 138, 152, 156, 158 Entwistle, J., 14, 111 Eternal sameness/eternal recurrence, 27, 31, 34, 45 Ethnography, 15, 16 Ethnology, 16 Euclid, 57, 59 Euro-ethnocentrism, 18 Evans, C., 63 Exchange value, xii Experience (Erfahrung), 4–6, 51, 67–76

Index Experimenta crucis, 40, 43 F Fairchild, J., xiv, 106, 119, 132 Family, 108, 130, 135–139, 148, 165–167, 169, 170 Farthingale, 111, 112, 114 Fashion anthropologist, 15–17, 19–21 change as a defining characteristic of fashion, 129 cycle, 79, 80, 106 definition of, 14, 15, 18, 26, 97, 106 definition of fashion compared to that of dress, 121 etymology, 95, 97 fashion as the mediation between the individual and the collective, xv, 64, 76, 152 fashion’s relation to the bourgeoisie, 162, 170 fashion’s relation to Western modernity, 17 history, x, xi, xvi, 12, 64, 69, 76, 81–84, 91, 93, 133, 140, 155–171 philosophization of, vi, xvi, 1, 2, 5, 9 system, xvi, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 106, 108–110, 112, 116, 129, 139 temporality of, 14, 26 theory, 18, 25, 69, 98 Fête de la Révolution, 118 Feudalism, 103, 104, 127, 137, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170 Feuerbach, L., xi, 127, 134 Fichte, J.G. deductive method, 88 formalism, 88 First principles, 3, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61 Flapper, 122 Flügel, J.C., 11, 80 Forster, M., 85 Foucault, M., 131 Fourier, F.M.C., 128 Freedom bourgeois freedom, 39, 42, 163, 165 collective freedom, v, xiii, 7, 48, 160 and Hegel’s notion of historical development, 156 individual freedom, v, xiii, 6, 7, 20, 42, 46, 48, 145, 160, 170, 171 Kantian freedom, xiii, 6

177 of movement, 112, 120 rational freedom, xiii, 45 and unfreedom, v, xiii, 9, 40, 43, 69, 70, 146, 159 universal freedom, 7, 8, 140 women’s freedom, 133, 146, 151 French Revolution, 64, 84, 95, 109, 116, 118, 131, 151 Fukuyama, F., 96 G Geist, 156, 159, 160 Gendered dress emergence of, 108 Gerhardt, U., 18 German philosophy, xvi Gillespie, M.A., 98, 101 Great Masculine Renunciation, 11 Great men thesis, 132 Gronow, J., 160 H Habermas, J., 98, 99 Hamlet, 42 Hansen, K.T., 15 Hegel, G.W.F. dialectical method, 85, 87, 89, 90 experience of consciousness, x, 71 first triad, i.e., being-nothing-becoming triad, 84, 85 idealism, 58, 61, 71 logical necessity, 94 master-slave dialectic, 67, 68, 74 philosophy of history, x, xii, 69, 94, 140, 152, 155, 170 Philosophy of Right, 70, 165, 166 universal consciousness, 6, 69, 75, 150 Heidegger, M., 71 Hermeneutics, 10, 52 Hobbes, T., 103–105 Hollander, A. Seeing Through Clothes, 131 Home economics, 11 Horkheimer, M., xiv, xv, 46 Houston, M.G., 109 Hughes, J., 12, 13 Hume, D., 88 Hunt, A., 103, 107, 167, 168 Hypermodernity, xvi

178 I Imitation, xii, xiv, xv, 20, 21, 39, 70, 106, 159, 161 Immanent synthesis, 88, 122 Immiserization, 147 Impulse, xiii, 6, 7, 9, 17, 39–48, 98, 100, 127–140, 151, 152, 157, 163, 166 Incognito, 168 Individualism, 100, 103–105, 107, 108, 127, 129, 137, 165–167 Individuality, xiv, 18, 20, 39, 70, 105, 106, 108, 110, 114, 127, 128, 159, 168, 171 Individuation, xiv, 39, 40, 47 Industrialization, 10, 144, 147, 170 Industrial Revolution, xi, 127, 138, 144, 170 Intentio, xii, 53, 62 Intention (nous) Aristotle’s concept of, 61 Inwood, M., 62, 90, 165 Irwin, T., 54–56, 60, 61 J Jacobi, F.H., 88, 117 Jacques-Louis David, 118 Jameson, F., 87, 90 Jansen, M.A., 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21 Jaworski, G.D., 19 Jazz, 30, 122, 130 Jones, J.M., 115, 135–137 Justaucorps, 116 K Kant, I. (aesthetic) judgment of taste, 10, 22 agreeable, the, 22 beautiful, the, 21–23 categorical imperative, xiv, 6, 38, 41, 42, 48 categories, ix, xiv, 41, 42, 51, 61 concept of knowledge, 5, 53 epistemology, 53 feelings (Gefühle) of pleasure and displeasure, 22 forms of intuition, 32 good, 22, 38, 52, 53 judgement of beauty/ judgement of the beautiful, 22 Kantian dualism, ix noumenon and thing-in-itself, v, x ought to, 41

Index rational freedom, xiii, 45 transcendental idealism, ix, 27, 35, 37, 51, 99 transcendental object as such, 31, 32, 34 transcendental subject, ix, x unity of apperception, ix, x, xiii, 32, 34, 36 universal communicability, 22, 23 Kawamura, Y., 100, 101, 106, 107 Knowledge (Epistêmê), 54–56 Knowledge (Erkenntnis), 4, 51 Kroeber, A.L., 79–83, 93, 108 L Labor movement, 156 Labor process, 148 La Caze, M., 21 Laver, J., 106–108, 130, 131 Leibniz, G.W. monadology, 58, 65 Levine, D.N., 18, 105 Liberal bourgeois capitalism, 96, 105 See also Capitalism Liberal democracy, 96 See also Democracy Lillethun, A., 15, 18, 97, 98 Locke, J., 88, 103, 105, 116 Lukács, G., xii, 52, 73, 74, 144, 156, 157 Luxury, 111, 138, 143, 161, 162, 168–170 M Marx, K. dialectical materialism, xi, 71, 157 Georg Lukács’s interpretation of dialectical materialism, 156 historical materialism, 156 interpretation of fashion, 162 materialism, xi, 71, 156 materialist dialectic, 95, 116, 170 political economy, 67, 70, 146, 148–149, 156 Masculine domination, 7, 132, 137, 149, 151 Maza, S., 164, 168, 169 McKendrick, N., 143 McNeil, P., 97, 105 McRobbie, A., 139 Mediation (Vermittlung), x Mercantilism, 102, 104, 105 Metaphysics, vi, ix, 1–3, 10, 13, 25–38, 51, 61, 95, 99, 140 Middle Ages, 102, 109, 167, 169 Middle class, 114, 161–165, 171

Index Miller, S., 97 Mind/body dichotomy, v Midi-skirt, xiv, 132 Mode la, 101, 102, 115, 135 Modernity, v, vi, xiii, xvi, 1, 7, 14, 17, 18, 20, 35, 37, 38, 45, 65, 70, 95, 98–102, 106, 108, 134, 136, 139, 144, 146, 150–152, 160, 162, 170 Molière, 163 Money, 129, 144, 145, 148, 150, 163 Moneyed economy, 145 Montesquieu/Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 168, 169 Moralität (Individual morality), 165 Morality, xv, 41, 95, 104, 114, 118, 159, 165, 166, 169 More, T., 127 Mueller, G., 87, 89 N Nature/culture dichotomy, 10 Newness, v, ix, xiii, 1, 7, 27, 29–36, 47, 98–100, 121, 129, 139, 160, 162 See also Change See also Novelty Niessen, S., 18, 20 Noumenon, v, x, 30–32, 34, 158 Noumenon in toto, 30, 158 Nous, as the epistemic priori, 61 See also Intention (nous) Novelty, 30, 36, 80, 98–100, 136, 139, 144 Now of recognizability (Jestzt der Erkennbarkeit), 63, 99 Nowtime (Jetztzeit), xii, 47, 62 O Objectification, v, x, 72, 74, 105, 145, 147, 159, 160 Olivier de Sardan, J.-P., 16, 21 Opinions (Doxa), 54, 57 Orthodox Marxism, 156, 157 P Patriarchalism, 152, 167, 168 See also Phallocentrism Perfectibility, 156–159 Phallocentrism, 121 Philosophy of history, x, xii, 42, 47, 69, 75, 140, 143–152, 155–171

179 Plato ideas/forms, 4, 53, 54, 58, 65 platonism, 4, 53, 59, 60 redemption, 4, 65 Poggioli, R., 102 Political economy, 7, 67, 70, 100, 127–140, 146, 148, 149, 156, 163, 169 Postmodernism, 12 Postmodernity, xvi, 98 Postmodern times, xvi Post-postmodernity, xvi Post-postmodern times, xvi Poststructuralism, 12 Prefashion system, xvi, 94, 95, 102–106, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116 Producers, xi, xii, xiv, 8, 135–138, 144, 149 Production, xi, xiv, 7–9, 11, 30, 36, 45, 52, 67, 70, 72–74, 95, 99, 116, 120, 122, 130, 134, 135, 137, 144, 146–151, 156, 163, 166, 168, 170 Progress, xii, xvi, 7, 13, 45, 48, 67, 73, 87, 117, 130, 134, 135, 139, 146, 149–152, 155–160, 166, 169, 170 Progressive Era, 19 Proletariat, 7, 8, 52, 73, 150, 151 Prosumption, 75 Protestantism, 104 Protestant Reformation, 108 Purdy, D.L., 134, 164, 165, 167, 168 Puritan Movement, 108, 114 Puritan style, 113, 114 Push and pull, xv R Rational Dress Societies, 120 Rationalism, 27 Recognition (Anerkennung) Hegel’s concept of, x, 70 Reification, xii, 46, 65, 73, 74, 148 See also Positive reification Renaissance Italian Renaissance, 110, 112 Mannerist Renaissance, 110, 112 Renaissance humanism, 108 Richardson, J., 79, 82, 83, 93, 94, 108 Robe à la française, 116, 117 Robe à l'anglaise, 116 Roberts, M.L., 130, 133, 134, 138 Rococo style, 117 Rousseau, J.-J., 127, 135, 137, 169

180 S Sapir, E., 18 Schematism, ix, 1, 26, 27, 30 Scientific ideology, 16 Self the, 25–38, 99, 140 Self-consciousness, ix, x, xiii, xvi, 5, 9, 10, 36, 37, 67–69, 71–76, 150 Self-sublation (Selbst-Aufhebung), 83 Sensibility, ix, xiii, 23, 28, 31, 35, 51, 53, 72, 158 Sewing machine, xi Short hair, 114, 122, 130–132 Short skirts, 121, 122, 130, 133 Siedentop, L., 17 Simmel, G., v, xv, 5, 9, 18–21, 25, 39, 47, 48, 70, 100, 106, 127–129, 143–146, 150, 159–161, 168 Sittlichkeit (Community morality/ethical life), 165 Slave trade, 171 Social Darwinism, 18, 19 Social Democratic theory, 156 Sociation, 159 Sociological aesthetics, 5 Sociology, 10, 12–14, 18, 19, 159, 160 Socrates, 59 Spencer, H., 19, 81 Spinning jenny, xi, 170 Spinoza, B., 6, 39, 43 Spirit of the times, xii, 5, 160 See also Zeitgeist Steam engine, xi Stomachers, 114 Subjectivity, x, xiii, xiv, 2, 5, 9, 36, 52, 61, 74, 88, 105, 128, 140, 152, 166 Subject-object dichotomy, v, x, xii, 3, 6 Sublation (Aufhebung), x, 59, 67, 83, 170 Sumptuary laws/projects, 103, 107, 167–169 Superorganic, 81, 93 Surplus, 7, 130, 145, 156 Svendsen, L., 25, 26, 35, 45, 160 Syllogistic demonstration, 56 Synthetic a priori cognition, v, 1–2, 29, 30, 33, 35

Index Taylor, L., 11, 12 Textile industries, 144, 170, 171 Thing-in-itself, v, x, xiii, 31, 32, 158 Third Estate, 161, 164 Totality, 3, 21, 42, 45, 91, 92, 95, 96, 156, 159 Transcendental aesthetic, 2, 51 consciousness, 5, 61 empiricism, xvi, 27 logic, 28, 29, 31, 34 use, 31, 32 Trickle-down theory, 129, 161 Triplicity so-called thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, 86 threefold process, 89 triadic model, 90 tripartite method, 89 Truth, xii, 3–6, 12, 43, 51–65, 69, 75, 85, 88, 91, 96, 99, 150, 157, 158 U Unfreedom, v, xiii, 8, 40, 43, 46, 69, 70, 146, 150, 159, 164 Unintentional truth, xii, 4–6, 51–65, 69, 75, 99 Universal consciousness, ix, 5, 6, 67–76, 152 Universal history, 151, 155, 158–161 Urbanization, 144 Use values, xi Utopia, 127, 128, 139, 151 V Vernunft, 94 W Warner, P., 120 Welters, L., 15, 18, 97, 98, 107, 108, 110 Wheat, L.F., 87 Wilson, E., 25, 106, 111 Wurst, K.A., 164, 165, 168, 170 Y Young, B., 79–81, 109

T Tailoring, 107–109, 162 Taste, 5, 10, 21, 22, 47, 48, 101, 116, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139, 143, 144, 160

Z Zeitgeist, xi, 64, 118, 155, 171 Zeno, 59