The scope of choice permitted h-y a fashion system
In a fashion system, consumers are offered choices between details rather than basic forms. likewise, creators of products are rarely allowed to alter familiar forms radically, but are obliged to express their ideas by producing their own version of the familiar. in this way, fashion is paradoxically characterized by both constant change and relative stasis. in a fashion system, one should expect to see rapid, frequent modifications of surface details such as ornaments and accessories, but less frequently reshaping of the general form or silhouette. This criterion will be particularly important in evaluating the presence of a fashion system in its early stages, as in the Middle ages.
Basic silhouettes resist change. attempts to alter them too abruptly are greeted with vehement criticism (itself a sign of fashion, criterion 8). social superiority, perceived in terms of family reputation and tradition in non-fashion systems, becomes visible in subtle outward signs with the initiation of a fashion system.61 The theory of the social power of minute signs explains in part why novels and romances are full of description: tiny details are eloquent under the reign of fashion, whereas large-scale, ostentatious gestures code more negative things such as inexperienced composition, lack of intellectual subtlety, the blunders of fools and fops, the lack of self-identity associated with fashion victims rather than those who know how to speak with the power of signs.
Fashion is like wisteria, which blooms on old wood: each new season’s growth is produced on the stems of the previous year. New fashions grow out of their immediate predecessors.62 Baudelaire observed that if an impartial observer could page through every single fashion all the way back to the origins of France, there would be no surprises: the transitions would appear as smooth as evolution in the animal kingdom, without a lacuna.63 Changes occur slowly by small increments in real time, but, like the growth of plants when shown in a time-lapse sequence, they appear radical when compared at the rate of an image per year, decade or century. This is very important when judging the cycles of fashion from a limited number of images, such as historians of costume must do for the Middle Ages. Many have located fashion’s birth at a point where a major change in silhouette seems to occur (see Chapter 2), but Baudelaire observed that where fashion exists, changes occur not as shocks or radical disappearances but as a process of evolution. in this process, wrought by many, many small personal choices made on the daily level, revolutions do not come out of the blue. Changes that appear too radical are not assimilated into the larger picture.
Baudrillard coined the term “plus petite difference marginale (P. P.D. M.)” to connote the search for differentiation within the context of repetition.64 The display of P. P.D. M. implies cultivating the small qualitative differences that symbolize style and status.65 This process occurs in the society of “combinatory personalization,” where consumption is portrayed ideologically as a way of finding and showing true personality and uniqueness. This is basically a paradoxical ideology: consuming mass-produced, monopoly-controlled goods or services in order to find one’s own individuality. in attempting to present a personalized image, what people are really doing is not seeking out objects and goods in themselves, but rather differences, the small but distinctive differences that the objects are represented as representing.
Propriety and variability
In another paradox, fashion requires strict yet constantly yielding limits on the range of possible change. As Blumer put it, “By establishing suitable models which carry the stamp of propriety and compel adherence, fashion narrowly limits the range of variability and so fosters uniformity and order, even though it be passing uniformity and order. In this respect fashion performs in a moving society a function which custom performs in a settled society.”66 The result of changes occurring on the minimal rather than maximal level is that resemblance between moving and settled societies may be difficult to discern, as both will exhibit signs of uniformity and order. The distinction between them will lie in the encouragement of widespread individual desire for variability, as well as the force producing that encouragement, fashion as opposed to custom.
Function of the trendsetter
Successful leaders in a fashion system maintain their rule not by radical distance from the populace, but by cultivating commonalities. Robert Devleeshouwer gave a striking example of how this principle of fashion can transform something like the institution of monarchy, noting that the few monarchs who survived the Second World War are tolerated only because they cultivated a bourgeois persona instead of a military one, so that their appearance varied little from that of those on the street.67 Such a description evokes the thirteenth-century French king Saint Louis, who crusaded with his men and spurned competitively sumptuous dress in favor of sober riches.68
Fashion’s process of translating inner feelings and personality into outward signs implies that for fashion to exist and function, people in a given society must be trained to act as audience to one another. only a trained audience will be properly receptive to the small signs expressing difference and character, and only people aware of their audience will attempt to develop such a language of signs: this is fashion’s theatricality, the next criterion.
World History
