Chanel: The Order of Things

Abstract

This article considers the importance of fashion to both modernism and modernity and the importance of modernism to understanding fashion. It does so through a close consideration of the example of Chanel—not the biographical woman Chanel, or even the label Chanel, but rather the Modernist moment in fashion we have come to call “Chanel.” The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women's fashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of the modernist break that produces both “the avant-garde” and “the classic.” Using such an understanding of Chanel, this article examines the intimacy between fashion and modernity through Modernist aesthetics, modernist writing on fashion and culture, and that critical attitude Michel Foucault calls “modernism.”

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