The Empire of Fashion

Abstract

The critical unanimity provoked by the empire of fashion is anything but accidental. Fashion is no longer an aesthetic embellishment, a decorative accessory to a collective life; it is the key to the entire edifice. In structural terms, fashion has completed its historical trajectory; it has reached the peak of its power, for it has succeeded in reshaping society as a whole in its own image. Fashion has become a problem devoid of passion, lacking in theoretical stakes, a pseudo-problem whose answers and explanations are known in advance. The plethora of fashion magazines is matched by the silence of the intelligentsia, by its forgetfulness of fashion as both infatuation with artifice and the new architecture of democracy. Theoretical reason has remained in the thrall of the lived meaning of the actors on the social stage, positing as fashion’s origin what is merely one of its social functions.

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