Fashion is fleeting
The importance of time for the concept of fashion is prominent in dictionary definitions of the term, and as such offers a place to begin this list of principles. Terms such as passager in French, “fleeting” or “of a specific place or time” in english, are typical qualifiers. The Oxford English Dictionary gives, among other definitions, “a prevailing custom, a current usage; esp. one characteristic of a particular place or time,” and “the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture, style of speech, etc., adopted in society for the time being.”20 A fashionable society is distinguished by the presence of desire for novelty. The most obvious consequence of a desire for the new is a disregard or animosity toward the old, a notion of obsolescence.
Rejection of the recent past
Sometimes fashion can be detected by the presence of tension between those interested only in novelty and those calling (usually in vain) for greater reverence for the past. such a tension is present in montaigne’s essay “Des coustumes anciennes,” where he complains of the French indiscretion of being blinded by the authority of the styles of the moment, changing opinions every month, instead of judging for oneself.21
Baudelaire poured scorn on anyone who plunged too deeply into the past. For him this meant losing memory of the present and abdicating the privileges conferred by circumstance, forfeiting the originality derived from time’s stamp on experiences.22 The emphasis on modernity in the subtitle of Baudelaire’s work, Constantin Guys: peintre de la vie moderne, reveals the importance he attached to time, and specifically to the present.
One of the important symptoms of a developing fashion system is dissatisfaction with the recent past, and a need to be free of the constraints of tradition. Fernand Braudel defined fashion in this vein as “a search for a new language to discredit the old, a way in which each generation can repudiate its immediate predecessor and distinguish itself from it.”23 herbert Blumer’s analysis of fashion’s complex relation with time is worth quoting in entirety:
[F]ashion serves to detach the grip of the past in a moving world. By placing a premium on being in the mode and derogating what developments have [?] left behind, it frees actions for new movement. The significance of this release from the restraint of the past should not be minimized. To meet a moving and changing world requires freedom to move in new directions. Detachment from the hold of the past is no small contribution to the achievement of such freedom. In the areas of its operation fashion facilitates that contribution. In this sense there is virtue in applying the derogatory accusations of being “old-fashioned,” “outmoded,” “backward” and “out-of-date.”24
From this point of view, Baudelaire’s condemnation of painters transfixed by the rules of the past shows a kind of productive spirit, as much as a more destructive spirit of rejection. The freedom and eventually the imperative to reject items of recent production, even those still serviceable, opens up the possibility for much greater production. A fashion system is characterized by constant production, and by the ideal of constantly increasing production.
Fashion is inseparable from “a relative disqualification of the past,” in Gilles Lipovetsky’s terms.25 A fashion system is initiated when a society begins to reject the past’s importance, which he called fashion’s “historical radicality,” believing that this makes fashion a key force in the social operating system of “modernity.” Both fashion and modernity are founded on a view of time in which the present and immediate future are more important than the past.26 The paradox of this criterion is that the rejection of the past is highly dependent on awareness of it.
Time in different cultures
The view of time is one of the key distinguishing factors between those societies where a fashion system governs social activity, and those where desire for novel adornment is only a latent force. From the idea of fashion’s rejection of the past it followed for Lipovetsky that fashion cannot exist in traditional societies where social superiority is accorded by ancestral legacy, where social continuity is highly valued and styles are dictated by reverent repetition of forms inherited from the past. A culture’s view of time has deep psychological roots and permeates the culture on all levels, as Blumer observed. A fashionable society must have a forward-looking concept of time, rather than being bound by a notion of the sacred, for example, which will inhibit their willingness to discard old practices, beliefs, and attachments in favor of being up-to-date.16 contrary to the perspective that fashion is characterized by a specific view of time is the notion that fashion is universal, and therefore all societies may be studied in terms of fashion. This, for example, is implied in 8umner’s assertion that fashion exists among the “uncivilized,” and that “all barbarians and savages” were “guilty of fashion.”17 8uch a view is illustrated by histories such as Fran9ois Boucher’s 20,000 Years of Fashion that equate all differentiation in ornament with fashion.18 More recent ethnographers prefer not to take the barbarism of “smaller societies” (the term Aubrey Cannon uses instead of “primitive” or “traditional”) for granted. What Cannon labels the main elements of fashion - emulation, comparison, and differentiation - are observable or inferable in most cultures. If, however, systematic fashion is defined by the rapid changes in emulation and differentiation observable in industrial or production-oriented systems, then many smaller societies would be excluded by virtue of the sporadic or circumstance-based nature of the changes that occur there.19
The invention of the mechanical clock in late thirteenth-century Europe, a sign of a growing need to measure time with precision, affirms that the high Middle Ages were a crucial period in Western fashion’s development.20 This book proposes that there was a period in the early to central Middle Ages in Europe when a fashion system did not exist, followed by a period in which one begins to appear. It will not presume to analyse other cultures, but rather propose a method that might be applied to them.
World History
