Fashion

Fashion and the Modern World

Some scholars maintain that fashion, as a form of regulation of collective behavior, is characteristic of all human cultures. Jennifer Craik in her book The Face of Fashion (1994), for example, argues that the fashion impulse exists in all cultures and embodies the achievement of distinctiveness in dress through clothing codes and symbols, whose aim is to express belonging to a group and at the same time the individual's desire to assert his or her personality. The predominant view, however, is that there is a strict [Page 584]connection between fashion as we know it today and the modern world, and that fashion as an institution has been essentially Eurocentric and capitalist. Numerous researchers date the birth of the first fashionable behavior to the second half the fourteenth century, when it was concomitant with the rapid growth of trade and economic enterprises in many parts of Europe. That period, in fact, saw radical change in the relationship between the individual and society. There arose the idea that value doesn't always reside in the immutability of social structures inherited from the past, because the individual personality—autonomous and responsible for its own choices—can have value in itself. To be appreciated, therefore, was the capacity to design and to direct one's own life, that is, the capacity to differentiate oneself from others by making autonomous choices. The appearance of the first short-lived fashions in the princely courts of the fourteenth century expressed the need to represent this new value attributed to the individual's autonomy through the manner in which the body was clothed. Thereafter, fashion developed as individuality became progressively valorized in the social structure, the more that society became flexible. In societies where the social structure was rigid and where individuals had almost no chance of changing their social position, there was neither the requirement nor the need to express one's belonging and identity through dress. Today, however, now that the social structure has become flexible and individual mobility is high, belongings are always uncertain and modifiable, and identities are provisional and negotiable. The modifiability of dress can thus become an important instrument of social relations, notes Elizabeth Rouse.

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