ABSTRACT
Fashion is perhaps the proverbial Pandora’s box. In opening it up to scutiny, its colours, fabrics and enchantments fly out along with all their magical, seductive and even nerve jangling meanings that – try as one might – one can never contain again. That is its fascination and indeed its difficulty – its lack of parameters, lines or even limits. The study of fashion has similarly exploded in recent decades – art histories, anthropologies, psychologies and exhibitions – and all on an increasingly global scale. Yet quite what all this means, quite where it might take us, is not clear, fuzzy, out of focus. So this text is primarily a synthesis, an attempt to bring fashion into focus, though hardly exhaustive. The vehicle and indeed lens for this is sociology. Interestingly some of the first – and most powerful and influential – analyses of fashion were sociological, particularly in the work of Veblen who more or less coined the term “conspicuous consumption” and Simmel who perhaps inadvertently set up a paper chase all of his own for the study of fashion (Simmel, 1904; Veblen, 1934). In addition, almost all theories of fashion, past and present, have as their central point awareness of dress, style and adornment as signifying rather than functional phenomena, a point that in itself is perhaps primarily sociological. Yet, despite the influence of feminist and postmodern analysis of fashion, little as it were core theory has truly developed here since the early nineteenth century. With the rise of celebrity, designer labels and global levels of exploitation and production this is perhaps surprising and considered in later chapters. Part of the difficulty is that sociologists, like the population as a whole, tend
not to take fashion that seriously. Worse, fashion is also often the object of ridicule and seen as frippery by so-called serious intellectuals and the politically correct, morally suspect or even downright narcissistic by the conservative or the religious, or deviant and just not “the done thing” for half the population, namely men. The problem here is primarily a moral one – people object to fashion on the basis of mores and value judgements around other people “knowing their place” or “being responsible”. Some of this centres on money – spending one’s disposable income on housing improvements and one’s family’s future is often seen as more appropriate, more mature and more acceptable
than blowing it on yet another pair of hopelessly impractical shoes – and some of it is centred on sex, as a concern with one’s appearance is frequently seen as flaunting it or showing off and of course what is “shown off” is precisely oneself and one’s sexuality. Not surprisingly, it is one of the primary intentions of this text to take fashion seriously and to demonstrate its importance. This similarly rests on its more sociological significance, for fashion is the most profoundly social yet individual phenomenon, an act of will and yet totally controlled, hyper capitalist and yet not explained by the industrial revolution, consumerist yet reliant on archaic modes of production, violently oppositional yet deeply conservative, a matter of standing out and fitting in. And the fabric that underpins these jostling contradictions is identity – a similarly contradictory phenomenon – for fashion is that most personal of things, our second skin, and it is the thing that binds us to our society, how we make sense of who we are and who everyone else is too. This is not only a communicative or signifying function, rather a set of feelings as fundamental as the senses which it also invokes – sight, sound, touch, smell even – and not so many miles from our very survival: keeping us warm, protecting us and telling us who is friend and who is foe, who is ruler and who is ruled, and who we can mate with. Fashion may be like language, and there is some parallel with nonverbal communication, but actually that comes later – if a Martian dropped onto the planet Earth tomorrow we would primarily make sense of him or her though how they looked and how they presented themselves or, in short, their fashion.
