Fashion as Methodology

Abstract

Recent feminist scholarship has shown that women’s anteriority to ‘the modern’ — and even to time itself — was a powerful and persistent feature of the temporal imaginary at the height of industrial modernity, from about 1860 to 1940. Neo-Marxist work on the time of modernity, for its part, indicates that the dualistic understanding of temporality that structures the trope of feminine timelessness is marked by instabilities and contradictions. Fashion, I argue, makes apparent these instabilities. Approaching the debates on modern temporality through the lens of fashion adds complexity to theories of women’s positioning vis-à-vis modernity, showing that women were invoked simultaneously as modernity’s antitheses and its exemplars. I suggest that the register of ephemerality advanced by fashion offers a useful framework for understanding the variable visibility of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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