ABSTRACT
It would seem that fashion, as a field of cultural activity, has managed to barricade itself against systematic analysis; it has put up rather a successful fight against meaning. Perhaps it would be more positive to say that fashion has always existed as a challenge to meaning where meaning is understood to involve some notion of coherence, a demonstrable consistency. This challenge is precisely what attracts those of us who believe that the practices which a culture insists are meaningless or trivial, the places where ideology has succeeded in becoming invisible, are practices in need of investigation.
