Benjamin on Fashion

Philipp Ekardt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350076006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture. In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into
discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray. In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist.

Part One

Time/Fashion Models

1

On Some Systematic Aspects of Benjamin’s Fashion Theory

Has fashion ever been modern?

Across a number of smaller and larger divergences, it is possible to recognize in the field of systematic fashion theory a major subdivision that touches on questions of fashion’s origin and inceptions. Let us consider two opposite approaches first. One school regards fashion as a feature pervasive to the entirety of human culture and possibly even to pre-human—i.e., animal and evolutionary—formations. Another school operates with a concept of fashion as datable, i.e., as a phenomenon which can be ascribed a more or less distinct point of temporal emergence that lies within the continuum of (human) history. The first school assigns a systemic origin to fashion and thus propagates an idea of fashion as responding to basic needs that are coeval with the condition of societal, cultural, or all systemic existence (anthropological, proto-anthropological, animal).¹ The second school assigns a discrete temporal origin to the phenomenon of fashion. While the protagonists of this second school usually operate within constricted cultural confines—for the most part an understanding of “Western” societies—there is still a surprisingly high number of suggestions as to when and where to situate the actual inception of “fashion,” encompassing, in chronological order, the abrogation of common cuts in men’s and women’s garb through the introduction of tailored, fitted, and—in the case of feminine attire—laced vestments as of the twelfth century; the emergence of the earliest forms of capitalism in the Flemish and Italian city states of the Renaissance; the indeed fundamental overthrowing of aristocratic and stratified social formations in the French Revolution and the concomitant emergence of bourgeois society, with its realignments of the vestimentary codes for men and women; and the beginnings of the couture system in the mid-nineteenth century (i.e., the period of the mode de cent ans).² While the period since this last system’s collapse in the late 1970s—i.e., the ascendancy of the economic formation of prêt-à-porter—is swiftly expanding toward half a century, this transformation hasn’t quite been dignified by being recognized as (yet another) starting point of fashion. Given its fundamental significance for an alignment of the tastes, aesthetics, and styles of vast parts of the globe, it eventually might. And there is no doubt that in some future treatise the transition into the digital era will also be recognized as one of those shifts that start fashion (again).

This latter, datable approach to fashion doesn’t preclude systematic concerns. The principle of fashion’s datability can be reconciled with the idea of passing over a more encompassing historico-systemic cliff edge. This makes for a third approach, espoused in various ideological and epistemological shades, all of which recognize in the advent of fashion the hallmark or symptom of a systemic break, a major rupture, usually seen as correlating with a historico-systemic transformation, some sort of alteration in the basic conditions which triggered, necessitated, or favored the emergence of “fashion.” These can be as unspecific as declaring fashion to be coeval with—in blanket terms—“the origin and development of the modern West,” or as specific both in terms of theoretical approach and date as locking the incipit of fashion in step with the emergence of a semantics of contingency and the beginning of a transition into what, in sociological systems theory, is referred to as functional differentiation and second-order observation.³ Unsurprisingly, these approaches tend to consider the systemic preconditions for the existence of fashion as incompatible, if not irreconcilable, with an opposite type of systemic organization usually referred to as “traditional,” and as if both were the two sides of a Rubin’s vase diagram: one in which the profile of fashion emerges only under the condition of the obfuscation of the vessel of “tradition.”⁴

The mentioned model of a meta-historical subdivision—the pitting of a regime of acceleration and rupture against the vision of an “archaic and stable past”—as well as a certain concomitant understanding of “modernity” as a passage from the first into the second stage, have in recent decades been treated with due skepticism and have received their share of criticism. This has been achieved not least by applying the fundamental critique of ethnological models and their mere positing of non-Western (i.e., “traditional”) societies as “being without history” to the very Western framework itself.⁵ Yet there remain strong voices to argue for adopting a quasi-Baudelairean perspective and for identifying the time span of the historical existence of la mode with the age of modernity, of aesthetic modernism in particular, and, if you will, to declare the famous enumeration from Le peintre de la vie moderne, “l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion,” to be the headline for an assumed joint life span of the modish and the modern; and be it only because the scholarly and theoretical study of the subject under consideration here (fashion) would respond to the semantics with which a number of its most eminent thinkers, protagonists, and observers did describe its formations à l’époque.⁶

Whereas such a framing plays off the affinity between la mode and modernity, etymology actually suggests a different kinship. The Grand Robert informs its readers that the first usages of the French term la mode occurred in the late fourteenth century (pointing to a documented instance about a century later in 1485), when it simply translated the Latin modus—i.e., “manner” or “measure”—from which sprang those usages of the term which nowadays are more commonly associated with fashion. In 1549 there is a documentation for mode as referring generally to manifestations of collective taste, passing manners of living, thinking, or feeling, as well as conforming with what is socially considered bon ton. In 1480 (i.e., even earlier) mode is also employed to specifically describe collective habits and passing manners of dress.⁷ Mode, however, is etymologically unrelated to the adjective moderne, which is first documented in 1361 and translates the Latin modo (not modus), meaning “recent.”⁸ The alleged linguistic originary proximity of mode and modernity is thus a classical “false friend.” The situation is—albeit slightly—complicated by the fact that the current French term for the mode in which something occurs or presents itself (i.e., the manner or the modus) does not share the same grammatical gender with the word that is employed when referring to fashion. Whereas the latter (fashion) is la mode, the former (manner/modus) is le mode. The reason for this divergence may lie in an early attempt to set the reputable business of intellectual inquiry apart from the mundane realm of circulating tastes and fashions: only by the early seventeenth century (by way of imitating the original Latin gender of modus) was the gender for the philosophical usage of this term changed to masculine, hence referring to, for instance, a “mode of being” (modus essendi) as un mode–not, or more precisely no longer, as une mode.⁹ (One entertaining consequence of this kinship is that, in contemporary French, the noun modiste can either refer to a vendor of fashions, a hatmaker (Coco Chanel’s first profession), or the medieval grammarian philosophers (such as Thomas von Erfurt) who founded the theory of universal modes.)¹⁰ (See also later in this chapter the section “Being in fashion, being form”; and sections “On the non-givenness of material” and “Materialism à la mode” in chapter 3).

Fashion as model and as chronotechnics

To open this first chapter of a book about Walter Benjamin “on fashion” with such a (necessarily less than detailed) overview of a few basic tendencies in scholarly accounts of the subject of fashion is not just to begin the endeavor of situating Benjamin’s writing on this provisional map of critical literature. Rather, while retaining an awareness for the historical and systemic specificity and concreteness of fashion as an object of study that fascinated Benjamin, the key question of this present book is in equal parts to analyze the arguments, tropes of thought, and so on that make up Benjamin’s ideas about fashion, and to inquire as to what end Benjamin engaged with questions of fashion—i.e., what theorizing fashion enabled him to think. Or, to put it slightly differently: the answer to the question “To what end does one study Benjamin on fashion?” is in parts coextensive with the answer to the question “To what end did Benjamin study fashion?”, implying that while Benjamin of course had an interest in the object of fashion itself, fashion was also a means, a test case, a model, the theorization of which allowed him to access and perspectivize other questions.¹¹

One of the basic assumptions that is crucial to the argument is that fashion can be considered a chronotechnics—i.e., a distributed, collectively actualized, and perpetually reactualized technique for operationalizing time.¹² Returning to the previous summary of positions in fashion theory, it will be obvious that only very few of them place the question of time center stage, at least not explicitly. The implicit, and in most cases unreflected, address of temporality occurs either through the mentioned unquestioned subscription to the idea of a historico-systemic passage from which fashion springs, or through the always available semantics of the transitory—i.e., the fleeting moment that is readily ascribed to fashion phenomena.¹³ One exception here is Luhmannian sociologist Elena Esposito’s The Reliability of the Transient: Paradoxes of Fashion (Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode); she presents the systems theorist’s view of modernization, that with the passage into a functionally differentiated state of society and the concomitant dissolution of a stable (i.e., extra-temporal) ontological fundament for communication, contingency is felt in all temporal acuity. Under these temporalized conditions, fashion acquires a specific functionality, in part precisely through its essentially temporalized character.¹⁴ We find another in literary scholar and fashion theorist Barbara Vinken’s work, who, through a meticulous analysis of individual fashion poetics of garments produced at the moment she terms “post-fashion,” reveals that these designs frequently articulate the temporal dimensions of their making and existence, and which, in a retroactive perspective, demonstrate the historically preceding formation of haute couture to be largely concerned with a negation of temporality and its effects. In this fine-grained and complicating approach, which deciphers designs and looks as negotiations of such historical ruptures, dresses thu...