ABSTRACT
The innovative force of fashion was associated both with the dissolution of the body politic and with the exorbitance of the state’s subjects. The rapid development of “fashion” in the Renaissance has obscured the sense in which clothes were seen as printing, charactering, haunting. Clothing has the force of an iron yoke, enforcing conformity; clothing has the ability to leave a “slavish print”; clothing is a ghost that, even when discarded, has the power to haunt. Cloth or clothes were so essential a part of such payments that the term came to have the predominant meaning of clothing that identified its wearer as the servant of a particular household or member of a particular liveried group. The concept of the “fetish” emerged as the colonizing subject simultaneously subjugated and enslaved other subjects and proclaimed his own freedom from material objects. This disavowal of the object has often been read as merely a ruse.
