Unveiling Fashion

To most people, fashion can daze and confuse.1 On the one hand, fashion professionals often feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in the industry, as well as by the pressure exerted on them to squeeze a living out of an inherently creative process that is undoubtedly a form of artistic expression. In a recent (and rare) interview given to Le Monde Magazine, the celebrated, Tunisian-born, Paris-based fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa complained:2 “Why do they force fashion designers to produce, produce, produce? Productivity, productivity, budget, productivity. […] Today, the only thing I want is more time to be creative! […] This is all I want: to do my job as a couturier, but do it well. Otherwise, I’ll leave the field.” This is quite a striking comment made by one of the most influential designers in the world and a remarkable expression of the key tension that exists in fashion between creativity and financial profit.

In the early twenty-first century, fashion is so pervasive that it seems inherent to social and economic life, almost a “natural” thing that no one can escape. However, fashion as we know it — with its powerful industrial infrastructure, its widespread appeal as a career, and its media omnipresence — has not always been around. When and where did it appear? As pointed out by American historian Sarah-Grace Heller, the dominant position among scholars is that fashion originates “in the West in the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century courts of Burgundy or Italy, or more generally with the era referred to as ‘Early Modernity,’”1 that is to say with the European Renaissance, usually considered to have started in the fourteenth century. This academic standpoint on what constitutes the “cradle of fashion” derives from the work of French historian Fernand Braudel, who saw the constant and regular change in dress as a byproduct of the emergence of modernity in Europe. Braudel’s central thesis is that fashion is what sets the West apart from other civilizations that have not known anything comparable until very recently.2

The second principle that defines fashion as we know it today is the principle of convergence. This principle means that fashion is characterized by the existence of trends, a feature that is mysterious and must be accounted for. Trends seem to be a natural phenomenon, but they exist only through the actions of individuals and organizations, and are ultimately created by them. As explained by French sociologist Guillaume Erner, trends are “focalizations of desire,”1 varying in scope and scale, which lead many people to adopt certain behaviors or tastes for a limited time. Trends exist in many spheres of social life and not just in the apparel industry: “These convergences of collective taste have, for example, led to the acclaim of chocolate fondant cake then macaroons, tennis then golf, hybrid cars after SUVs.”2

The third principle of fashion as we know it today is its autonomy as a creative endeavor. The emergence of the autonomy principle in dress fashion is recent and, as is the case for all of the other principles, the result of a long and intricate historical process. Symbolically, it is Queen Marie Antoinette of France (1755–1793) who made this principle possible, and allowed it to expand across Europe and beyond. Before Marie Antoinette, fashion was subjected to the dictates and choices of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and trends emerged mainly from dynamics that were external to the world of dress. With Marie Antoinette, fashion was emancipated and became — to a large extent — an autonomous field which obeyed its own logic. For the Queen, who was born in Austria and always struggled to impose herself in the French Court of Versailles, the autonomization of fashion under her auspices was a way to gain empowerment and compensate for her political weakness, notably her subordination to the king.1

The founder of haute couture, and “contemporary” fashion in general, was Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), a British designer who opened his fashion house in Paris in the late 1850s. He introduced many innovations still in force in the early twenty-first century, such as biannual fashion shows, the use of living models, whom he called “sosies” (doubles), to present designs to clients, and a marketing strategy based on fashion magazines and mail order.1

The fifth principle of fashion is an extension of the previous one — the personalization principle — because it generalizes the power of personal labels by embodying them in brands and emancipating them from the fashion designers as people. While the type of fashion created by Charles Frederick Worth was centered on specific individuals, fashion designers, the fashion that emerged after World War II was brand-centric, thus separating and decoupling creations from their creators.

Fashion is a total social fact, a phenomenon where most spheres of social life intersect. It navigates between imitation and distinction, individuals and society. It is a set of institutions that produce garments laden with meanings, which individuals and groups use for infusing their identities with more or less conscious messages. The “fashion form”1 is constituted of permanent change and semiotic diversity. It constantly brings newness to the world and tolerates diversity, thriving particularly well in modern liberal democracies and market economies, but requiring neither the former nor the latter to exist.

This book offers both a deep look into the history of the fashion industry, and a birds-eye-view of the main academic and practical knowledge produced on this industry. In this sense, it is an exercise in “fashionology” at the crossroads of fashion as a significant economic activity, and as an intriguing research topic. It is a sketch of today’s fashion, in all its diversity and complexity, as a “total social fact.” Like its subject, this sketch is multifaceted. It draws from many sources and various academic disciplines: mostly sociology and economics, but also geography and history. A full integration of all these approaches remains to be done, but research on fashion is thriving, and common principles appear throughout the various disciplines interested in this subject. Six principles have been identified in this work.