What do you think?
Rate this book
Fashion Theory: A Reader
From its beginnings in the fifteenth century, intensified interest in fashion and the study of fashion over the last thirty years has led to a vast and varied literature on the subject. This collection of essays surveys and contextualizes the ways in which a wide range of disciplines have used a variety of theoretical approaches to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the astonishing variety, complexity and beauty of fashion. Themes covered include individual, social and gender identity, the erotic, consumption and communication. By collecting together some of the most influential and important writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we think and say about fashion.
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
11 people are currently reading
427 people want to read
About the author
Malcolm Barnard
14 books13 followersMalcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough University and an internationally recognized theorist of visual culture. He has degrees in philosophy and in sociology and his PhD concerned Derrida and other French philosophers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 17, 2018
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” pp.347-350
p.347 – The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determinants of value. For in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a psychological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs.
p.348 – The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.
Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals form the aggregate labour of society.
p.349 – It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.
Peter Braham, “Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production” pp.351-372
p.351 – In cultural studies fashion is treated as a cultural subject, in which most emphasis is on fashion as a badge or a means of identity. Yet fashion, as well as being a matter of creation, consumption and identity, is also a matter of production, distribution and retailing. It is therefore not just a cultural subject, but also a subject which has to do with apparently rather mundane matters of profit margins, response time, supply and demand, and so on. Accordingly, the assumption that fashion in clothes ought to be considered in terms of both its cultural aspects and its economic aspects is central to my approach, as is the contention that we must try to illuminate the connections between the production and consumption of fashion. […] notion of a cultural economy.
Kurt W. Back, “Modernism and Fashion: A Social Psychological Interpretation” pp.398-407
p.398 – Cultural activities such as arts, crafts, literature, and music are products of social norms, the state of technology, and the need for personal self-expression. They are also the products of individual creativity and of the structures in which this creativity can be translated into a recognized work.
Fashion is in many ways an extreme of cultural activity. It is concerned with a basic human need, clothing, but goes far beyond the simple biological necessity. Because it refers to a universal necessity, however, it becomes part of a large economic sector; individual creativity is often absorbed in a collective process.
p.399 – Fashion is therefore influenced strongly by all three factors: social norms, individual self-expression, and technology (Lurie 1981). The need of the whole society for clothes links fashion directly to the structure of society.
Cultural products can be distinguished in many ways, as arts or crafts, as vanguard, mass, or folk culture, or in different branches such as literature, music, or fine arts; different time periods of cultural epochs can then be distinguished along all these lines, individually as well as in their interplay. Fashion as a cultural product has a mediating position between extremes; it partakes of art and of craft. It may be an esoteric art form, but its importance lies as well in mass production. It partakes of many special fields, in stage performances as well as in fine arts, besides being important for its own sake.
Three dimensions define culture as part of a communication process: the nature of the communication process, the relations between the communicator and the audience, and the distinction between the communicator and message.
Ulrich Lehmann, “Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity” pp.422-443
p.423 – Most significant for fashion is its ephemeral, transient, and futile character, which changes with every season. This insubstantiality with regard to linear historical process, as well as fashion’s marginal position in the cultural spectrum, appealed especially to those who considered the fragment particularly expressive for modern culture, representing the shape of modernity.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) closely followed Simmel in defining fashion as the ultimate metaphor for the varied views on modern life concentrating on its fragmentation and diversity.
p.424 – In his last work, titled Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno, much more inclined to follow the prosaic and substantial in his philosophical discourse, acknowledged his debt to Benjamin in battling for a perception of fashion as fundamental to aesthetics and politics alike:
“Despite its commercial manipulation fashion reaches deep into the works of art, not simply exploiting them. Inventions like Picasso’s painting with light appear as transpositions of experiments in haute couture where the cloth for dresses is merely draped around the body and pinned together with needles for one night, instead of tailoring it in the usual sense. Fashion is one of the ways in which historical change affects the sensory apparatus and through it works of art – in minimal traits, often hidden from themselves.” (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1984, 255)
Here Adorno moved directly from the sartorial surface to sensual perception and historical progress. He thus followed both Simmel and Benjamin toward the same goal, fashion’s metaphysics. Benjamin had postulated some forty years earlier that it was integral to modernity that contemporary fashion (i.e. fashion aware of its heritage and tradition) came to play the counterpoint to apolitical and restricted forms of sensualism – precisely because it speared to have originated from such an apolitical stance.
The dialectical structure that lies in the perfect creation of sartorial fashion, namely that it was designed to last forever by those aware that it will “die” within six months (Simmel), remained unrecognized by Adorno, since he does not consider the topic capable of carrying such profound meaning.
p.425 – More apparent for Adorno is the Benjaminian notion that die Mode possesses the power to fashion a new look for history. It does so on a large scale, by reshaping the silhouette of historical structures, by altering the way one perceives the succession of past epochs and the relation of the present to them – thus time itself. On a smaller scale it also focuses on the sociohistorical accessories, on the nuances within the appearance of the past, that reveal and determine more than mere historicism ever would.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Ideological Genesis of Needs / Fetishism and Ideology” pp.451-461
p.453 – The concept of commodity fetishism and money fetishism sketched, for Marx, the lived ideology of capitalist society – the mode of sanctification, fascination and psychological subjection by which individuals internalize the generalized system of exchange value. These concepts outline the whole process whereby the concrete social values of labor and exchange, which the capitalist system denies, abstracts and alienates, are erected into transcendent ideological values – into a moral agency that regulates all alienated behavior. What is being described here is the successor to a more archaic fetishism and religious mystification (“the opium of the people”).
Jean Baudrillard, “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code” pp.462-474
p.467 – All cultures, all sign systems, are exchanged and combined in fashion, they contaminate each other, bind ephemeral equilibria, where the machinery breaks down, where there is nowhere any meaning. Fashion is the pure speculative stage in the order of signs. There is no more constraint of either coherence or reference than there is permanent equality in the conversion of gold into floating monies – this indeterminacy implies the characteristic dimension of the cycle and recurrence in fashion (and no doubt soon in economy, whereas determinacy (of signs or of production) implies a linear and continuous order. Hence the fate of the economic begins to emerge in the form of fashion, which is further down the route of general commutations than money and the economy.
p.468 – Fashion, like language, is aimed from the outset at the social (the dandy, in his provocative solitude, is the a contrario proof of this). But, as opposed to language, which aims for meaning and effaces itself before it, fashion aims for a theatrical sociality, and delights in itself.
p.470 – Fashion grows deeper as it “stages” the body, as the body becomes the medium of fashion.
Kim Sawchuk, “A Tale of Inscription / Fashion Statements” pp.475-488
p.485 – Capitalism and the colonization of the imaginary – a dream of a resurrected past, capitalism’s cannibalization of the other, its treatment of them as already dead museum pieces, and its resurrection of them as fashion – the colonialism of advanced capitalism powered by the energy of seduction and desires.
Roland Barthes, “Fashion Photography” pp.517-519
p.517 – In Fashion photography, the world is usually photographed as a décor, a background or a scene, in short, as a theatre. The theatre of Fashion is always thematic: an idea (or more precisely, a word) is varied through a series of examples or analogies.
The theatre of meaning can assume two different tones here: it can aim at the “poetic,” insofar as the “poetic” is an association of ideas; Fashion thus tries to present associations of substances, to establish plastic or coenesthetic equivalences: for example, it will associate knitwear, autumn, flock of sheep, and the wood of a farm cart.
p.518 – At other times (and perhaps more often), the associative tone becomes humorous, the association of ideas turns into simple wordplay: for the “Trapeze” line, models are put on trapezes, etc.
What is the point of these protocols (poetic, romantic, or “outrageous”)? Probably, and by a paradox which is merely apparent, to make Fashion’s signifies unreal. […] by putting its signified in quotations marks, so to speak, Fashion keeps its distance with regard to its own lexicon, and thereby, by making its signified unreal, Fashion makes all the more real its signifier, i.e. the garment.
p.347 – The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determinants of value. For in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a psychological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs.
p.348 – The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.
Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals form the aggregate labour of society.
p.349 – It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.
Peter Braham, “Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production” pp.351-372
p.351 – In cultural studies fashion is treated as a cultural subject, in which most emphasis is on fashion as a badge or a means of identity. Yet fashion, as well as being a matter of creation, consumption and identity, is also a matter of production, distribution and retailing. It is therefore not just a cultural subject, but also a subject which has to do with apparently rather mundane matters of profit margins, response time, supply and demand, and so on. Accordingly, the assumption that fashion in clothes ought to be considered in terms of both its cultural aspects and its economic aspects is central to my approach, as is the contention that we must try to illuminate the connections between the production and consumption of fashion. […] notion of a cultural economy.
Kurt W. Back, “Modernism and Fashion: A Social Psychological Interpretation” pp.398-407
p.398 – Cultural activities such as arts, crafts, literature, and music are products of social norms, the state of technology, and the need for personal self-expression. They are also the products of individual creativity and of the structures in which this creativity can be translated into a recognized work.
Fashion is in many ways an extreme of cultural activity. It is concerned with a basic human need, clothing, but goes far beyond the simple biological necessity. Because it refers to a universal necessity, however, it becomes part of a large economic sector; individual creativity is often absorbed in a collective process.
p.399 – Fashion is therefore influenced strongly by all three factors: social norms, individual self-expression, and technology (Lurie 1981). The need of the whole society for clothes links fashion directly to the structure of society.
Cultural products can be distinguished in many ways, as arts or crafts, as vanguard, mass, or folk culture, or in different branches such as literature, music, or fine arts; different time periods of cultural epochs can then be distinguished along all these lines, individually as well as in their interplay. Fashion as a cultural product has a mediating position between extremes; it partakes of art and of craft. It may be an esoteric art form, but its importance lies as well in mass production. It partakes of many special fields, in stage performances as well as in fine arts, besides being important for its own sake.
Three dimensions define culture as part of a communication process: the nature of the communication process, the relations between the communicator and the audience, and the distinction between the communicator and message.
Ulrich Lehmann, “Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity” pp.422-443
p.423 – Most significant for fashion is its ephemeral, transient, and futile character, which changes with every season. This insubstantiality with regard to linear historical process, as well as fashion’s marginal position in the cultural spectrum, appealed especially to those who considered the fragment particularly expressive for modern culture, representing the shape of modernity.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) closely followed Simmel in defining fashion as the ultimate metaphor for the varied views on modern life concentrating on its fragmentation and diversity.
p.424 – In his last work, titled Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno, much more inclined to follow the prosaic and substantial in his philosophical discourse, acknowledged his debt to Benjamin in battling for a perception of fashion as fundamental to aesthetics and politics alike:
“Despite its commercial manipulation fashion reaches deep into the works of art, not simply exploiting them. Inventions like Picasso’s painting with light appear as transpositions of experiments in haute couture where the cloth for dresses is merely draped around the body and pinned together with needles for one night, instead of tailoring it in the usual sense. Fashion is one of the ways in which historical change affects the sensory apparatus and through it works of art – in minimal traits, often hidden from themselves.” (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1984, 255)
Here Adorno moved directly from the sartorial surface to sensual perception and historical progress. He thus followed both Simmel and Benjamin toward the same goal, fashion’s metaphysics. Benjamin had postulated some forty years earlier that it was integral to modernity that contemporary fashion (i.e. fashion aware of its heritage and tradition) came to play the counterpoint to apolitical and restricted forms of sensualism – precisely because it speared to have originated from such an apolitical stance.
The dialectical structure that lies in the perfect creation of sartorial fashion, namely that it was designed to last forever by those aware that it will “die” within six months (Simmel), remained unrecognized by Adorno, since he does not consider the topic capable of carrying such profound meaning.
p.425 – More apparent for Adorno is the Benjaminian notion that die Mode possesses the power to fashion a new look for history. It does so on a large scale, by reshaping the silhouette of historical structures, by altering the way one perceives the succession of past epochs and the relation of the present to them – thus time itself. On a smaller scale it also focuses on the sociohistorical accessories, on the nuances within the appearance of the past, that reveal and determine more than mere historicism ever would.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Ideological Genesis of Needs / Fetishism and Ideology” pp.451-461
p.453 – The concept of commodity fetishism and money fetishism sketched, for Marx, the lived ideology of capitalist society – the mode of sanctification, fascination and psychological subjection by which individuals internalize the generalized system of exchange value. These concepts outline the whole process whereby the concrete social values of labor and exchange, which the capitalist system denies, abstracts and alienates, are erected into transcendent ideological values – into a moral agency that regulates all alienated behavior. What is being described here is the successor to a more archaic fetishism and religious mystification (“the opium of the people”).
Jean Baudrillard, “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code” pp.462-474
p.467 – All cultures, all sign systems, are exchanged and combined in fashion, they contaminate each other, bind ephemeral equilibria, where the machinery breaks down, where there is nowhere any meaning. Fashion is the pure speculative stage in the order of signs. There is no more constraint of either coherence or reference than there is permanent equality in the conversion of gold into floating monies – this indeterminacy implies the characteristic dimension of the cycle and recurrence in fashion (and no doubt soon in economy, whereas determinacy (of signs or of production) implies a linear and continuous order. Hence the fate of the economic begins to emerge in the form of fashion, which is further down the route of general commutations than money and the economy.
p.468 – Fashion, like language, is aimed from the outset at the social (the dandy, in his provocative solitude, is the a contrario proof of this). But, as opposed to language, which aims for meaning and effaces itself before it, fashion aims for a theatrical sociality, and delights in itself.
p.470 – Fashion grows deeper as it “stages” the body, as the body becomes the medium of fashion.
Kim Sawchuk, “A Tale of Inscription / Fashion Statements” pp.475-488
p.485 – Capitalism and the colonization of the imaginary – a dream of a resurrected past, capitalism’s cannibalization of the other, its treatment of them as already dead museum pieces, and its resurrection of them as fashion – the colonialism of advanced capitalism powered by the energy of seduction and desires.
Roland Barthes, “Fashion Photography” pp.517-519
p.517 – In Fashion photography, the world is usually photographed as a décor, a background or a scene, in short, as a theatre. The theatre of Fashion is always thematic: an idea (or more precisely, a word) is varied through a series of examples or analogies.
The theatre of meaning can assume two different tones here: it can aim at the “poetic,” insofar as the “poetic” is an association of ideas; Fashion thus tries to present associations of substances, to establish plastic or coenesthetic equivalences: for example, it will associate knitwear, autumn, flock of sheep, and the wood of a farm cart.
p.518 – At other times (and perhaps more often), the associative tone becomes humorous, the association of ideas turns into simple wordplay: for the “Trapeze” line, models are put on trapezes, etc.
What is the point of these protocols (poetic, romantic, or “outrageous”)? Probably, and by a paradox which is merely apparent, to make Fashion’s signifies unreal. […] by putting its signified in quotations marks, so to speak, Fashion keeps its distance with regard to its own lexicon, and thereby, by making its signified unreal, Fashion makes all the more real its signifier, i.e. the garment.
October 27, 2022
Prof Higonnet gets it
March 4, 2025
heavy on "exhaustive" read
November 24, 2013
"Reader" je všeobecně dobře udělaný a zpracovaný koncept antologií, jejichž autoři jsou v dané oblasti zběhlí a sami se jí dlouho věnují. Ukázky z jednotlivých děl jsou dobře vybrané a slouží jako dobrý úvod do problematiky. Pokud si člověk neví rady, odkud čerpat při analýze určitého problému z oblasti společenských věd, tyto knihy jsou inteligentním pomocníkem.
August 14, 2014
Some dated excerpts from interesting writings on fashion theory from design, social and cultural perspectives. It's a good taste of many things that refers one on to the canon. Contrasts with current trends are fun to identify and speculate on.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews