ABSTRACT

Fashion ‘links beauty, success and the city’. It was always urban, became metropolitan and is now cosmopolitan, boiling all national and regional difference down into the distilled moment of glassy sophistication. Fashion parodies itself. In elevating the ephemeral to cult status it ultimately mocks many of the moral pretensions of the dominant culture, which, in turn, has denounced it for its surface frivolity while perhaps secretly stung by the way in which fashion pricks the whole moral balloon. Writings on fashion, other than the purely descriptive, have found it hard to pin down the elusive double bluffs, the infinite regress in the mirror of the meanings of fashion. Modernity creates fragmentation, dislocation. It creates the vision of ‘totalitarian’ societies peopled by identical zombies in uniform. The fear of depersonalization haunts our culture. Mass fashion, which becomes a form of popular aesthetics, can often be successful in helping individuals to express and define their individuality.