fashion: Three ways to be modern in fashion

the growing importance of fashion has been decisive in the rise of modernity. But what is the precise definition of modernity? And are there different ways to be modern? How would these different takes on modernity impact our understanding of fashion? Any definition of modernity must account for the relationship between the purpose of Art, let’s say beauty, and the attention given to the present times. To be modern, as Ulrich Lehmann writes, is to consider that “beauty lies expressively in the contemporary and no recourse to the ancient ideal of sublime beauty is permitted”. This is a good start, but it does not tell us exactly how the consideration of the contemporary inspires artistic creation. Three different interpretations of the modern aesthetics exist, and we will see that they translate quite well into the fashion world.

Baudelaire gave the first interpretation: according to him, the consideration of the contemporary is the starting point of the artist’s process. Present times offer the subject matter as well as the sensitive form of the artistic representations. Poets, painters, novelists: all of them have to start from the observation of the life and habits of their contemporaries. But for Baudelaire, the main task is to extract the beauty from the present times, which means that beauty is not directly observable in the flow of time. The artist’s gift, and mission, is to detect the underlying beauty hidden in ephemeral appearances. As we noticed in an previous video, Baudelaire believes that beauty is eternal and consists in unchanging forms he calls “Ideals” in reference to Plato’s philosophy. Therefore his take on modernity remains a moderate one: the search for eternal standards of beauty is common to Baudelaire’s modern aesthetics and to classic aesthetics. Another French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, interpreted modernity in a different sense. For Mallarmé, beauty is also an ideal, but so pure and so abstract that it cannot be attained even by the most gifted artist. Mallarmé is famous as a poet for crafting a poetic language whose principle is not to refer to objects of the external world, but to please the hearer with its sounds and their evocative power. This is why it may seem strange that Mallarmé was also fascinated by the contemporary and developed a most radical take on modernity. Alongside his poetic works, in 1874, Mallarmé published six editions of a fashion magazine called “La Dernière mode”, meaning “The Latest Fashion”. Mallarmé used pseudonyms but wrote the entire texts of the magazine, describing the outfits worn in Paris, giving advice to readers, commenting on the manners, the styles of the Parisian lifestyle and their quick shifts. For Mallarmé, fashion served as for Baudelaire as a prototype for modern art and modern poetry. But what Mallarmé keeps from fashion is the pure idea of constant change. Because this change operates without any functional ambition, it is perceived by Mallarmé as a manifestation of a pure beauty, free of any practical concern. Mallarmé retains from fashion this glorification of the pure instant, that no one can really seize, because as soon as you try to represent it, it is already gone. This elusive, uncatchable character of the present is similar to the inaccessibility of the ideal beauty. For this reason, fashion, which is the art of the superficial and the transient, is paradoxically the closest thing to beauty, according to the radical view that Mallarmé supports. Contrary to Baudelaire, Mallarmé does not say that beauty has to be extracted from the ephemeral: beauty is the ephemeral, beauty lies in the temporary itself. These two opposite takes on modernity are reflected in the fashion industry. As the French critic Roland Barthes explained in a 1967 article published in Marie-Claire, fashion designers fall into two broad categories. Some of them look for a distinctive style that trumps the variations each new season and new collections may impose. Others on the contrary stick to the “zeitgeist” (spirit of the time) as much as possible: for them, every new collection is almost a blank page that shall translate the current state of the new. 

Barthes entitled his article “The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges”: in the end of the sixties in France, Chanel represented “the unchanging ‘chic’” and the “values of the classical order”, whereas Courrèges and his “brand-newness” aesthetics stood for youth and absolute innovation. Chanel embraces a creative strategy that reminds us very much of Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity: the overall style of Chanel, its distinctive silhouette, the color scheme, the fabric choices all prevail over the timely variations. Chanel is after permanence, and even if its style is born of a particular moment in history, its main elements are kept season after season. On the other side of the fashion scale, Courrèges and his obsession for constant renewal echo the aesthetics of the pure novelty praised by Mallarmé. The purpose of fashion, here, is to articulate the on-going present, or the very near future that is already starting to blossom. Today, you still find this division within the fashion market, with brands that mostly stick to their heritage and brands who place contemporary relevance on top of their creative priorities.

But there is a third take on modernity that is also quite fertile and has strong supporters. In the first half of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin developed a series of thesis on History and modernity. According to him, modernity is not defined as the pursuit of pure novelty, but as the development of a historical awareness of our current condition. History, according to Benjamin, is always written and perceived from a situated and partial position in time. For example, French Revolution is not the same historical event when studied in class in 1918 and in 2018. It does not have the same meaning for us as it had for our ancestors, because our present is different and makes us select different aspects from the past that we consider relevant and important. Historical events are understood from now. And conversely: to be modern is to recognize an echo between the age we live in and a former era, to be able to identify the return of social and cultural patterns. Benjamin agrees with Baudelaire, that modern artists must consider present times as a starting point and not as an end in itself as Mallarmé, but he does not believe in eternal beauty. Rather than looking for this vain ideal, Benjamin suggests that the modern creator is the most aware of the nature of the current historical situation, and the most aware of the resemblance between our times and past times. In fashion, this conception of historical time as a non-linear cyclical one made of constant back-and-forth movements, is rather widespread. From Jeanne Lanvin who was inspired by the Italian Quattrocento to the antics revisited by Madeleine Vionnet, from the medieval touch of the end of the thirties to the explicit quotation of the forties by Yves Saint Laurent in the scandalous collection of 1971, the fashion industry has always revisited past styles. Alongside the brands à la Baudelaire, who tend to establish a fixed aesthetics, and the brands à la Mallarmé, who look for absolute newness, there are the brands à la Benjamin, who will combine past and present references into a hybrid style made of collages and quotations. The present enthusiasm for vintage fashion, on the customers’ side as well as on the designers’ side, is another proof of the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s take on fashion and modernity.