ABSTRACT
Today, of all commodities, the fashion object initially appears the most superfluous, transitory, and especially trivial—infinitely distanced from its historical origins in the magic and mystic of ceremonial costume and bodily adornment. This chapter expresses that it is not in spite of, but precisely because fashion has this ephemeral, volatile existence that it becomes the exemplary site for exploring the dominant tendencies and contradictions of our late capitalist, consumer, or postmodern society. Far from signalling the end of capitalism, postmodernity then can be seen as its purest stage, one in which fashion now increasingly represents the dominant expression and widening extension of the logic of the commodity form. By virtue of its indifference to the material content of social life, fashion cannot only transform any or every one of its aspects into so many successive "objects" of consumption, but intensifies the abstract systematization and accelerated logic of the obsolescence of value itself.
