Fashion as an illusion of change and a child of capitalism

French writer and essayist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) is particularly famous for his analyses of consumer society, the system of objects, or more broadly for his notion of “simulacra”. If the question of clothing or fashion is latent in most of his texts, he dedicates an entire chapter of Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) to the phenomenon of fashion, beyond its mere clothing meaning. We will focus here on the relationship he draws between fashion, capitalism and modernity.

Fashion as an illusion of change


In “The Structure of Fashion”, Baudrillard starts by focusing on the question, central to our chapter, of the relationship between fashion and modernity. For him, the two notions are linked. More than that, fashion would depend on modernity, in other words on a pattern of “disruption”, “progress” and “innovation”, or on a structure of change that dates back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But if modernity tends to “disruption” and “innovation”, isn’t there a contradiction between the linear time of modernity and the cyclical time of fashion? How can a mechanism of perpetual recycling of forms be compatible with the idea of linear modernity and constant progress? Fashion would allow precisely what Baudrillard calls the “myth of change” or “structural law of change”. Fashion would allow us to delude ourselves of the supposed transformations and alternations of modernity. Thus fashion is defined as a “spectacle”, as the “drama of change in place of change”, and would exercise its reign far beyond clothing.

Fashion as the “completed form of political economy”

If fashion “very clearly states the myth of change”, it is still “the completed form of political economy”, “the cycle wherein the linearity of the commodity comes to be abolished”: as “light signs”, opposed to “heavy signs” such as politics or economics, fashion first of all calls for a general switching of the signs, for the erasure of the signifier/signified border in favor of a pure material signifier emptied of its content. Baudrillard then uses the metaphor of a “fairy tale”: the fashion regime appears as a total simulacrum, a dismantling of reason, symptomatic of a “liquidation of values”. Can we not indeed see this regime of equivalence or interchangeability of signs in many silhouettes presented during the different Fashion Weeks? The imitation of a traditional Afghan garment is well worth the Mexican-inspired one as long as the aesthetics is preserved.

According to Baudrillard, it is precisely the proximity of fashion and death that allows for this infinite recycling. Fashion thus appears as “the aesthetics of renewal”, the “weight of all the dead labor of signs bearing on living signification”, since it develops on the simple abolition, and then on the rebirth of forms. The multiple revivals that fashion allows are explained through a pathological propensity to an eternal return of past and outdated forms. Evoking the awakening of the archival spectra of the 1970’s, the last Celine shows under Hedi Slimane’s artistic direction are a perfect illustration of this, so much so that it can indeed be interpreted as a rehabilitation of dead signs in the contemporary world, or following Baudrillard, as “triviality of death and modernity of déjà vu”. It may not be by chance that fashion is contemporary with the emergence of the museum: just like the museographic system, fashion ends up tending towards the juxtaposition of past forms.

Therefore, if Baudrillard shares the analyses of Elizabeth Wilson, John Carl Flügel and Ted Polhemus on fashion clothing defined by its variation and cycles of change, the fashion phenomenon does not, in his opinion, reflect real changes, but rather maintains an illusion of change thanks to an eternal return to past forms. This reflection allows us to question the alleged affinity between fashion and novelty.