fashion & modernity

The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), particularly known for his reinvention of poetic language, seems to understand modernity as the quest for the pure present, the ephemeral, in other words the novelty itself. He opens a completely different relationship between fashion and time from other writers like Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin.

“Le beau et l’utile”

First of all, let us take an interest in the conception of modernity he states in “Le Beau et l’utile”. Here is an excerpt:

“In Beauty and Usefulness one must introduce a degree of Truthfulness. Beauty can just become some sort of forsaken ornament. Usefulness on its own, if the purpose is mediocre, can express only inelegance. To shape in true fashion demands a certain oblivion from the artisan as to what the use of the object will be; that is what counts— the application of the idea as a totally modern expression of truth. This transformation of the gift of creativity does not come without flaws or failure; yet what marvel, in the achievement, can exist in that umbrella, that black suit, that coupé”

Modernity seems to lie in a conjunction between the notions of “beautiful” and “useful”. Alone, the “beautiful” is only ornamental, when the “useful” alone refers to trivial needs. The “truth”, “all modern”, would rather reside in a combination of the two, in other words in the modern male attributes, namely an “umbrella”, “a black suit”, and a “coupé”.

“The Latest Fashion”

Mallarmé radically dissociates himself from Baudelaire’s modernity, which was defined by a dialectic between eternal and transient, to embrace, on the contrary, a total contemporaneity, a pure present, this time devoid of its timeless dimension. This relationship to ephemerality is reflected in the eight issues of his famous fashion magazine, published in the last four months of 1874, and entitled La dernière Mode (“The Latest Fashion”), to an audience of women from the aristocracy/high bourgeoisie. Mallarmé writes under different pseudonyms: “Madame Marguerite de Ponty”, “Miss Santin”, “Ix”, “Le chef de bouche chez Brébant”, or “Zizy, bonne mulâtre de Surate” will be featured in such diverse sections as “La mode” (“Gazette de la mode” from the 4th issue), the “Chronique de Paris” (shows, literary innovations), “Le Carnet d’or” (menus, recipes, decoration…), “Nouvelles et vers”, or the “Programme de la quinzaine”. Although he was not the first writer to take an interest in the subject - Balzac published his Traité de la vie élégante in 1830, Théophile Gautier his De la mode in 1858, and Baudelaire his Peintre de la vie moderne in 1863 - the fact remains that Mallarmé maintains a renewed relationship with this object which is not so much a matter of analysis, interpretation, than comment. Mallarmé does not write on fashion, he writes a fashion text, and commits to a literary genre that inherently belongs to the fashion system. Fashion magazines are indeed fashion products, and part of the fashion economy and culture as much as fashion pictures and even actual clothes.

Now, let’s try to identify Mallarmé’s relationship to fashion in the pages of his gazette. Here are some excerpts:

• First issue of September 6, 1874, section “Fashion”:


”Too late to speak of summer fashions and too soon to speak of winter ones (or even autumn ones).” (Marguerite de Ponty).

• Second issue of September 20, 1874, section “Fashion”:

”Let us pass on, all the more so since to have anticipated fashion by several seasons may seem to some like forgetting our duty, which is to create fashion day by day. So, instead of riddling the future, let us turn to the present and study that […] We shall not, in this case, be reproached of over-hastiness.” (Marguerite de Ponty).

• Fifth issue of November 1, 1874, section “Fashion”:

“I resume - after an interruption caused by the Festivities, as will happen more than once during this winter - the normal subject of this page, that is to say Fashion: or to be more precise, the Taste of the Season.”(Marguerite de Ponty)

• Eighth issue of December 20, 1874, section “Fashion”:

”What! From her royal dais, made of the fabrics of all ages - those worn by Queen Semiramis, and the one created by the genius of Worth or Pingat - Fashion parting this curtains, reveals herself to us transformed new, and in her future glory.”(Marguerite de Ponty)

It is now easy, from these four excerpts, to characterize the relation between Mallarmé (disguised under the Marguerite de Ponty alias in the magazine), and the present: this is how he places us from the very first excerpt in between, in an indefinite present time, between “too late” and “too early”, before emphasizing the need for the newspaper to make it “day by day”, without anticipating it, to state the “taste of the season”, and to be enthusiastic about the newness of fashion. It is through these many examples that we can define Mallarmé’s modernity, as an object based on an intimate relationship to the “pure present”, in opposition to the Baudelaireian and Benjaminian visions analyzed in the two previous articles. The Vetements collective will be defined as a brand exemplifying Mallarmé’s take on modernity in our case study.

Fashion as a "tigersprung"​

German philosopher, writer and art critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is particularly famous for “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” where he revisits the Parisian urbanity of the 19th century, and “On the Concept of History: Theses on the Concept of History”, written before committing suicide in 1940. Let us consider this last text: it will allow us, after Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to sketch a new conception of fashion temporality.

“A rebours”

Following Michael Lowy’s model, we can identify three sources of Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The first one, German romanticism, influences his critique of progress, and questioning of modernity, mechanization, and the “disenchantment of the world”. Second, Jewish messianism provides him with his conception of history as a “qualitative conception of infinite time”, in contrast to the “empty”, uninterrupted and linear time of progress. Finally, he draws from the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács a Marxist influence that he tries to reconcile with his criticism of progress and to take out of an evolutionary vision.

Written at the beginning of 1940 under the influence of the war, the German-Soviet pact, just before his abortive attempt to escape France and his suicide, the text comes at a very particular moment in his life and work. Composed of 18 theses and a multitude of allegories, it aims to put an end to a certain positivist vision of history, targeting in particular its historicist and evolutionary tendencies, to criticize the ideology of progress and to envisage the construction of a history in reverse.

Fashion as a “tigersprung”

If fashion is not his primary object, Benjamin considers it succinctly in his thesis XIV.

Here it is:

Origin is the goal [Ziel : terminus]. - Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I [Words in Verse]

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-how [Jetztzeit]. For Roberspierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged whith the here-and-how, which he explored out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latterday Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [Dickicht : maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena in which the ruling classes are un control. The same leap into the open sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the revolution.

Benjamin introduces his remarks with a quote from the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, which can be interpreted as both a theological and a political reference to paradise lost. Then, he directly puts forward the idea of a story as a simple construction object. He mentions Robespierre’s conception of the revolution, for whom it stood as a resurgence of ancient Rome, of a “latterday Rome”. The philosopher then moves to his conception of fashion as a “tiger leap into that with has gone before”, a notion inherited both from his reading of Engels and Lukács. Basically, for Benjamin, the French Revolution was quoting ancient Rome, just as fashion quotes its past costumes, Greek Antiquity at the time he writes. For Benjamin, the Revolution must nonetheless be distinguished from the fashion movement, in that it must aim for a “dialectical leap”, in the “open air”, and above all to be located outside the “arena of the ruling classes”.

If the metaphor contains certain ambiguities and could rather be perceived as a critique of fashion, it literally puts forward the idea of a fashion conceived as a set of quotations, in short, as a revival. In this respect, Madeleine Vionnet’s “antique” creations, or the Yves Saint Laurent couture collection of 1971, could be perceived as following Benjamin’s conception of modernity as a back-and-forth movement in History, connecting the present time to past times that are similar in some essential aspects. That is what we will keep in mind here. In this respect, this idea is radically different from the two other conceptions of modernity: whereas Baudelaire’s modernity aimed to capture the eternal from the transient, and Mallarmé’s modernity was based on an acute conception of the present time, Benjamin pictures time in the form of “loops” and “jumps”.