The emotional appeal of fashion defies logic
A personal fashionable choice can produce a range of complex feelings in both consumer and audience, from pleasure to embarrassment, from allure to irritability. The couturier Ted Lapidus captured the affective aspect of fashion saying that designers do not dress clients, but subjectivities: the insecurities, the affections, the anxieties of a great mass of people.44 many of the conditions for fashion’s existence include the idea of desire, making the role of emotions in fashion a key element to consider. The importance of human choice and reception in fashion brings into play one of fashion’s most frustrating qualities: it does not change and vary along predictable, linear, rational lines.45 On the contrary, there is a very human quality to this force that defies simple containment or straightforward logic.
The psychology of fashion
While it is problematic to apply Freudian-style psychoanalysis to all cultures, the field of psychology has made significant contributions to the study of fashion by introducing the notion that it involves subconscious motivations.46 Influenced by the first wave of psychoanalysis, Veblen denied that the need for dress is experienced consciously as “a naive propensity for display of expenditure.”47 On the conscious level is the need to live up to an accredited standard of taste and reputability. He classified dress as a “higher or spiritual need,” beyond the apparent venality of the demand for conspicuous consumption and waste.
The psychologist J. C. Flugel showed a similar appreciation of the religionlike power of fashion, musing after Mallarme that fashion is a “goddess, whose decrees it is our duty to obey rather than understand: for indeed, it is implied, these decrees transcend all ordinary human understanding.”48 Flugel classified the deeply felt reactions to being inappropriately dressed such as shame and nausea, ascribing the emotions to the fear of arousing contempt or displeasure in others under the rubric of modesty.49 For the psychologist Gregory Stone, a person’s dress helps the individual’s appearance conform to the social expectations of a milieu, preventing the paralysis of embarrassment. It also “mobilizes his activity,” preparing him and those with whom he interacts for his role and behavior.50
Studying children’s earliest desire to wear specific clothing, stone’s survey group responded almost unanimously that their earliest self-conscious appropriations of clothing were those of their peer group, in contrast to clothing imposed by a mother or other authority figures.51 These could be viewed as the earliest manifestations of a desire for fashion in an individual’s lifetime. Stone’s study construes fashion as the psychological impulse on the one hand to emulate peers, and on the other to establish a separate identity from that imposed by parents. While these alone are insufficient to account for the larger sociological effects of fashion, these observations do support a number of other criteria discussed here. Rebellion against parents is a form of individual expression within a framework of social imitation (criterion 3), and rejecting dress imposed by parents is a way of rejecting the immediate past (criterion 1).
Fashion as self-expression
In societies regulated by fashion, finding ways of representing the self becomes a preoccupation absent in societies where fashion is latent. This quest for expression returns to the premise that words constitute the values in the economy of fashion (criterion 7). Like the principle that a society of fashion privileges the present over the past (criterion 1), this notion helps distinguish between societies where fashion is central or marginal and thus contributes to the argument that fashion is not universally present.
Fashion’s role in the historically perceived rise of the value of uniqueness and individuality is explored by Lipovetsky, who says that far from being contrary to the affirmation of personality, as people love to say, fashion is founded historically on the value and legitimacy of the individual and his or her unique personality. In his view, the error of previous theories lay precisely in having considered the questions of fashion and of the representation of the individual as unrelated, when they are one and the same.52 The historical milieu where he saw the pursuit of individualized appearance first becoming a passion and a legitimate aspiration was the court culture of the late Middle Ages. It is noteworthy that he locates the early stages of the development of selfrepresentation in the Middle Ages; nowhere does he mention the “rise of the individual” associated traditionally with the Renaissance, such as artists beginning to sign their works, or patrons seeking to immortalize themselves. What he called “the creation of the esthetic cult of the self” consists rather in the growth of the right to present oneself as an individual, with unique features, mannerisms and traits.53
The traditional historical moment of the beginning of the great Western drive to represent the self, celebrated by Burkhardt and michelet, is the Renaissance. stephen Jay Greenblatt’s study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, reexamines the accepted notion that the concept of the individual is the hallmark of that period. He begins from the notion that in sixteenth-century England, there was both a sense that “selves” existed, and a sense that they could be fashioned.54 “Fashioning” for Greenblatt denotes the self-consciously artful, manipulable process of representing and even designing human identity, in contrast with fashion as a social system that comprehends many acts like fashioning, among other processes, both conscious and unconscious. Greenblatt observed that there is considerable empirical evidence that self-fashioning occurred before the sixteenth century. Moreover, there may even have been less autonomy in the sixteenth century than before, which supports the idea that fashion existed before the early modern period. He observed that self-consciousness was widespread among the elite of the classical world, although it was discouraged by the Augustinian tradition of Christianity that dwelt on the sinfulness of pride and vainglory. Greenblatt upholds the idea that a successful alternative to the dominant christian doctrine calling for renunciation of the self and the worldly desires was not fully articulated until the early modern period, but he also points out that when it is said that there is a “new stress on the executive power of the will,” it must be recognized that this was in response to “the most sustained and relentless assault on the will.” This implies that where the will and self-expression are not experienced as being in danger, they need not be so forcefully expressed: a simpler or less searching form of representation of the self would suffice. This view also implies that self-fashioning had been well established previous to the period he studied.55
Fashion as self-expression to counter restriction
The possibility for a new kind of representation of the self that a fashion system offers has important consequences for certain groups, such as women, whose self-expression has been restricted in many societies. While it is important to recognize the role that gender can play in the fashion system, this role is so variable that it cannot be formulated as any particular kind of general principle. Steele suggests that fashion offers a compromise between the real and the ideal self one would like to present or become.56 This more flexible notion is more likely to hold true at the level of generalization. It ties some of the psychological appeal of fashion to criterion 10, which describes how a fashion system promotes an equalization of appearances and thereby destabilizes existing status codes.
Simmel saw unprecedented development of individuality occurring in Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, citing great inroads upon the “collectivistic regulations of the Middle ages by the freedom of the individual.” Because women were denied access to this individualistic development, to freedom of personal action and self-improvement, Simmel believed that they sought redress by adopting “the most extravagant and hypertrophic styles in dress.”57 he saw Italian women as having all the freedom that German women lacked, but scholars of late medieval Italy have come to a conclusion parallel to simmel’s on Germany: that increasing splendor in women’s dress at this period arose because women had wealth, but few productive economic or political outlets. Their need for self-expression was channeled into the ostentatious use of wealth.58 For all that women’s freedom and desire for self-expression are notoriously difficult to measure quantitatively, these studies show examples of two societies where fashion appears to have had a dominant, shaping role, leading scholars to sense the presence of a general belief that self-expression was necessary and important for personal well-being. Where women could not engage their minds and fortunes in political or philosophical debate or leadership, the fashion system offered another area where they could express themselves and feel power: their personal appearance. This kind of tension would probably not have occurred in a society where fashion was not the primary social shaping force, because the need for self-expression would not have been perceived as a norm.
Fashion is often construed as an exclusively feminine preoccupation. While that has and should certainly be questioned,59 gender undeniably plays a role in how fashion manifests itself in each culture. Fashions themselves are very frequently restricted to one gender or the other, even in societies where there is relative equality between the sexes. Theorizing any more specific role for gender in a general theory of fashion is problematic. Many writers on fashion in the last two centuries have included description of the place of gender in the mechanics of fashion, only to be proven wrong within a generation.60
Women’s power to earn money and to control their own affairs can vary markedly from one municipality to another, and from one decade to another. Gender specificity is a variable of fashion rather than a constitutive principle of it. it must be examined with the context of each particular fashion system rather than on the theoretical level.
Self-ohservation
While fashion indicates a looking outward, as individuals compare themselves with others and decide whom to imitate and whom to mock, fashion also entails an inward gaze as each individual assesses his or her own place in the hierarchy and considers what changes need be made to improve his or her position. Lipovetsky referred to this as “auto-observation esthetique,” a new, unprecedented kind of self-observation.55 This psychology is a counterpoint to the outward-looking type of moralizing criticism discussed in criterion 8. Under the conditions of fashion, each person is allowed to become their own metteur-en-scene, designing an individual public persona (on this, see also criterion 6, on fashion’s theatricality).
The idea of unprecedented self-observation carries within it equal potential for benefit and harm, in another of fashion’s seeming contradictions. It promises greater self-knowledge, social sensitivity, and the development of many artistic and technological outlets of expression, as well as a climate of relentless self-criticism.56 Baudrillard saw a generalized narcissism as the outgrowth of whole societies seeking to express individuality with tools provided by mass-production and marketing.57 Ultimately, the effects of self-representation are vast and complex, and the evaluation of their merits depends upon the perspective of the beholder. Good or bad, self-representation, self-criticism and self-improvement, narcissism and self-hatred are all consequences of long-term presence of fashion’s dominance in a culture.
The next principle follows from 3 and 4, discussing the forms that novelty and choices may take in order to satisfy the demands for both self-expression and imitation.
A display object for their husbands, falls apart in the age of the massive entry of women into the job force, Theory of the Leisure Class, pp. 106-9, 121, 125-7.
55 Lipovetsky, L’empire de I’ephemere, p.44.
56 For instance, Lipovetsky, writing on the outcomes of the sexual revolution, saw women growing more and more implacable in their self-criticism (e. g. leading to eating disorders) as society criticized them less and less from the outside (e. g. following the emergence of taboos on shows of misogyny). Lipovetsky, La troisieme femme, p. 184.
57 Baudrillard, La societe de consommation, p.313.
World History
