1920s man fashion picture

The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. - book reviews

Fashion is in fashion: in recent years cultural critics have taken it up as a serious object of study. The way in which dress inscribes certain power relations and constructs differences of race, gender and sexual orientation - these topics have shaped the new scholarship on fashion. Most of this work is revisionist in seeking to correct the notion that fashion, like the mass consumer culture it is taken to represent, is an homogenizing, mind-numbing, objectifying force. This view is so widespread as to have gained agreement among writers as ill-assorted as Simone de Beauvoir, Theodor Adotoo, Jurgen Habermas and Guy Debord. By contrast, contemporary cultural critics increasingly see fashion as a vital means of cultural expression that is not without political valence. So quickly has this fashion for fashion gained currency that Gilles Lipovetsky's opening line - "the question of fashion is not a fashionable one among intellectuals"(p. 3) - already sounds demode four years after it was originally published in French.

But the rapidity with which his words have become passe would please this French sociologist since it would prove his central point in The Empire of Fashion: that fashion itself is a "rising power" in contemporary society, encompassing not just clothing but all aspects of socio-cultural life, from television shows to sexual practices to scholarly interests. Although Lipovetsky talks mostly about dress, he defines "fashion" more broadly as "a sociohistorical reality characteristic of the West and of modernity itself" (p. 4) that negates the power of tradition and celebrates the passion for novelty and change. (Lipovetsky's original French title is L'Empire de l'ephemere not L'Empire de la mode.) According to the author, the identification of fashion with dress results from the historical fact that up until recently, the fashion process was most obviously embodied in the clothing people wore. At present, however, a logic of inconstancy is at work in all phenomena: fashion is no longer an "embellishment" of modern collective life, but its very essence, a force reshaping society itself in its own image. As Lipovetsky puts it rather inelegantly, "fashion is in the driver's seat." (p. 6)

Following a critical path opened by Roland Barthes, Lipovetsky uses the seemingly banal artifacts of popular culture to probe the nature of modern life, in this case, the effect of mass culture on democratic societies. But he differs from French critics like Barthes or Michel Foucault in that as an unabashed liberal, he conceives of democracy as a generalized realm of freedom and equality. Written in a style that can only be called "high French," Lipovetsky's book has the air of post-1989 democratic euphoria, as if he were the Francis Fukuyama of the fashion world. Beginning in the late middle ages, he claims, fashion emerged as a sign of a new sense of adventure. "Freed from the grip of the past," human beings began to value choice and desire over the verities of tradition. Fashion encouraged their effort "to make themselves masters of the conditions of their own existence." (pp. 23-24) And in Lipovetsky's view, it was one small step from freedom of action to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In other words, the growth of fashion was intimately linked to that of individualism and democracy. Far from suppressing individual creativity, as some critics have argued, fashion is based on the desire to assert the self in relation to others. And fashion demonstrates how modern bureaucratic apparatuses, far from disciplining human activity, as Foucault believed, "reserve a growing systematic place for individual desires." According to Lipovetsky, "we have entered the era of personalization, choice, and combinatory freedom."(p. 80)

Such a view has much to offer in balancing Foucault's gloomy picture of a disciplined liberal society. But Lipovetsky's cheeriness would be more convincing if tempered by an acknowledgment of the hierarchies of power that structure democratic notions of freedom and individualism. Lipovetsky insists on a "democratic logic" in modern history that "pursued its task of equalizing conditions, dissolving extreme differences and hierarchies."(p. 73) He never explains the "Empire" of his title, nor is he at all attuned to the way in which orientalist fantasies have consistently shaped Western fashions in dress and in the home. Indeed fashion has been an Empire precisely because it reinforces the western imperialist notion of the individual. Unfortunately, Lipovetsky shows no greater sensitivity towards issues of gender. Women can easily dress like men, he complains, while men in drag still provoke laughter. This is because in the world of fashion "the masculine pole still occupies the inferior, stable position, as opposed to the free, protean mobility of the feminine pole."(p. 110) But this interpretation fails entirely to understand sexual difference in socio-political terms. As the film critic Mary Anne Doane has pointed out, the asymmetry between female and male cross-dressing can be traced to the phallocentric nature of our culture, a world where it is easy to understand why a woman would want to become a man, but not visa versa.(1)

Lipovetsky's failure here derives from a characteristic lack of socio-political and/or historical analysis. Any historian would have trouble with Lipovetsky's broad claim that up until the fourteenth century, "the same tastes, the same ways of doing, feeling and dressing [were] perpetuated unchanged."(p. 19) He looks at the history of fashion in the early modern period with satisfying detail, but his treatment of the French Revolution is inadequate. Absent is a sustained analysis of how the many elements of his argument - individualism, gender relations, scorn for tradition, aesthetics - passed through and were transformed by this crucible of the modern era. Instead Lipovetsky flatters the 1920s with disproportionate attention. He clearly points to but does not clarify the decade's status as a turning point. The dramatic changes in fashion during this period - bobbed hair, simple lines, short skirts - Lipovetsky explains as inspired purely by a novel interest in sports among women. Although la femme sportive was an important figure of the 1920s, her impact on fashion can hardly be allowed to eclipse the truly central event of this era, the Great War, which budged women from their parlors and forced the streamlining of fashion to accommodate a new, more active life.

Lipovetsky might do well to ask himself the question he at one point poses to his reader: "Why do so many analyses look at issues from just one side?"(p. 170) His history of fashion tends towards the idiosyncratic with the ultimate aim of extolling the liberal value of fashion.

But then what would you expect from someone whose project is fundamentally anti-historical, who lauds the negation of past tradition - in the form of fashion - as a "good" thing? To be fair, this book is polemic not history, justified by the moral weight of the author's argument rather than an even-handed treatment of the past. The moral benefits of fashion, according to Lipovetsky, result from its encouragement of superficiality. Fashion encourages superficial social relations by trivializing pleasure and desire. These relations, in turn, create tolerance among various groups because the less they know and feel about one another, the better they will get along. In this way, fashion assures social harmony in a democratic society. Even if Lipovetsky's logic here can survive closer scrutiny, (and I have my doubts that it could), the question becomes: do we want this kind of democratic future? His revisionist notion of fashion as a potentially empowering force redoubles the effort already underway to do justice to this complex cultural phenomenon. In addition, his argument concerning the creeping logic of fashion in contemporary society is provocative and important. But because Lipovetsky's liberalism is facile and his thinking largely unchecked by a sense of broader context, his analysis ultimately deteriorates into half-hearted history and half-baked prophecy.

Mary Louise Roberts Stanford University

ENDNOTE

1. See Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales. - Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York, 1991), p. 25.