Before focusing on fashion as a consumer practice and the different forms of alternative consumption, we should start by focusing on fashion as an industry, and precisely on the elements that specifically characterize the fashion product.
T. Veblen is a major contributor here. A self-taught economist and sociologist contemporary with Weber, Durkheim or Pareto, who entered the intellectual field relatively late, Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class - An Economic Study of Institutions in 1899. Chapter VII of the book, entitled “Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture”, is particularly relevant to us in understanding the specificities of fashion clothing. The author identifies three main features.
The “conspicuous waste”
Starting from the premise of a fashion product falling under the rule of conspicuous waste, and above all of clothing expenses systematically governed by a concern for appearance that goes beyond the simple function of protection (dominance of elegance and honorability over functional virtues), T. Veblen wishes to highlight the conspicuous waste typical of fashion products. For the buyer, it is a matter of preferring to consume expensive products (Veblen specifies that it is carried out rather in the second degree by the formulation of the canons of taste), “cheap” being synonymous here with “poor quality”. Thus, the aesthetic virtues of an object would be directly related to its economic value. In other words, its beauty would be determined by its price.
The “conspicuous leisure”
But a fashion product must also refer to the principle of “conspicuous leisure”. If the price of a garment determines its aesthetic interest, the piece of clothing must above all mean the fact that the wearer is not involved in any productive activity. Veblen notes that the accepted definition of elegance in his time is ultimately contrary to any activity requiring physical effort. Patent-leather shoes, cylindrical hat and walking-stick obviously cannot be used in active life. Worse still, the female cloakroom would accentuate the phenomenon by the use of hats, Louis XV heels, dresses, skirts, or other mutilating corset. Thus “the womanliness of woman’s apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women”.
The zeitgeist
Veblen’s last principle of fashion clothing is its necessary adequacy to the time, to the zeitgeist. If the principle of conspicuous waste determines certain forms of clothing, why does a particular style end up being praised at some point? A hypothesis would be to consider “each successive fashion innovation” as “an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness”. Veblen refutes this idea, noting that clothing finally turned out to be “better” 2000 years ago. In this way, fashion would not tend at all towards any “artistic perfection”, witnessing forms more adapted to the human body, but would reveal more broadly the profound antinomy between “expensiveness” and “artistic” apparel, the high cost referring to “futility”, “waste” and supposedly functional simulacra details. Fashion would rather be adopted by attraction for novelty, both for itself (the pleasant transition to something new in contrast to the previous fashion) and for the honorability it provides, two reasons why it would be immediately denied, these two parameters only suggesting the transient beauty and the “aesthetic nausea”.
Finally, Veblen focuses on the differences between male and female clothing. Why is the female toilet even more affected than the male toilet by the lack of productive activity? It finds its explanation in the patriarchal past of women’s clothing. If the wife remains an ostentatious good for her husband, it is coherent to think that she should not work to, on the contrary, rule the interior of the domestic sphere. On the other hand, according to Veblen, the man himself cannot apply for such discomfort, as he would work against his own well-being, in other words, in favor of his inferiorization. Thus, woman’s fashion is analogical to the clothing of servants, the woman being only “chief menial of the household”, and to with the priestly garment, testifying in the same way to a status of servility by the embarrassment it implies (the man in the service of the divinity). Veblen nevertheless notes some formal clothing changes. Since it could no longer be suspected of productive activity, the rich class pushed for the abandonment of the corset among women, as well as for a refinement and a spiritualization of the clothing symbol to the detriment of the “loud” thrust of the parvenu.
If Veblen identifies three main characteristics of fashion clothing, conspicuous waste, conspicuous leisure and its tendency to follow the taste of the time, is this theory really still relevant for contemporary fashion?
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